Moderates United

Straight lines do not appear in nature.  They come only from the math animal.

Ponder.

Fascism, from the inside, likely appears as nothing more or less than the right sorts of people FINALLY being in charge, and making needed and overdue changes that everyone would support if they were smart enough to understand how necessary they are.

Lois Lerner, we now read, thought “right-wingers” were crazy.  Within the Fascist mindset, the law is really intended for stupid people who are not gifted with the intrinsic wisdom and insight that guides the Statist.

Within their own minds they are right, and everyone else is wrong, and given that they are right, what moral or legal impediments should slow them down?

The Jews had to be purged, right, for the good of the human race?  Nazism was nothing if not social engineering of precisely the sort leftists have ALWAYS called for.

Dissidents have to be put in jail or killed–right?–because they are WRONG and risk screwing the perfect system up.

And it is hard to wake up from within this system, because it is self sealing.  You simply do not talk with or interact in any way with people who disagree with you.

I have a fierce temper.  It does not come out often, but both of my children have told me it scares the crap out of them when it does.

As with everything else, I am working on this.  It feels like an overreaction–there is clearly a place for anger in my world, but anger appropriate to the time and offense–comes from a place of perceived helplessness.

Peter Levine makes the case well that a principle therapeutic method is converting helplessness–freezing, or an actual helplessness–is “promoting” it through the nervous system hierarchy to the fight or flight response.  Both are acceptable, but need to be vigorous.

Anger, of course, is a fight response.  I can and have left dents in sheetrock walls with both my fists and head.

What I am realizing, though, is that anger has multiple sources.  There is of course the proximate cause.  I have been angry this week because the IRS apparently lost a tax return that I show as received and accepted, and which indicated a sizable refund.  Instead, they sent me a levy notice for money that I did not owe, and I had not paid because a large number minus a small number is still positive.  I tried to sort it out with them, but two people in a row hung up on me after conveying with their chosen words and tone of voice that they had no actual interest in helping me, and viewed what assistance they did offer as a favor to me, and not an ineluctable and important part of the responsibility inherent in being empowered to take people’s money by force.

Given Lois Lerner’s stunts, there is no reason not to believe there are people there capable of simply deleting returns to cause people like me trouble.  The IRS has no cause to view itself with anything but organizational contempt [I would like to propose here that the IRS be formally decimated, in the Roman Legion sense: fire every tenth person, without regard to level or status.  They are arrogant, and quite obviously believe themselves not just beyond the law, but even beyond the need to justify themselves.  For the Cincinnati office, where much of the Fascist activity took place (more on that in my next post), fire one in five.]

Be that as it may, though–even granted justified rage–I am in a cage when I cannot escape anger.  You have to let it go.

Here is the interesting point, to me, that I wanted to make: it is obvious that primal wounds are activated in situations like this, where you have a monolithic and indifferent, but abusive, entity; BUT ALSO anger can be the result of me enabling daily helplessness by not managing my affairs as diligently as I could, or could be reasonably expected to.  I get angry at myself, and direct it outward, and that anger is the result of devolving from a conscious, calm, and controlled place, where I direct my actions with reason, purpose, and willing acceptance.  I don’t know how to set limits yet–I don’t know when enough is enough–but I can clearly do better.

Tonight, I took the rage out on myself, and ate some food–calzones–that were not on my diet.  It calmed me down; that, and talking with some folks at the  bar that I’ve known for years about random stuff.  That is the activation of the social self Levine talks about.

Whenever you break your word with yourself, that is a type of violence.  You have done something to yourself that you would likely not have done to someone else.

It seems increasingly to me as well that much anxiety has deep seated anger as a root.  It is an expression in your mind of a somatic reality that you have not yet processed.  We are not meant to worry.  Animals don’t worry, as far as we can tell.  Some part of you keeps a tension in you to remind you it is there, but it cannot name itself, or bring itself fully into awareness without careful study and quiet.

I go everywhere.  I try my best never to lie to myself.  I see my flaws, and am trying to work on them.  That is all I can do.  I share this process with you in the hope it might provide you comfort or insight.

Courage is a creative use of fear.

How’s that?

I’m in an odd place.  I’m still processing last week.  I have odd times, with odd people, sometimes.  I like right angles, curves, and loopety loops.  And misspellins.

I feel like I connected my head with my heart.  This is an odd thing.  The mind is still there, and the heart is still there, but they are now talking.  It feels weird.  I think that was the source of yesterday’s odd post.  I like to think of my thinking as a hammer: hard, clear, fresh.

But clearly, I think a LOT.  How can I say I don’t like discussing ideas?  I just like discussing them with myself.  I find that even though I am an asshole sometimes, I tend to agree with most of what I say, and understand the bulk of my thinking, although some of this shit god only knows what the actual point is, if any.

To use a word new to me, I think I have tended to pendulate between states.  I feel until it gets too rough, then enter my head.  After a time, I head back into thiis feeling shit.

