Moderates United

I am going to avoid intellectual posts for the time being, but this occurred to me.  It is an interesting fact that at least in my own personal space, the World Cup is most popular among internationalists, people who tend to self identify with “social democracy:”, with what we call Liberalism in this country, mistakenly.

What connection does the Cote D’Ivoire have with soccer?  Colonialism.  Soccer–Football–is an export a great many colonized countries choose to continue.

It is a cultural meme, repeated.  It is something We created, and which They want.

Oh, when will we pursue It, Goodness?

All the abstractions float, hover.  They exist as possibilities in minds, as thoughts that could move.  We in turn live by rote.  We assume of today what we assumed of yesterday.

I am so dumb.  So are you.  I will try to remember this tomorrow.   Will you?

Here is a random link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePIImGMjn_8

Maybe not fully random.

This thing that has had me is breaking.  I can feel it.

I will return momentarily to this task, but feel a need to permit myself a small brag.  I reached 1395 on my BPI for Lumosity today.  It’s not 1400, which  is a goal I have set, but I feel the need to brag, to assert myself.  It’s 98.9th percentile for my age.  On Attention I am at 99.5, which is as good as you can get with their system.

It is worth noting as well that these percentile scores are among people who USE Lumosity.  It is likely safe to assume that only roughly the top third of Americans use it, so that score is even better.

It is perhaps a bit pathetic to feel the need to point this out, but part of my healing will be, I think, openly asserting myself more often and more directly.  I have never had a place in the room.  Now I will.

I texted my oldest, on the verge of a Major Life Event, that “life is an adventure, and an adventure is just difficulty and stress that you accept, laugh at, and learn from.”  I will be honest and admit that I had the Walter Mitty movie in mind.  It was cliched in some respects, but cliches exist because they usually represent abundant realities.

Well, I am having my own adventure.  I sent that in part to myself.  I just cancelled all my Facebook news feeds, and am going to put myself, to the extent possible, on a news fast.  I am going to try and see my new therapist twice a week until most of the horror is gone.  As I believe I’ve shared, the movie which best represents the emotional tone of my family is “Texas Chainsaw Massacre”.  When I told that to the last therapist (who is in another State, hence the new one), she said “we may have some work to do.” [I will add, can we not assume that Toby Hooper had his own share of trauma, that this movie came from somewhere, and not somewhere pleasant?]

As I’ve shared, I like to think of myself as a Master Sergeant, as a professional NCO, but not yet at the fully politicized level.  I try to do my work well, silently (you can laugh out loud at that), and with full commitment.

I am relieving myself of my operational duties for the time being.  I am not going to fight anyone on anything for a while.  There are others who can and will take my place.

Logically, if the “spiritual” path is about increasing pain tolerance, then pain is a principle method.  This of course has long been a precept of many religions, and is the basis for all asceticism.

At the same time, pain is so often replaced as an end, rather than a means, that one can rightly question how well it has been used in most religions for most of history.

Everything useful can be made harmful.  All good ideas can be perverted by applying them too much or too little.

Let me frame this in 21st Century terms: all of us must come to terms with all traumas, large and small, in our past, and we must learn the skill of emotional processing, even of difficult information.  This is the task both of individual and social maturity.

Once this is done, expanded perceptions become possible, and those, in turn, facilitate further growth.

This is the model I am convinced is “correct”, to the extent one can apply a word like that to abstractions.

I will add as well, that this model precludes the Sybaritic path of assuming life is meant to be easy, and that only circumstances prevent us from being happy.

That last sentence is a paraphrase from a book I found immensely useful at a certain point in my life, Garth Woods “The Myth of Neurosis”.  Easily one of the five most useful self help books I have ever read, with others being “Learned Optimism”, “Trauma and Recovery”, and “The Drama of the Gifted Child.” I’d have to think about number 5.

The purpose of asceticism is to accept asceticism.  Once this has happened, it is no longer useful.  Mere austerity is quite sufficient, and that only to avoid an overabundance of things you might miss.

Scientologists audit one another to identify and remove emotional knots and unresolved trauma.  As I understand the method, one person is hooked up to the equivalent of a lie detector, while anothe reads words, to see what produces a reaction.  When one happens, they go into it.  How, I don’t know, but Stan Grof talked about it as an abreactive therapy.

Scientology is a cult, but why could this process not be reintroduced and improved within an open, free, non-coercive setting?  Why could we not use this process to elicit reactions, then whenever an unprocessed memory comes up use EMDR or something else to process it?

We could add Multi-Dimensional Eye Movement, or a variant called Brainspotting.

