Moderates United

My youngest confessed to me the other day to cutting a class.  After she revealed her method–the simple plan executed audaciously–I felt some pride, and gave her a high five. I told her I wanted a little–just a little–larceny in her soul.

And I got to thinking about why.  You would think someone who reasons everything through like me would have reasons for doing things.  I don’t, at least not always.  I very often go by gut instinct and feel.

What I told her was that organizations, human systems, can become corrupt.  Just because someone is in charge does not mean you should listen to them.  It does not mean you should not resist them, in large things and small.  I do not want to build habitual obedience, and a good test for flexibility on this score is precisely the ability to break rules without excess guilt, and without getting caught.

I don’t reflexively admire people who do X religiously for a long period of time.  Somewhere in that period of time, an adjustment was needed, and this fact was missed because they were attached to the outward form, and not the inner purpose.  Sometimes you have to cheat on yourself, and take a look around to see if you are missing anything.

And law and morality are very often quite different.  Our leaders break both laws and moral codes constantly, but they remain our leaders, at least politically.  I have long taught my kids that just because something is legal, that does not make it just; and just because something is illegal, that does not make it wrong.

I also teach them it is OK to break a rule, if you know why it exists; and I teach them to regularly take calculated risks.  Taking risks is how you build judgement, and calculating teaches you to think.

We would not be better off if everyone were a pirate, but I also question those who reflexively follow authority.  Even the so-called counter-culture has leaders who are not questioned.  Obama is doing virtually all the same things they criticized Bush for, but the criticisms were propaganda, not principle-based, and so they cannot judge him for the many things he has done they would have crucified a Republican for.

Having a small black flag somewhere in you means you are alive.  You are not reflexive, and you will not easily be taken for a machine.

I think I said at some point my motto is “Neither Kings nor Commissars”.  When I say Commissar, I mean low level bureaucratic apparatchniks who have the power to interfere with your life directly.  And if they are all around you, it is the rule of the Commissariat, understood broadly.

I was pondering all the SWAT teams proliferating under Obama.  The FDA has one.  The Consumer Safety and Product whatever has one.  The Department of Agriculture has one.

What does a SWAT team give you?  The power to scare people.

And I got to thinking too, that once you have a Commissariat of some sort–let us say the Food and Drug Administration–it can be counted on to justify its existence by finding problems even where they don’t exist.  And what do the SWAT teams do?  They rehearse scenarios in which they are needed, in which SWAT really is an appropriate response.  Since such scenarios are far-fetched, they define down what constitutes a need for Special Weapons and Tactics, as opposed to an unarmed official knocking on the door with a clipboard.

What exactly do Homeland Security agents do?  They are apparently agents who are not TSA, not Secret Service, not Coast Guard.  Well, among other things, they justify their existence.  They create problems where none existed.  They dumb down the situations in which they are needed; they expand the scope of their operations.

The thing about bureaucracies is that they metastasize always and everywhere unless they are carefully regulated.  Anyone wanting to squelch American liberties has only to create enough of them, and overfund the rest, and simply wait.

We are reaching a point where everybody feels the need to keep a look over their shoulder, at least in the most Regressive States, lest they violate some norm they didn’t even know they were being held to.

This post was provoked by this article: http://www.salon.com/2015/04/19/what_a_horrible_mother_moms_arrested_for_leaving_their_kids_in_the_car/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=socialflow

Edit: Here is another example:

 http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/exclusive-new-fed-rules-nypd-training-101-article-1.2192488

When they call Peter Zimroth a “monitor”, they should use the word “Commissar”.  When there is some fucking asshole telling you every fucking minute about what you need to do and how, you are living in a Commissariat.  I am mildly–only mildly–redefining it.

And I would add as well that the closer the center of decision making is to the individual, the more complex the social order, because they more decisions that get made.  The farther that decision moves from the individual, the less decision making they do, and it makes them stupider, because they don’t learn from experience.  It also, in a formal sense, reduces complexity.

Socialism is rows of trees–the same trees–all planted in a row.  They call this order. Liberalism and Free Markets are forests, which is a complex order.  The latter is vastly more resilient, and interesting.

I think it is a truism that power attracts precisely those least likely to bring wisdom and an altruistic mindset to it, but I think we could speak more generally that the world is run by people who are unable to relax, whose success depends in large measure on a long term monomaniacal, obsessive focus on each next step in self aggrandizement, regardless of the field.