But the shit is getting easier.  I’m actually accessing moments of profound contentment and even joy, despite the fact that I have tapped into and am now in dialogue with some fairly serious trauma.

I’m sure I’ve mentioned this somewhere, but if you write as much as me you can’t keep stuff straight: my “guru” is a guy named Jack Schwarz, who I have never met.  I had two dreams of him, both of which remain with me to this day.

In the first, he was skateboarding.  What he communicated to me was a deep sense of playfulness and fearlessness.  Life is not so serious.  Pain is not so serious.  Engage.  Interact. Play, wherever you are and whatever you are doing.

I feel like I have entered that energy somewhat this week.  My day job sees me driving many miles every day, interacting with people and environments that are completely foreign to me, solving problems with no help, then moving on.

The addon to the story is that the dream encouraged me to look up his website.  I had read about him, and I think had one of his books, but otherwise had no idea about him.  When I pulled it up, the very first image was of a kid skateboarding.  Experiences like that stay with you.

The second dream was of him–and he may have been dead at this point, as I don’t remember the exact date–showing me what absolutely unconditional love feels like.  I just saw him, and felt this radiant energy coming out of him, and knew that no matter who I was, what I had done, or where I came from, I was loved, absolutely.

The Hindus speak of Darshana, and the Jews and Arabs of Baraka (yes, same root), which is a qualitative energetic communication.  I believe I received Jack’s Darshana.

Now, he absolutely discouraged cultism, and personal devotion.  He always said you have to find your own way, although he offered ideas and practices which had been helpful to him.

To my mind, no book or teaching could ever even approach the gift of feeling these energies, such that I can aim at trying to manifest them in my own life.

Oh, I’m having some tequila again, but all alcohol has ever done for me is make me more honest.  I have love and respect in me.  I take my responsibilities very seriously.  I take my life seriously.  I work HARD at personal growth.  I have walked into Hell many, many times.  I know I can do it, and I am tempted to say it does not frighten me, but I have likely just numbed that part of myself.

I need to hit the sack.  8 hours of driving tomorrow, and I will not have a day off for at least three weeks.  It’s all good, though: it’s an adventure.  I am really, truly beginning to feel that excitement and enthusiasm.

The emotionally based need to discuss ideas is counter-productive.  It  becomes a distraction rather than a task in problem solving.

There is no passion in intellectualism.  It is a disease of emotional dwarfism.  Most college kids, certainly Humanities majors, succumb.

Yes, I saw Les Miserable.  Narcissism and grandiosity are not in my view desirable traits.  Yes, of course you have to love Jean Valjean, but the kids who set up the blockades, not so much.

Good tequila may have been involved in this post, which I may disagree with tomorrow, but not likely.

Honestly, I am just sitting here drinking after an odd day–an odd week, for that matter, with several more to come–and contemplating the stereotypical college night of sitting up discussing ideas: free will, God, death, politics.

I have always hated these discussions.  I have my own ideas, and by and large nobody ever presents me with anything I have not heard or seen.  I state this as clinical fact.  I cringe when certain “deep”topics come up.

My best interrogator is me.  I know my weak spots.  I know where I am ignorant.

But even then, there is a feeling, not an idea, that I am seeking.  It is the feeling of drilling somewhere, then watching and feeling something emerge, something new to me, something interesting, something alive.

My new mantra is Adventure.  I am feeling increasingly able to frame inconveniences, long days, human stupidity and chance in ways that are interesting and exciting.  To my mind, I am very lucky, but I still get my panties in a wad sometimes.  I’m trying to reduce that, turn it, with the goal of making every part of every day something that I am engaged in and connected to in natural, organic ways.

Random musings.   Do with them what you will.

It feels to me like the relationship of an addict to his or her “poison” is exactly that: a relationship.  It is not different in kind or principle with the relationship one has with another human being.  It has feeling qualities.  It has variation.  It changes day to day.

And it seems to me the essence of addiction is getting from chemicals a sense of connection with something, with feelings, and I think in particular the sense of relief from isolation, which is not quite the same as belonging, but awfully close. and as close as most addicts think they can get.

The cure lies in developing new relationships that over time exceed in value the relationship with the substance, which after all cannot quite speak for itself, and onto which feelings must be projected.

As I have said before, this is the principle innovation of AA.  It is not the 12 steps, but the inclusion of groups of like-minded people saying and believing the same things.  It is the creation of a tribe, or if you like, a church.

One can with justice ask how and why we are all–or if you like, why I particularly am–so stupid, why we (I) fail to meet our (my) needs in effective and harmonious ways.  I don’t know the Answer, but I will continue to come up with answers.

Sometimes one blind man has the trunk of the elephant, one the leg of an elephant, and a third the ass of a donkey.

Can you imagine your own non-existence?

For my part, I believe that consciousness survives death.  I believe, based on considerable study, that this is the only conclusion supported by the actual evidence.

And yet, our goal, we are told by those who have apparently passed on, is evolution, growth.  We have to expand, grow beyond our ego selves.

