Truly, deeply Good people are happy on the inside.
This last time, going through, it struck me that a resilient organism reacts to trauma with an appropriate fight or flight response, shakes it off, learns from the experience, then returns to a status quo leavened by new experience.
What happens when the government is involved, though, is that a new organism is created. This new organism is unconnected with the old trauma. Rather, like any organism, it comes into being and immediately sets out to expand and propagate, to ensure its continued existence. It develops survival instincts, expressed through metastatis into domains and activities which can only tangentially be connected to its ostensible mission.
No one is trying to hijack airplanes in this country. To the extent of my awareness, in BILLIONS of interventions–and forcing people to take off their shoes and belts, as one example, is an intervention–the TSA has not stopped ONE attack. None.
But people continue to diligently consent to full body scans, and getting every piece of luggage opened, and in general dealing with the stupidity of the process of security theater.
We all know 9/11 can’t happen again the same way. Passengers will fight back. The cockpit door is bolted and reinforced.
We all know that airplanes are much safer than cars, and I think anyone with a shred of sense would realize that they are safer not because the TSA does a good job, but because nobody is trying to hijack airplanes.
Yes, of course there are pockets of deluded, violent people. Yes, the NSA can and should spy on them. But this nonsense of patting people down and forcing them through ridiculous levels of security needs to stop.
Airlines should be allowed to opt out of airport security protocols, and passengers, having been informed of this decision, should be allowed to fly them. If I run the risk of being shot down if the plane IS hijacked, I am willing to take that risk, and so too would many Americans. I have known a number of people seriously hurt in car accidents. I have never known, and never expect to know, anyone hurt in an airplane accident, much less an act of terrorism.
I have had alcohol now twice in 3 weeks, but the 3-4 days in when I was starting my booze-fast–roughly two weeks ago (I’ve been traveling, and am just now posting some thoughts I’ve had), I went to see “Edge of Tomorrow” with my oldest, and I had the most unpleasant night. I kept waking up thinking no time had passed, that the clock said the same thing; that I was stuck in a never ending night.
And I got to thinking about it: trauma is like Groundhog Day/Edge of Tomorrow. It is the same, the exact same, day in day out across a lifetime until you deal with it. Its very timelessness is its defining quality. All things that exist in time evolve and change; but trauma does not exist in time. This is what this recurring dream/hynogogic nightmare was telling me.
Bringing trauma into time, inherently, is healing. Inherently, it places it in the moving current of change, and nothing hard can long endure such circumstances.
I am reading a very, very interesting book by Peter Levine called “In an Unspoken Voice”. I will have more to say about it presently.
In the meantime, I wanted to offer one more observation in this vein: we call hear about how we humans use only some small percentage of our potential brainpower. I can’t comment on this (other than to say it appears a LOT of guesswork and abuse of the authority implied by credentials seems to be going on), but I can say this: we only use a fraction of our potential selves.
Now, I think most people use 80-90% of their potential selves, but there are in almost all people locked away traumas and negative feelings that they don’t process. I would say further that the difference between 80 and 100% is not purely quantitative–in the sense of creating a ratio of feelings felt consciously, and dividing it by the sum of those feelings and feelings not felt consciously.
Rather, there is a qualitative difference between a robust, complete capacity to digest emotion, and ANY degree of emotional indigestion. Certain feelings are impossible, I feel, without full awareness.
This is speculative, but it feels right. For my part, I’ve been doing some deep work over the past week, and it seems to have done some good. I’m still shedding emotional fur.
Can I say that? Fuck it. I’m allowed bad metaphors. Shedding, as a gradual process of letting go, seems appropriate.
This is a subtle but important point I do not have time to flesh out more at the moment.
But it occurred to me the other day: there is ALSO a lot of courage, persistence, selflessness, giving, ingenuity, patience.
Then it occurred to me that one of the greatest crimes you can commit is to attempt to deprive someone of useful suffering. Useful suffering is transformation is growth. Depriving them of it, is telling them to remain permanently stunted as human beings, and to fail–to the extent you can manage as their alleged guardian–to reach anything close to the potential with which they were born.
The essence of productive, useful culture is making emotional pain useful.
Our salient problem in the modern world is that we have rejected the notion of THROUGH, that you can get through depression or anxiety by embracing it, and accepting it, internalizing it, and using it as a teacher. Anything short of a superficially happy Worker and Consumer is considered maladaptive and treated as a deficiency of neurotransmitters, or happy thoughts.
Fuck this. It is stupid.
I am tempted to state as definitive, and will certainly state provisionally: the sole honest purpose of spiritual teachers is to teach people how to make pain productive. It is in no cases to deny them the opportunities their pain grants them.
Thus, no one–not me, not you, not the local pastor or rabbi, or yogi–need concern him or herself with helping people directly. Their concern is with good ideas, which enable them to help themselves.
I would draw an analogy between Socialism and Capitalism.
In Socialism, a fascist state is enacted to a varying degree, so that a core group of emotionally constipated individuals can avoid processing their own internal emotional trauma by claiming to care in the abstract for the misery of everyone else; they do this by promising something for nothing to ignorant and greedy people. In the end, by working hard to deny people their actual misery, and by denying the need for pain in the abstract, they actually make everyone MORE unhappy. There is no point in pain, in either a Sybaritic Leftist society like they have in northern Europe; and there is no redemptive pain in a Communist hell. There are only lies.
In Capitalism, the goal is to create universal opportunity for people to choose their own work, to make their own way, to build their own fortunes. Morally, this system is empty, except to the extent that functional emotional behaviors tend to lead to financial gain.
Are you beginning to see where this modern world went so wrong?
In my own case, I am finally ending the grip unprocessed trauma has had on me, and it feels like falling, But it is like jumping into the deep end of a pool: you go down, but you also come back up. It’s good. You jump into a pool because you want to be surrounded by water. Once you can swim, this is very enjoyable.
Eric Holder is a bit more tricky, but if I were John Boehner, I would figure out a way to put him next to Lois. Both have been convicted of the crime, effectively, of obstructing justice and of lying to Congress.
Of all the sensory modalities, listening seems most appropriate to this perceptual task. I don’t know why.
Ponder.
1) I was wandering the grocery store yesterday, and it hit me that it is very possible I have never met a fully sane person. In pursuing optimal functioning, I may need to discover many things no one I have ever met has been capable of teaching me. There is a solitude inherent in this, but over time, I feel, a compensatory relief from the problems that have always dogged humankind.
If we all pursue enlightenment in our own way, we all pursue it, in the end, alone. [Note to self: deal with it.]
2) How inefficient it is to pursue experience, rather than the capability of processing and using experience.
With regard to overpopulation, there seems to be a clear pattern of economic growth, population growth, then population stability, then in the case of all developed nations but the United States and I believe Israel, population decline.
Can we perhaps posit a curve similar to this over time with regard to consumption? Can we not imagine that with a better, more fulfilling culture, we can all learn not just to make do with less, but prefer it?
We are at a point in time where we can turn left, towards the eradication of culture in a socialist tyranny, or turn right to a graceful age filled with a cultural and social fulfillment that satiates even the aspiring despots.