Moderates United

And pondering this, I was reminded of this Sufi story I posted a year or two or three or four ago: https://moderatesunitedblog.com//2009/02/paradise-of-song.html

I think on one level it represents spiritually something like Plato’s Ideal, as applied to our selves.

But I move all day long along emotional/sensory continuums.  I do Kum Nye all day long.  I generate and expand experience all day long, while breathing it in. And today it struck me that if I have an ideal self, it would look different than this self, which is struggling and wounded and often ineffective.  On some level, this thought is a natural corollary of the idea of the Spiritual Self which they teach in the Hoffman Process.  I have multiple selves, even understood purely psychodynamically.

[Edit: what I intend here is that I am repressing both my spiritual self, which is otherwise available: AND my–oh, hell, let’s call it the IT (Das Es, kids), after Freud.  I write enough that it should be clear what the range is which I intend.]

The important point, though, is that it is both OUT THERE, and already arrived.  Then: why would not my wounded self be the same? My dark self?  That part of my psyche–where you locate it–which is not readily available to my conscious mind, but which still must be accounted for? Is there not some skeletal, half dead, starved, sick version of me wandering in the rain with a crutch?  Is some equivalent of Miss Haversham (read or listen to Great Expectations) stuck forever in a room with halted clocks?

Would this self disgust or terrify me, if it presented itself directly?  And it occurs to me I need to learn to–am learning to–welcome my nightly adventures.  Just last night I expanded the whole thing mightily.  I was able to take the external shaking internal, so that it was really a species of energetic vibration.  And it seemed it went up, from my navel center, to my heart, to my throat, where it stopped.  I could not pull it any higher.

And of course, there are strong parallels between what skilled trauma practitioners see in treating trauma, and what Kundalini Yoga teachers see in helping facilitate that form of energetic awakening.  My view would be that the two are closely related, with each side seeing the same coin from a different angle.

You cannot reconcile “selves” rationally. That is why it is so hard to learn there.  Rationality can guide you, but you cannot learn an emotional lesson intellectually.  This should be obvious, but it obviously isn’t, to many.

What you will note in reading all this is the all documents came from the DoD.  What I infer from this is that they are telling Obama to fuck himself, despite having felt the need to kowtow to his threats and blackmail for some years.

We need to be clear that this administration is the most suppressive, most secretive, most abusive of public acknowledgement and discussion of abuses, probably in our history.  Nixon didn’t hold a candle to Obama.  The only competitor is FDR, who routinely eavesdropped on opponents, and used all sorts of dirty and awful tricks on opponents to keep his hold on power.

One can hope that our military understands that the most pressing existential threat to our freedom is the leftwing movement and agenda, as embodied currently by Obama, and in the future by Hillary Clinton, and nearly anyone else the Democrats may propose.  We are threatened with national bankruptcy, and all the economic devastation that will follow it, a bankruptry chosen and planned for the purpose.  We are threatened by a Federal government which is daily transgressing the boundaries prudently set for it by our very astute, very wise, historically very literate Founding Fathers.

No one values the unique experiment which is the United States Republic, can fail to grasp the very real danger we are in, caused by people who in private are very candid about their intentions and means.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2015/05/the-truth-about-benghazi-slowly-emerges.php

Here is the deal:

And what is that reaction?  Effective violence, and genius, all at very early ages.  Ender was 10 in the final battles.  He had mastered violence, mastered strategy.

As a purely practical matter, most minds and reflexes peak at about 17 or so.  This is the rough age of many Israeli fighter pilots, who are chosen to be the best possible, accounting for all factors.  12 is still prepubescent for most.  The brain has not fully matured.

But emotionally, this must have been a powerful liberation for Card.  And what does he wind up with?  A caring Mother–displaced psychologically by being made an insect–and a de facto child for whom he must now take responsibility, which I would suggest could be viewed profitably by taking it to be his own unrealized self, his own thwarted–but no more?–possibilities.  That egg is innocent.

And I would suggest his brother represents another aspect of himself he is or was wrestling with, another possible path, one not hindered by considerations of empathy and compassion.  These, too, are common enough outcomes of trauma.

We tell ourselves in our stories.  We cannot but do so, and this is a powerfully good thing.  I am telling myself, am I not, in my Rorschach?  It is a good thing that stories are told.  As I near the end of “Great Expectations”, I can well imagine how this may have done a great deal to build sympathy and empathy among classes and people in that very cold nation.

But I relate to Ender.  My own reaction, like most, was one of emotional disconnection, depression, a ruthlessly elevated self importance at times, and sense of a loss I could neither define nor express.

I continue to map out hell, to measure its textures and moods, its landscape.  I continue to learn how one lives in hell, how one gets there, and how one stays there.  This is all highly useful information.  I could think of no higher compliment than that which I will offer myself: map maker.

Practice done poorly,
Practice done well:
It is of practice DONE
Which I shall tell.