Freedom, then, over time places power of all sorts in the hands of those who are unwise.  Freedom contains, too, though, the power of reform, and this rule obviously is not absolute.  It merely describes what I feel is a tendency.

I would stipulate this: no person who is unable to relax fully, to let EVERYTHING go, can be said to be fully psychologically healthy; and I would guess this is most people on the planet, certainly in the supposedly “developed” world; it is likely less true for those who have less to hold on to, although I don’t presume to speak for the poor, who in almost all cases would certainly prefer not to be poor.

Autogenic Therapy rests on this premise.  How it works, effectively, is that as the patient learns deep relaxation, more and more unconscious content, held in reservoirs of sorts, comes flowing out.

It has been my own experience that there are qualitative levels, approximately, and that as you process one, you gain access to another.  The end will find me capable of letting go of everything that binds me, which is the goal of most spiritual traditions, all of which, in my view, would benefit from incorporating the insights particularly of modern trauma psychology.

Virtually everyone you see on every street is “walking wounded” in some way.  Given the chance, they will not be able to fully let go in a deep relaxation session.  This is my guess, although of course my opinion may be skewed by me being, I think, a bit more wounded than most.

But I got to thinking.  I remember being screened for scoliosis in grade school (I have it).  What if we screened kids for trauma?  What if, for example, we taught every school kid in America both Progressive Relaxation and Autogenics from grade 4 through 6?  Sooner or later, all traumas would likely come out.

Look at our prisons: could you not hang a sign on the neck of virtually everyone there, even those in for drug and alcohol related offenses, and say “untreated trauma victim”?

I suspect you could hang such a sign on every other person, at least, in a typical ghetto.

What a wonderful society we could build, though, if everyone got the help they needed, and which in most cases they didn’t even know they needed.  This holds particularly true if as many people suffer from pre-3 trauma as I suspect do.  What emotionally immature mother is not capable of scaring the shit out of a rambunctious 2 year old?

Food for thought.

Ponder that last phrase.

Did you see more than a fraction of what happened in front of you?  No, of course not.  Don’t be stupid.

Did you learn more than a fraction of what was presented to you?  No, of course not, don’t be arrogant.

Ah, did you greet the day with some acceptance, and do your work with something approaching pleasure and engagement?  Here: give yourself a grade between C- and A.

Did you learn SOMETHING?  Pass/fail.  Grade yourself.

There will be another quiz tomorrow.  You can thank me then.

In my view, “modernity” is acadamese for sloppy thinking, laziness, and grotesquely unwarranted moral and intellectual hauteur.

I was reading this piece: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/04/13/philosophy-returns-to-the-real-world/?_r=0

We start with a softball game, with Stanley Fish as umpire:

When I was in graduate school at Johns Hopkins in the early 1980s, I played on the intramural softball team of the postmodern literary theorist Stanley Fish. I recall his umpiring at a practice once when the batter, my buddy Mike, now a distinguished professor at Yale, argued a call. Fish good-humoredly pointed out that what’s a ball and what’s a strike is not an objective, external, or natural fact, it’s an interpretive practice; and according to that practice, whatever the umpire calls is real: If he calls it a strike, it’s a strike.

What do we call this attitude everywhere else?  Fascism.  Or in another era, Monarchism, or at least Oligarchy.  It is “might makes right”. The entirety of the Western Liberal tradition of philosophy was intended to end it.  Everything our best minds did for several hundred years, which resulted in an unprecedented out-pouring of political freedom and vast material wealth, spread across all classes, was oriented precisely around avoiding assholes like this getting the upper hand.

Well, they got the upper hand.

Then we read about his interactions with Richard Rorty (PoMo, which means “intellectually impoverished Modernist”):

Rorty challenged me, over and over, to describe an undescribed object, to tell him about something outside language. He didn’t, according to himself, deny the existence of the world, he simply held that the assertion that there was stuff outside of language was itself a linguistic practice.

Jesus H. Christ.  How the fuck would you describe something without using words?  This is a fucking tautology.  If he had asked me to describe the feeling of being kicked in the shins without using words I would have kicked him in the shins.  Yes, plural.  Then I would have hoped he asked me to describe the feeling of a groin kick.

Can you name me any word which has no descriptive referent?  Cow?  Milk?  Even more complex words like “justice”, which can be defined in many ways, can still be defined.  I would define it as equality before the law, regardless of social class, race, or gender; and the diligent effort to punish the guilty.

