Moderates United

If I am correct that we need a smidgeon of horror in our lives, then the emergence of zombies as a cultural thing would make sense.  They are animated rotting corpses who eat human beings, preferably their brains.

It is interesting to ponder the fact that most modern Americans have never killed anything larger than a spider.  They do not share the experience of Americans 100 years ago, when more people lived on farms than not, and where wringing a chickens neck–or cutting its head off–or slaughtering and butchering a pig were ordinary events.  I don’t know the statistics, but it seems likely that hunting and fishing are largely confined to rural communities, although I do know a number of people around here who do both.

Killing feeds the gut energy I keep obsessing about.  It brings, I think (and I am my own statistic: I’ve killed a few fish, but many years ago, and that’s it), a connection with the serious side of life.  Do flippant people cut pigs into pieces, and make sausage with the intestinal casing?  I don’t think so.  There must be a certain horror to it, which one gets used to.

It is a bad thing, I think, that we have outsourced all our killing to professionals.  There is a meat packing plant–a slaughterhouse–I drive by sometimes, and see the people who work there outside, smoking, with their protective hair nets on, and I wonder if they dream of knives and chainsaws and blood. I suspect many do.   It is too much.  This is far beyond going out back to grab a chicken for supper.

And I have been pondering the ways that we engineer horror in some amount into our ordinary lives.  Immediately, I thought of the Tibetan Sky Burials.  This video shows it quite graphically: http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=666_1414847845

It is described here: http://people.howstuffworks.com/culture-traditions/cultural-traditions/sky-burial.htm

It is not uncommon for serial killers to dismember the bodies of those they kill.  Here, it is done to the bodies of loved ones.  And they don’t stop at dismembering: they flay the skin from bone, and crush the bones.

By all accounts, Tibetans are calm, cheerful, peaceful people–or were until the bastards from China colonized them to build a larger neo-Capitalist Empire.

But they do this.  Tantric practices include drinking from cups made of human skulls, and keeping human bones as relics.

Horror, accepted, internalized, grants peace.  This is perhaps the solution to the puzzle.

Within my Kum Nye practice, they are speaking of our “dark side”–which seemingly needed Jung to point it out, since we were quite content to identify fully with the parts we like about ourselves–as holding.  It is held energy, unreleased energy.  Released, it is no longer dark.  The task is to carefully, painstakingly, search out these areas, and grant them water.

And me being me, and getting obsessed from time to time with things, it occurs to me that the precise function of the unmyelinated vagus nerve is suppression, down-regulation, holding. Taken to its full extreme, it will pull you out of your body entirely, with many people reporting, in the moments before they think they will die, something like an out of body experience.  Short of that, it will paralyze you.  It is a primitive survival circuit.  It is like being taken over by some primitive creature which has somehow survived within us.

I will wonder aloud if some technology can be invented for measuring tension in this circuit, which would allow some sort of biofeedback to be developed to release it.  I know that Heartrate Variability is related to vagus nerve function, but I think it is the myelinated one.  I will admit ignorance on this.

I’m listening to Lyle Lovett’s North Dakota, and it is bringing up powerful memories of doing the Hoffman Process. I don’t recall if I mentioned this, but I spent two days after we finished listening to evocative music on their most-excellent stereo system.  This song in particular, a lot.  I anchored it, it seems.

I am a man with skull flags on both sides of my bed, and it occurred to me that love is an extraordinarily destructive force.  It confronts us with the fact that most of us live half lives, that we exist as shadows.  It calls out the inauthenticities and lies we tell ourselves.  It refuses us the illusory shelters of complacency and perpetual distraction.  It, too, is a sword.

May we all die tomorrow of this sword.  It is past time.  Its presence is quite welcome.  There is light behind that shell you and I live in.  Our shelter is our cage, and must be destroyed.

Could I posit that evil people–let us call them sadistic sociopaths–associate fear and pain with the sense of “home”, that we all need a home, and that their cruelty is rooted in a deep psychological need for it?  Of course: I just did posit it.  Turns out you can posit anything.

Home is an instinct.  It must be.  Geese flock together, and people need places they feel safe.  Safety and social connection are the core elements in a healthy home, and not coincidentally the two emotions absent from people who have endured psychological trauma.  If you do not feel safe anywhere, you have no home. If you cannot rest, you have no home.

As I heal–and I think I’ve mentioned this–I am feeling more and more keenly the importance of my emotional connection with the physical space I live in, how orderly it is, how connected I feel with its contents, and look and feel.  Women do this naturally because they are naturally more connected with their emotions and a sense of flow than men are.

And I got to thinking about the early Buddhist wandering mendicants, who roamed from village to village with a small rice bowl, which if they were lucky they might fill twice before noon rolled around and it was time to fast.  Were they homeless?  No.  They “took refuge” in their practice.  They lived in their practice.  A routine can be a sort of home. It can bring with it a sense of safety and connection and known-ness.  I feel this.

We call people on certain paths “lost souls”.  Why are they lost?  They cannot find a way home.  There are many songs about this.  It is common.  What does a religious conversion do?  It gives you a new home, and you are no longer lost.  Religio means bound, but could we not also say “held”?  Contained?  Sheltered?  Located?  Surrounded by the like-minded/like-practicing?  Do you not have a seat at the circle of that communities life?  We do not need religion, in my view, but we categorically need the feelings which they produce.

We are so fucking primitive.  So much more is possible.

