Moderates United

I think I am making progress.  It occurred to me I am a ghost.  We are all ghosts.  We are insubstantial, misty, in constant flux.  If I ask you who you are, you might poke your arm.  That is a correct answer, but only a very partial one. You might tell me your occupation, ideas, personality quirks.  Also correct, but also incomplete.

As I am increasingly arguing, we are characterized by both an Unconscious related to our animal instincts, AND an unconscious related to our spiritual side.  We exist in the middle, stupid.

And we are ghosts in machines.  It is our task to learn to operate the machines, but it much more our task to learn that we are ghosts.

This is the essence, in my view, of the Buddhist Anatta/Anatman doctrine, the “No Self” creed.  Your self is so much more vast than you can possibly imagine, so much more in flux and change and evolution than you can imagine, that you may as well say that on this level it doesn’t even exist, and needs to be discarded; this is particularly true since anything we can think or reason at this level can only contain and hinder us.  If I say “that”, but you can’t see it, then I must leave you behind.

On a related note, I have made a major change, as these things go in my world.  I don’t change avatars or names.  I have had the same Facebook avatar since changing it once when I first signed up however many years ago.  I have had the same handle here.  But I changed it, to one of my psychological/spiritual animals. I  discussed all this several years ago, and have no desire to rehash it here.

I grew up in a physically and emotionally violent home.  It was not the quantity of violence, but the quality.  I am very sensitive, and I have always seen more than was likely good for me.  I have many, many pictures from all ages where I am the only one looking at the camera, because I was the only one who sensed it.  My very first prized book as a child, which I perused over and over and over and over, was a book of World War 2 weapons. I had a G.I. Joe and a Lone Ranger, and I always idolized the military.

Even as an adult, I would seek out military metaphors. I would beat myself up to get things done.  I was an early and militant adopter of CrossFit, because of the militaristic ethos. I may in fact bear some blame for some of the less attractive cultural elements there.

And I have often thought about doing things like the Bataan Death March (in New Mexico every March), not so much because I want to honor the soldiers–although they certainly deserve it–but because it would be painful and difficult for me.  All my life I have faced pain and difficulty, and sort of internalized a need to think about it.

But I really don’t want to do the Death March.  That is why I haven’t done it.  We all do the things we actually want to do, and don’t do the things we don’t.  This is a little spoken truth of life.  And it’s OK to not want things as much as you think you ought to.  Desire works the way it works, not the way we might prefer it to work.

All of this to say I don’t think I have anything to prove.  I know what it is like to spend years fighting on in despair with no hope.  I know what it is like to have to use a powerful will each and every day just to get through it.  I don’t know what it is like to get shot at, but I do know what it is like to face things which scare the shit out of you, and what it is like to do it daily for long periods of time.  Terror is terror, even if it is rational in one case, and completely (outwardly) irrational in another.

Long story short, I am tired of aspiring to butt heads. I am tired of anger and violence, and using conflict to sharpen my spirits and take me back home for a while.  I will continue to say my say, and I’m sure reply to the innumerable idiots and shitheads on the internet.  But no longer as Mountain Goat.

I was trying to decide if I should get some “New Science of Mind” thing–which I doubt has anything truly new at all–and it hit me that I don’t want to improve my thinking.  I want to improve the part of me that throws off thinking, that projects it, that generates it, like a fountain.  Thought is an outgrowth of something rooted in sensation and emotion.

If we think of all our possible affective states as the frequencies on a radio, I want access to all of them, all the time, and you can’t do that consciously.  You can teach yourself to tune into certain frequencies.  You can pinpoint the positive self talk at 102.9, and that is all good, but that leaves a lot missing.

I want my work to be sensual, in the sense that I want to develop a relationship with it of friendship, companionship, comfort, play.  In America particularly so much material exists which teaches you how to succeed, how to set and achieve goals.  But it seems absolutely obvious to me that if you learn to love work, success is a foregone conclusion. I have taught both my kids that any activity they can learn to love, they will eventually excel at.

So what I’m realizing is its not even the process, but what you bring to the process, WHO you bring to the process, who you are, deep within.  Something within me seems to be coalescing which can bring something good to the table of life.

How is it that those who are concerned that government can be bought want more government?

If I currently have to go to the butcher shop, produce shop, dairy shop, and bread shop to get my food, is it not MORE efficient if I can go one place and get everything I want?

People who demonize money makers are doing one of two things: 1) planning to destroy them, and thus the economy, aka Communism; or 2) put the competition out of business so they can make fat profits with no competition, aka Fascism.  Both of these models are anti-free market, and thus exist as polar opposites of true Liberalism.

I think those of us who were brought up in the operant conditioning model of parenting–who mainly were punished for actual or alleged failings, usually physically, but certainly by yelling too–find it hard to make peace with the voice in our heads telling us what to do.  It is the voice of a parent who was often cruel, and at least in my case completely lacking in empathy and understanding.