As I have said many times “that” is a fully descriptive term.  Who is Bob?  HIM.  We do not form words and then match them with outer realities.  Our entire early life is wordless.  It is pure experience.  And everything that matters afterwards is also wordless. Love is wordless.  Joy is wordless.

This is the creed of people avoiding feelings.  I would suggest that is the psychological root of the whole thing.

And I would offer an alternative definition for philosophy I put forward earlier: Philosophy is the structured intellectual process of learning to effectively get from THIS to THAT.

Finally, he feels the need to defend those who would speak of “reality”:

Some of the motivation for the realist turn has been ecological: Climate change isn’t just in our heads or in our descriptions, but a real-world situation that requires real-world physical transformations. Others have been political: defenses of the urgent truth of justice, or of the importance of material economic conditions and the treatment of physical human bodies. And I think that, as our experience becomes in many ways increasingly mediated or virtual, we simply started yearning toward the old-fashioned physical environment, which was always available and still is, and on which whatever we see on a screen depends utterly. Ideas are always an index of longings.

People like this should be fired and forced to apprentice in practical trades like plumbing and carpentry.  Such idiocy would not long endure a daily engagement with real and practical problems.

I think the shortest description of PTSD is “internalized horror”.  I have gotten to some powerful energies, and staying with it, to allow it to process and dissipate, is very hard.  It is much easier to allow myself to slip into mere fear, which I can usually combine well with intellectualism.

There is a large qualitative difference between fear and horror.  Fear is a surface emotion, or so it feels to me.  Horror is many dimensional, complex, rich.  It is unpleasant, but still interesting–I suppose like a car accident.

And I feel horror very much represents the involvement of the gut, of very primal, very primitive nerve impulses.  What you do you feel, when you are “frozen” with fear?  What is that dream, where you try to run but you can’t?  I think horror is an activation of the unmyelinated vagus nerve system, which is suppressive, which works to slow things down, with the logical end state being complete immobility, complete paralysis.

And I will speculate again that the popularity of horror films must have something to do with a felt sense that something is missing, that some part of the process of living is going unexpressed.  We do not encounter primal terror in our ordinary lives, most of the time.

Think to farmers: they regularly slaughter animals.  Hunters kill because they enjoy it.  And in my experience, most of those people are very relaxed.

Being able to process horror and being able to process trauma are in my view the same thing.  It seems likely one could view some spiritual practices–especially Tantric practices–in this light.  I have in mind things like meditating in cremation grounds and smearing human ashes on yourself, and keeping human bones around as relics.

My task, I think, is to maintain contact with this energy while ;progressively diluting it by combining it with ordinary energies, with daily life, by staying with it and functioning, not allowing it to slow me down.  I think I can do this.  It’s not easy, but few things worth anything are.

Music mediates moods.

I have long used Iasos Angels of Comfort/Angel Play when I do Kum Nye.  It adds something important, and helps me go deeper.

I’d encourage you to listen to these when you are feeling contemplative: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GT3RiHYqSUk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uni-TVcsU6A

I think some men feeling listening to relaxing music is unmanly, but what is manly about fear and anxiety? If you are badass, you are relaxed.  You won’t find many wound up lions outside of cages.

While I’m at it, Edwina Francesca’s “Breath of Heaven” is amazing too.  I’ll listen to one of those tracks every morning when I do my EmWave2.  That, the Cistercian Monks Chants, or something from Vangelis or Stephen Halpern.

Here’s something nice from Vangelis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2Bp-xkMc20

Breathe in through your nose to a count of 4, and out through your mouth to a count of 8 until it’s done, and relax every muscle in your body.

I like this analogy of a mirror, used by some mystic group–Sufis or Kabbalists, I think–in which we learn to be sensitive to, and to reflect, God’s light.  Growth is “polishing the mirror” and sin, in contrast, would be smudging it.

Here is the thing about sin: it is error, plain and simple.  It is taking a wrong turn to get to the grocery store, or accidentally over-salting your chili.  It is contrary to your own best interest, and thus not something, properly understood, that you should ever need to be punished for.  Punishment is for maintaining social peace and harmony.  It is an outer form.

Inner punishment has no use.  There is never any point in beating yourself up.  The task is to LEARN, and having learned, the sin evaporates.  You take the correct route to the grocery store.  You make superlative chili.