Most of those who aspire to tyrannize us are filled with unresolved traumas.  If it is true, for example, that the Rockefellers want us all tagged with RFID chips, then this can only be the result a maladaptive sadism and power-mongering that is the direct result of emotional undernourishment and unresolved trauma.

No serious person can claim the “environment” is so endangered, or that overpopulation is such a risk, that a global tyranny is a rational, reasonable, humanistic, empowering response.  No: it is the response of sick, sick people who are unable to live happy lives.

This situation need not endure. It is possible to develop, in a gradualistic way, a more harmonious, healthy, empowering, GOOD society that will decrease its demands on the physical environment absent coercion, precisely as happiness becomes more available, and our economic system rationalizes in conditions of sound money.

Everything good anyone claims to want–a smaller global population, increased access to opportunity and wealth, a decreased burden on the environment and a less materialistic society–can be achieved without coercive government.  On the contrary, the government makes these things impossible outside of generalized inequality and misery.

No socialist can claim they value egalitarianism when their chosen method is an omnipotent and definitionally unequal State.

We can get everything good we want.  All the tools are there.  All the opportunities are there.  We just must deal with the reckless demons who never see anything they don’t want to tear down and break, while claiming they value and love it.

Salvation lies in embracing what destroys you.  That was Part One.

Part two: prior to figuring out how to move forward Sunday, I felt an acute resentment at God and the world for inflicting such pain on me.  I understood, experientially, how a Sade could come to hate the world, hate the idea of Goodness, and subsist entirely on pain and suffering.

Part Three: I am riffing on Nietzsche, of course.  But his ideas were incomplete.  I would like to propose the following concept: the Philosophy of Unresolved Trauma.  If myth precedes philosophy, as I argued some 5 years ago, then trauma, as expressed in myth, in underlying, prerational, unexamined assumptions about the world, also precedes philosophy.

I am going to get this shit figured out, so help me God.

I just worked 16 hard hours, though, and I think that will suffice.  I am punchy enough.

I am the only one reading this post.

I don’t know why I wrote that.  I am very tired, and it popped in my head.  I usually go with instincts, because if you don’t feed them, they stop coming.

But I still don’t know why I wrote that.  Maybe I’ll figure it out tomorrow.

Read this and ponder its implications: http://www.yourhoustonnews.com/friendswood/opinion/whitehead-has-the-dept-of-homeland-security-become-america-s/article_81acf508-4660-5e0a-87fc-fee9c447f61f.html

This supports perfectly my contention that the principle role of the DHS is militarizing our nations police forces, for no apparently useful reason, unless and until one assumes tyranny is an end goal, and the cooperation of LEO’s in the suppression of the expression of dissent a means.

I read today with surprise and sadness that the co-creator of Holotropic Breathwork, Stan Grof’s long term wife and friend–Lebesgefaehrtin–has unexpectedly passed away.  I overheard him talking to her on the phone at a retreat, and there is no doubt that even after so many years he loved her very much.  That is such a beautiful thing, and I cannot begin to imagine the pain he must be suffering, because I cannot imagine the amount of love he enjoyed.  It is foreign to me. But I was glad to see it shown to be possible.

According to my world view of how things work, Christina was greeted with light and love and joy, and shown all the lives she touched for the better, including my own.  What a blessing.

Some people live their lives fit for heaven–not as angels, not as perfect beings, but as striving, trying, caring, giving human beings, who try to do what they can with what they have–and I feel she was such a person.

So much human progress comes in fits and starts.  Not many people in the  United States have heard of HB, but that is no reason someone like me cannot take it, modify it, and generalize it, and be able to do so ONLY because she and Stan were attentive back in the 1970’s, and had the courage to experiment in processes that were wholly new.

All my current progress started with Holotropic Breathwork, and HB in turn started with her and Stan.

The Lebensgestalt they promoted in the idea of Spiritual Emergency has also been hugely useful.  I would frame it as: there is a back end to madness, a tunnel on the other side, an out, a way through.  That is hugely important.

I do wonder if the prevalence of depression in this and many other countries is not due in part to the ease of our lives.  Yesterday, I made myself move while in the thrall of gripping sadness.  Was this once common, such that many people experienced, albeit accidentally, what I did?

Oh, I know she will be missed, which meant she meant something.  The Holotropic Breathwork tribe is like a bunch of cats.  They hide somewhere, come down from the hills for retreats, then disappear again. I know well this thirst for solitude.

But her loss will leave a hole.  Those closest will mourn, and move on as best they can.

There are not enough good people in this world, and it hurts to lose them.  But as always let us use this as a reminder to do better, to be better, to carry on work which needs to be carried on.  Let us envision our best efforts ahead of us, and continue on, renewed in our inspiration by the beauty of the life that has fallen.