I should lose weight.  I can stand to lose 45 pounds of fat, which would make me a lean, mean 225 (my lean body mass is around 200).  But what I find is some part of me rebels every time I get serious about diet. It doesn’t like being told what to do.  That stentorian voice breeds resistance, which is overcome by force.  When this is an intrapsychic conflict is involved, that force is will, which as I have noted repeatedly wears out eventually.

There are ways to deal with this.  I continue to pursue personal growth, and have decided to try visualization again, but I did want to point out that in my view a PRINCIPLE task of life is learning to be on easy speaking terms with, to be friends with, the processes of learning, growth, and mastery.

I hearken back again to John Wooden, who every day pursued perfection gradualistically but passionately.  He taught his young men how to put on socks.  He not only taught perfect guarding, but taught himself how to TEACH guarding, and how to develop better and better drills for it.  He was not just perfecting how to PLAY basketball, but how to COACH it, which included motivation.  He was perfecting how to perfect the process.  If he had done anything else, he would have seen equal success.

This should be the model for all of us, in my view.  He was very healthy psychologically, or at least that is my clear impression.  Could he have done more?  Of course.  I would have added spiritual disciplines.  But if you DO add those, and take his process, you can scarcely do better.

Wow. That was one of the worst nights sleep I can remember.  I think I dozed for about 15 minutes about 3am and again for about 30 minutes around 5.  Surprisingly, I feel pretty good, but there are lessons to be learned.

First and foremost, I am going to hypothesize that video games are a method for dealing with anxiety by consciously invoking it, then creating situations of mastery.  The fight or flight response gives us the power/fear dichotomy, does it not?  I think this seems reasonable.

As Lara, I kept getting killed in really unpleasant ways, which made me mad, which made me go again.  As anyone who has played video games can readily attest, some levels are just damn hard, and you have to do them repeatedly, at least if you are an old geezer like me.  I started playing about 5pm, after pouring myself some tea and feeding my dog, and I awoke from my spell about midnight.  I don’t think I walked the dog, and the tea was cold.

That is a powerful focus.

What I want to say about it, though, is it is not play.  It is not the reconciliation of the social instinct with the hunter instinct.  It both creates and provides the solution for acute anxiety.  This is why it is so addictive.  When you finally get through a level, it is a huge relief, but then you want to do it again.  And again.  It fills you with energy, which is why I think I’m not that sleepy, despite having something less than 2 hours of sleep.

But what you are NOT doing is learning to deal with the anxieties of real life in an appropriate way. I was feeling very keenly the  passage of time yesterday.  I was clearing out old clothes and art projects and the like from my kids room, and going down memory lane.  I am getting older.  So too are they.  Their lives are in front of them.  This is a common enough happening for people of my certain age.

And it occurs to me that NOBODY wants to do this mourning, wants to deal with this change, but it is a fact of life.  It is a fact of life if we believe in God and if we don’t.  It is a fact of life if we have a fundamentally optimistic mindset, or if we are pessimists.  The former in both cases make it easier, but not effortless.

We have to–I have to–throw myself in the stream of life and let it carry me along.  I have to accept it. This is my task.  And what I did was short circuit that process somewhat yesterday.  I have had more than my share of sadness and change and bereavement.  Much, much more.  But that does not change the facts of the matter.  Happiness is courage, true courage.

I can’t say or tell where all these video games are leading, what the long term effects of social isolation and the weird sexual expressions that pornography (that is one addiction that has never tempted me) likely causes will be.

What I know is that the future exists in the future, and that I am capable of living in the moment contentedly and in peace, and can commit myself to doing what I can to build a better future, knowing that I may fail–we all may fail–but waiting to feel that grief, to feel that anxiety, until it actually comes.

As far as me playing these games, I am going to have to ponder if I want this energy in my life.  In small doses, these games are supposedly good for your brain, but me being me, I am going to periodically binge on them, and I have to wonder if Lumosity isn’t sufficient.  Of course, I have the Kinect and some dance games.  That might be fun.  It would be at least more social.

So I finished Assassin’s Creed 4, which set up a dichotomy between the authority loving Templars, who had a secret surveillance weapon that allowed them to spy on anybody at any time, and the Assassins, who were understood to be more or less anarchists, although of course the game was not overly developed philosophically.  Not too hard to read commentary on current events in there.

But I was feeling agitated today.  I am starting to engage with the world, and it feels weird.  I allowed myself to disengage after nearly a days good work.  I started up Tomb Raider.  It starts up nearly immediately with very macabre images, with dead bodies hanging upside down everywhere, corpses and skulls everywhere.  I don’t know if this is a feature of this series, but it was a bit disturbing to see the imaginative outputs of some very creative and probably young people.

Then I got to thinking about it.  In the game thus far I have seen perhaps 200 bodies, of people who were killed by some sort of sacrificial cult.  That may be on the low side.  Some of these scenes were quite over the top.  We react with horror to sacrificial cults, to human sacrifice.