This is why there is no point in judging people–or yourself, for that matter.  Life is filled with “tasks at hand”, and our job is to do them as well as we can, and when we screw up, to learn, and do better.  You, and everyone you meet, is a work in progress.  If you want to do good, set a good example.  Teach.  As the Tao Te Ching says, a good man is a bad man’s teacher and a bad man is a good man’s pupil.  Everything is relative.

Even the most twisted sadists, if you penetrate to their cores, are broken children, filled with horror, self disgust, and the most terrible emotional pain.  Their paths are very, very long ones, but all end in the light, in my view.

But this is all speculation.  I need to go to my task at hand, which is a session of Kum Nye.

I’ve been sleeping in a lot lately.  My job allows me to get away with it, and I am slowly contacting and learning to dissipate the horrors within me.  Seen rationally, it is productive, immensely productive.  But I still feel guilt.

This morning, as often, I was praying God would forgive me, and it hit me that this request is absurd.  Being somewhat cyclically amnesic, I’ve likely said this before, but ponder the stupidity of asking forgiveness from an infinite being.  In my view, God is the animating force behind everything that exists; God both creates the form and the motion.  Richard Feynman said that a square meter of empty space has enough latent energy to boil every ocean on Earth.  Multiply that by an infinity of space, and that is still likely too small.

We can’t begin to grasp what we don’t know.

But I did want to make two points: I think the image of God as a punitive parent creates fear, and fear creates violence and hiding.  I have no doubt that the reason I was tortured as I was, was to prevent me becoming a “brat”, and going to hell.  Love was not a word used or understood, but brat was.  Come hell or high water my mother especially was not going to raise a brat.

When you ask forgiveness of God, why?  Because you fear punishment. In my case, I am doing something which makes me feel good, but have an ambient anxiety that I have done something wrong, and that the way to dispel it is to ask forgiveness.  I do this out of fear.  It is a way of reducing fear, because this would be reasonable if you were interacting with a human and offended them in some way.

But I truly think there will come a day when we view most religions as fairy tales, as ridiculous, as profoundly psychologically unbalanced in many ways.  I think Love is and should be the universal creed, but even in Christianity it is diluted and unbalanced by the terror of Hell.  Much hatred and violence flows from this primordial fear.

And I will wonder out loud how accurately human history could be viewed as as history of undiagnosed and unprocessed PTSD, which is more or less a disorder of the nervous system, and which leads to depersonalization, dissociation, pervasive fear and paranoia, and an inability to relax.  Did the Assyrians beat their kids?  I’ll bet they did.  What is the cure for fear?  More fear.  War as homeopathic remedy.

I will say as well that I think a new and better psychology will figure out how to access and process infant trauma.  I’ll bet it is much more common than we suppose.

Finally, the point of this post was this vision that popped in my head of developing an actual science of God. We know about Zero Point Energy.  We know non-locality is a feature of our universe.  We know consciousness can affect matter.  Somebody needs to jump in with both feet and start finding and better understanding how our universe is shaped by an ordering principle, by a dynamic energy which is endless.

Some people are doing this of course, as people like Dean Radin have well chronicled, but my vision is a post-religious world, based fully on science, but a humanistic science, one which grasps the importance of faith and ritual and play, one which understands the value and centrality of symbols and human connections.

The specific vision that popped into my head was the creation of an endlessly reactive surface, and finding people who could affect it, and figuring out how.  Robert Jahn demonstrated telekinesis as an observable reality beyond any reasonable doubt.  But he did it statistically.  My vision is doing it directly.

All these things are vastly important.  We are literally talking about the nature of life and the structure of the universe.  No more important topics could be imagined.

And yet fools waste time on spent theories, that should have died 100 years ago.  There is no matter, only energy.  It is my personal view that all of us are created a million times a second.

The smartest guy or gal in the room is the one with the best answer to the problem at hand.  It is this simple.  It may be true that in a great many contexts this will be the same person, but anyone who assumes they are that person is in most cases being stupid.  You have to gather evidence.  This is how intelligence works.  Intelligences presumes stupidity until it can prove–or reasonably and plausibly conclude–otherwise.

IQ is vastly less important than the problems you can solve.  I look up Marilyn Vos Savant, and I don’t see anything interesting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marilyn_vos_Savant

Motivation matters.  Courage matters.  Playfulness matters.