Songs, because:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-a2o5ykaPwc  Blind Faith “Can’t find my way home”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmCRnRTUl6U Hank Williams “Lost Highway”

If this is in fact a sense–and I think it is–then where does it reside, neurologically?  I think it is in the gut.

I was thinking today that evil is a sort of nervous system breakdown brought on by an inability to relax.  The social sense and the gut sense permanently part ways.  The true face becomes the trauma face, which is the unresolved and enormously powerful emotions linked to gut energy.  The social face becomes a lie.  Only in sadism can the true face be shown, and some sense of home, of belonging, be created.

This is getting close to the truth, I think.

And it needs to be said that structural cruelty has been an element of the human experience for all of human history.  Bigotry is not the exception in history: it is the rule, the world over.  Racism and wars and slavery: all the rule, not the exception.  The Greek democracy depended on slaves.  Sub-Saharan Africans never invented the wheel because those able to take power used slaves to haul everything.

And India is perhaps the worst.  Yes, they are vegetarians and preach non-violence, but aggression, rape and murder continue to be practiced against their version of Untermenschen, on a scale quite larger than any such aggressions in the South at any period. It is far worse than Apartheid ever way.  I think only because it is not ruled by white people, and because of the fundamental antipathy towards actual moral reasoning on the part of those who enjoy being outraged about everything else, is this fact overlooked.

Our modern era is a huge experiment.  Where do all the unprocessed traumas and their after-maths go?  Where does the hate go?  Practically, it has gone into the realm of left wing radicalism, by and large.  This is not a good solution. But I think we need to recognize the psycho-social dynamic underlying it, which makes the effective use of reason next to impossible with these people. 

It occurs to me that it is the shy kids who buy most of the comic books.  Why?  It offers them models of empowerment.  As I think about it, so too do video games, in all likelihood.  I have pronounced curmudgeonly tendencies, and I think sometimes I think too little of positives.  Of course, I think most people are like this.  It’s how we are wired.

But, and here is my point, it occurred to me that video games could be used for psychotherapeutic work.  For example, phobias.  What if–at an appropriate point–people manipulated digital images of themselves facing virtual spiders?  Or a height?  Or a small space?

What if technology were created to produce realistic approximations of a traumatizing event?  What if you could place visual filters over parts of the situation, so as to do a sort of pendulation?  Or have the filters appear, then briefly fade, then come back?  What if you could recreate the scenario with a different ending?  What if you suddenly sprouted superpowers, or huge strength, and fought off the menacing person?  It would be interesting to try this.

And again, you could use video games to create scenarios in which, say, people repeatedly offer you cigarettes, and you say no.  They repeatedly offer you drinks, and you say no. It could be used in addictions therapy.

We see the term “dual use” mainly used with regard to nuclear weapons, but I would argue that nearly all technology is dual use.  It can be used to harm, and it can be used to heal.

Even guns are dual use: it all depends on who is pointing them at who, and why.  I have never seen any gun control advocate in this country suggest that cops not have them.  Why?  They are useful tools, and this is generally recognized.  Guns are to personal defense what wrenches are to car mechanics.

It occurs to me that helping people–watering their best sides, planting the seeds of better ways, sharing a generous spirit with them–is very much like having children.  It is a great joy.

My own two kids have been a huge blessing to me.  They pulled me away from what would likely have become selfish bitterness, and long term failure.  They offered a ready and appropriate place to pour my creative spirit and energies, and in eliciting this, made it available to me too. It wasn’t there before.

“Service” is another word that makes me cringe.  It is used and abused all too often by imbeciles and cynics.  But the spirit behind it is a wonderful one, and I would suggest the service mindset is a bit like the parenting one, not in the sense of being patronizing or protective, but in the sense of facilitating new births, new life.

We might even say true service is a creative art form.  I believe this to be true.  And I want to be clear that what is MOST important is inner hunger, inner pain, inner incompleteness.  You can manage poverty with a rich inner spirit, just as you can be rich in money and wind up killing yourself.

Another synonym.

If I want to define socialism as anti-Individualism, I have to define individualism.  Here is a shot: the creed that humans are capable of moral and psychological growth, and that this growth can only occur at the individual level.

If we could create a society of angels–of morally/psychologically perfected human beings–then as James Madison observed 200 years ago, no government would be necessary.  All necessary social forms and decisions would emerge as spontaneous order, as the self organization characteristic of a complex system.

If we, on the contrary, posit a society of greedy, lying, lazy, ignorant sons and daughters of bitches, then no amount of compulsion will create a complex order.  Tyranny will be necessary for the maintenance of even a semblance of order.

Socialists like egalitarianism because it can be measured.  Having rejected the notion of quality, they have nothing but grotesque quantitative measures.  One can say “income inequality rose last year”, and this can be measured (and it can be ignored that everyone’s quality of life improved further from an already elite level, seen from a global and historical perspective).  One cannot say that “overall Goodness in the United States dropped by two points last year.”  They are making efforts at this with happiness, but I think this misses the point that happiness is the result of self respect, which is the result of believing in something bigger than yourself and working to build it.

Put another way: Individualism is the creed that individual acts of beauty are possible and desirable.  Anti-Individualism is the belief that only State acts of beauty are possible and desirable.

Actually, this is an over-simplification, but I am not going to take the time to clarify it.  I have already spent half the day preaching to the winds.  Time to go work out.

What if you played a video game with you as the main character, and repeatedly acted out the behaviors you would choose, but which get repeatedly interrupted by negative patterns?  What if situations are programmed–and I suspect 10-15 would suffice for most of the population–where you are offered, say, something that is not on your diet, and you say “No, Thank you.”