But we killed some 100,000 Iraqis.  The number may be higher, or it may be lower.  But it was oceanic compared to even the awful scenes in this game.

And there was a lot of religious imagery, Buddhist and East Asian iconography, and it struck me that most of humanity has been crazy for most of human history.  War is craziness, but it has been a feature of human life for all of history.  History was CREATED to chronicle a war.

I get sometimes at a state I suppose the Existentialists would call authentic.  I feel keenly the shortness of life, the perishability of all relationships, and everything we build, and the constant possibility of the eruption of atavism into the order we think we have built.  Our animal natures are unseen by most, and fully tamed by virtually none.

And it struck me what a perfect thing it was that the Buddha came upon a method for NOT being crazy.  Very few of us value the knowledge that is handed to us on a silver platter daily.

I can honestly say I take my Kum Nye practice seriously.  I do the work.  I try to focus.  I try to learn the lessons.  But I can do better.

And I just threw the game away.  The game creators derived far too much pleasure in killing Lara in grotesque ways.

The lesson here, though, is that humanity has always been crazy, at least most of it.  It may be that some tribes of people for periods of time have not been crazy.  The Australian Aboriginals, and maybe some Native American tribes, and some African tribes, and some Asian Indian tribes, etc: some of them may have been largely sane.

But kings are insane. War and violence are insane.  Being stuck in a ritual order is insane.  Being other than happy, connected with people, and engaged with life is insane.

And I think about our troops and the wars we have fought.  I support our troops, but something in me has popped as far as wanting to emulate them.  All wars are tragedies.

We need to secure our borders, harden our grid to an EMP, rationalize our financial markets, develop an effective missile defense system, and vastly increase our HumInt capabilities.  And then we need to bring everyone home. I’m fine with the fleets being out there, but everyone else needs to look after themselves. It somebody attacks us, we hit them so hard nobody thinks about it again any time soon.

But particularly once you realize 9/11 was much larger than we have been told, and that beyond any doubt government investigators both suppressed information and outright lied to get the conclusions they did, then much of the past decade makes a whole lot less sense.

You really do need to clean out the past to make room for the future.

As I’ve said in many ways, directly and indirectly, I identify strongly with the values of duty, honor and courage.  Going the extra mile, and the mile after that, and the mile after that, because it is my job. Now, nobody assigned me this job.  I volunteered, for the simple reason that THE WORK NEEDS TO BE DONE.

Every day, without exception, I wake up trying to solve problems, trying to understand myself, trying to heal, trying to perceive something new about the world, and to dream something new about how it might be improved, how it might be led in a better direction.

And there is a cost to this: solitude.  The one unquestionable benefit of being in an actual military unit is shared difficulty.  Your buddies understand you, and you them, at least in important ways.  Me, nobody understands me.  I am a tribe of one.  I walk through the world largely unseen.  I do manual labor.  I walk in the construction entrance, and use the construction elevator, and spend my days with people who got their GED’s.  It’s better this way: I feel less misunderstood with people no one expects to do any hard thinking, than with people who theoretically could, but choose not to; who are encumbered with a variety of emotional issues even they can’t see; who are enmeshed in a political field which requires constant maintenance and tinkering.

Somewhere, though, there is a tribe of people who will get me.  It may not be in this world, but we aren’t here so very long after all.  I’m not feeling melancholy.  It is, I think, a good thing I am allowing myself this line of thought, though.  I have been alone so long I forget there are alternatives, and it’s always good to remember alternatives: it is a part of perception.

I was told many years ago by a hot Austrian “don’t think so much”. In this country especially, people who think too much are not held in much esteem, and as a general rule, those who do identify as “intellectuals” are leftists.  There are not a lot of conservative intellectuals.  But that may change.

At the end of the day, I am what I am.  I am not going to change to suit the winds.  I am not going to change to make things easier.  I am going to continue to do what I perceive as my job, until time takes this job away from me and assigns it to someone else.

Can you see why this card would excite me? Other than me being really weird, and screwed up in the head?  Why would this excite a psychologically healthy, but very contemplative person? Answer it for yourself.  Your answer may differ from mine.  That’s good.

Guess before you look it up, if you even give a shit.

I think PTSD is fully healed when you can survey the landscape of that epic battle, that place where your nervous system failed you through no lack of will, no fault of your own, and see it with curiosity.  This is a connection freed from the chains of horror.  This is of course a follow up/continuation of my previous post.

I will add to this that battles only need to be fought once. They are won, lost, postponed, or cancelled, but only once.  Ever after, you need to be either learning from them, or letting them disappear.  Preferably the first, then the second.

Nothing can be worse than a battle you can’t win, and can’t stop fighting.  You can’t change the past, but it can continue to change you if you give it the power to.

Never impose on yourself a guilt you would hesitate to hang on the neck of someone else.  Excessive guilt is actually a theatrical way of avoiding the responsibility of growing through failure and pain.