But who is left when this is done?  Are you still recognizably you? Is there a point where you take a final, divine breath, and merge with something?

It seems to me that we are built to fear dissolution.  We are built to favor survival, continuation.  This is in our genes, in our bodies, in our animal selves.

Yet, I would contend that even if there is no final moment when we cease to be as discrete entities, it is still useful to be able to visualize it.  It is when work is done.

We die nightly.  We “fall” into sleep. We throw ourselves into sleep.  We lose consciousness, assuming we will awaken again, and of course most of the time we do.

But we have to consent to die.  We have loosen our grasp on our faculties, on our senses, on our minds and bodies.

And I think it is precisely the openness needed to consent to die which facilitates growth.

I did Holotropic Breathwork last week, and one of my “emergences”–this may be the word I use in the future–was being nailed to a cross.  It filled me with grief and terror, and I had some powerful physical reactions.

But the space was filled with green.  It was not a sad space.

And in my next session I was hanging on the cross, and found it congenial.  I laugh to say this, but I did feel supported by the cross (in the sense that I was physically hanging from it).  From this vantage point I watched humanity in all its griefs, stupidities, and futile efforts.  I saw failure from ignorance, failure from pain, failure from violence.

There were moments when I was sitting, too, where the room darkened (visibly: I assumed a cloud was passing over the sun, but it felt deeper than that), where people were crying and moaning, that I felt a deep sense of the terror of being human, of feeling lost, of struggling and falling, never knowing which way is up, who to trust, where to go.

Death gives you this.  As Carlos Castaneda said, it is a valuable adviser.

I continue to make progress.

This is the way it works, but I’m not sure anyone has ever expressed it clearly:

You have to break a few eggs to make an omelet; and if you never actually get around to making an omelet, at least you got to break a few eggs.

This is why I call it Cultural Sadeism. The punishment is the point, not an incidental by-product.  Egalitarianism rests on a deeply rooted emotional need to place people on Procrustean beds and cut their limbs or rack their bodies.

Resentment–and Socialism is merely a cover for an intellectually respectable, if not defensible, expression of resentment–is the creed of those incapable of self directed happiness.

And I will say this: I am decreasingly inclined to anger at evil.  Some people need to be stopped–they need to be confronted in public, they need to be imprisoned, and some are likely best just put to death–but when I look at evil what I see increasingly is human beings turned into machines by trauma.  They are trapped, and do not know they are trapped.  Evil feels like a way out, but it cannot be escaped.

Goodness is freedom.  Goodness is happiness.  Goodness is creation, love and contentment.

And it is inherently generous.  When you can make more than you need, it is pleasurable to give it away.  We assume that what people most need are things, but this is of course stupid.  What everyone needs is love, which is to say a sense of being understood, of being accepted, and of being safe.  And being safe can mean having the freedom to take risks.  We all need risk in life.

What sane loving mother would protect her children from all possible harm?  Put another way, what sane, loving mother would build a cage around her children and call it love?

Yet, this is precisely the Socialist project.

Few musings.  I had not intended to write that much.

I’m debating someone on Facebook, and that is the wrong place, so I agreed to post statements I made that she disagreed with, and debate at length.

My invitation: Pick a statement you believe to be clearly true that contradicts anything I said; or pick a statement I made that you believe clearly wrong. I will cut and paste it verbatim to my blog, post a link to it, and we can debate until you start contradicting yourself, or we agree that insufficient data exists to formulate definitive positions. Or, until you embarrass me, and cause me to realize my sense of the strength of my positions is entirely unwarranted. I have never censored any comment, and for any lurkers will note that Anonymous is enabled. Feel free to pile on. 

Response: 

“Anyone who has ever formed a corporation, particularly a C Corp, is struck immediately by the gross unfairness of getting taxed both at the corporate level AND at the individual level.” My husband, Peter C. above, formed a C Corp and ran it for 30 years, and he posted Noam Chomsky’s video in response to that. 

Here is that video.

Second Response: “I suspect most people who are surprised that for-profit entities would seek to maximize revenues have never seriously thought about going into business, much less run one.” [this is my comment, to which she is responding]. Ummm, also inaccurate. Both my husband and I ran for-profit businesses and we did not engage in unethical actions to maximize profits. Putting profits above all else has resulted in egregious behaviors in many businesses. Presumably you don’t need me to provide examples (I am highly educated and just covered corporate crime less than a year ago and would have no problem finding ample evidence for this.)


Third Response: “None of you are emotionally capable of” [full statement, from me, in response to what I perceived as generalized repetition of bad propaganda: None of you are actually emotionally capable of seeing beyond your patent biases, or engaging in meaningful, useful dialogue].… I am a cognitive neuroscientist by training (PhD-ABD with an additional degree in psychology),. Do you have any idea what type of experiments you would have to run to determine anyone’s emotional capabilities? And yet you made this pronouncement to a group of strangers based on your own emotional responses. I don’t even need to refute this as it is patently absurd.


I do not have time tonight to respond in depth, but will over the next few days, in comments.