And I will add a short and mostly not interesting story.  I travel a fair amount, and found myself in New Orleans last week, and sought out a place called Jacque-Imo’s, which had a sausage and alligator tail cheesecake I had heard was quite good.

The meal was good, not great–although the place itself is a lot of fun–but sitting there pondering the whole thing it occurred to me that happiest thing that happened to me that day was in my Kum Nye practice, where I often, lately, pull out interesting and forgotten or new emotions.  This is a sort of discovery which is the end goal of physical travel, which does not always yield it.  Quite often, you just move your blindness from one location to another.  This can be repeated endlessly, to no profit.

I think I’ve come up with the answer: veterans pay a permanently lower rate of taxes, perhaps in absolute percentages, as well as perhaps being granted more deductions/allowances.

And as I have said a number of times, I envision both military training, and search and rescue training.  Both are useful.

And I was pondering in the Tibetan tradition how demons and angels are the same; it is the understanding which differs.  And then it occurred to me that when we are presented with demons, it is our job to transform them.  They are uncooked.  It is our job to cook that experience, which becomes useful and transformative in the process.

I keep my ear to the cultural landscape, and have followed at a small distance the work among others of Nassim Taleb.  He has this concept of Anti-Fragility, which I believe was the title of a recent book.  The gist of the idea, as I understand it, is that there is a difference between resilience–which might be summarized as “hard to break”–and something which BENEFITS from chaos and assault.

I don’t like negatives.  I don’t think it is ever good to include within a word what it is you don’t want.  Thus: transformation-capable.  Phase shift capable.  Informationally absorptive and self organizing.

And I got to thinking about this concept of being emotionally “vulnerable”.  We assume being emotionally open makes us vulnerable and we are supposed to simply accept this as the risk of living, of loving.

But what if I open to something which tries to wound or kill me, and I am able to process it, and TRANSFORM myself in the process, accepting both hurt and the following growth?  Over time, does my very vulnerability not become a positive virtue?  Is it not what pushes me forward, ahead of the winds of chaos and destruction which hang everywhere over the world in which we live?

Within Kum Nye, the task is to take all emotional “sensations” and open them up, and expand them.  And I saw that if you take a hard thing, and add space to it, you can imagine it like a blown up toy, filled with air in the middle.  You can enter this, and look around.  You can see dots of darkness, and dots of open space.  No evil is fully continuous. And you can expand this, such that the dots of darkness are very far apart indeed.  You can denude the sensation of its impact, its effect.  I have in mind here the Buddhist conception of dharmas as dots or points in a discontinuous universe.

Listening to it, though, I am struck by English society as characterized by this massive and national game called “Don’t piss people off and know your place.”  One must always be calculating.  Pip is always calculating.  Nothing is spontaneous.  There is no dancing.  The whole thing is quite grim, and only peppered here and there with clever word play, which is the only spontaneity allowed.  Wit is the only dancing in this world, as thus far represented.

One can feel the need for empire, as a way of expressing pent up energies.  And in that regard I would note the remarkable cultural similarities between the Japanese, who also subsisted nearly entirely on etiquette; and the Indians, whose caste system the English order closely resembled.  Everyone to their place, a place typically made obvious by the use of language.

These thoughts occasioned yesterday’s post.  I was thinking it was all a very dismal game, one which satisfied the emotional needs–the social connection needs–of no one, and then I realized it was not a game at all: it was a ritual.

If we think of play as a reconciliation of our social system with our lower nervous system energies–as a way of expressing and releasing “fight or flight” energies, and countering the immobilization response–then its necessity for social harmony becomes obvious.

But there are layers of harmony.  At the lowest level is the totalitarian “order”, in which a handful of savages inflict pain on the masses until they become prostrate and helpless.  Whether he articulates it as such or not, this is what Obama and his handlers want for the world.  This is because they have wild beasts within them–savage, angry, aggressive, unempathetic energy–and keep them from controlling them on an emotional level only by being controlled by them through the intellect.

Above this is the ritual order.  Throughout the book, one is struck by the closeness of violence of some sort, for perceived slights.  In this order, there are rules to follow, to prevent the outbreak of violence.  Unlike in a totalitarian order, though, some spontaneity is allowed, but only so much.  Thus: play without trust.  One can engage in witty banter, but only go so far.

A true order is one with cognitively and morally sovereign individuals–the creed of Individualism contains within it the only possible non-contradictory morality (societies do not exist, making an appeal to social morality inherently an X=0 proposition)–who interact in spontaneous and formally complex ways, forming a complex, and thus robust, order.

I would add that I think honest laughter is a good indicator of an authentic social order.  There was some honest laughter in Great Expectations, as for example between Pip and Joe, but not much.  Virtually everyone suffers from some sort of mental disorder brought on in large measure by social disconnection, and a sense of inner isolation.

Rock Lyrics: “English blood runs hot”.  Stones

“Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way.” Floyd.

I will continue to develop this.  I have had some major personal breakthroughs I will be focusing on and not talking about.