Moderates United

I think my self psychoanalysis, which no doubt would look from the outside a whole lot like self absorbed laziness, is nearly complete.  I had a put-a-feeling-into-words moment today, that helped me understand my tendency towards self importance and entitlement.  I fight it, but not always successfully.  I really am an ugly human being at times.  I really am.  That is simply a statement of fact. I was this week.  My shugyo, of course, it not pulling out yellow bubbles and rainbows of happiness, and over and above that I had a fair amount of concentrated bad luck.  No, inevitable consequences of poor or non-existent planning on my part manifested at the same time.  That is the honest statement.  That they all happened on the same day was God laughing at me and asking me to get my shit together.  And part of getting my shit together was figuring out why I constantly have this feeling the rules don’t apply to me.

What that insight is, I will not share.  That was a journal moment.

This is what I wanted to say: Freud’s work shifted from useful to counterproductive when he transitioned from an effort to elicit FEELINGS, to MEMORIES.  Memories you think, but they do not heal.  ONLY if they elicit feelings do they heal, but that is not the principle focus of historical psychoanalysis, which is more or less founded on lies Freud had to tell about pedophilia in his time and town.

To be perfectly honest, I don’t understand the details, the transference, counter-transference blah blah blah.  I read about them some time ago, but at no point in my life have they made ANY sense.  I do know that psychiatrists have managed to erect and maintain the delusion that they are in some respect emotionally wiser and smarter because of their own in depth psychoanalyses.  Bullshit.  We all know this is bullshit.  And bullshit is a useful metaphor because we all instinctively are repulsed by the smell of shit, and bulls drop more of it.  The analogy is an obvious one.   Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes Freudian psychoanalysis is bullshit.

Here is the thing: I don’t remember most of my childhood. Only bits and pieces here and there.  And it doesn’t matter.  I don’t and can’t live in the past.  What the details are don’t matter.  What matters is what my dominant emotions were.  Those can be found, contacted, embraced, and released.  The rest can be inferred, to the extent I have any need at all to do so for psychological closure.

I was talking with a guy in the bar yesterday, who knew 6 heroin addicts, and it made me think of this song, which I have always thought was about heroin addiction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvUI-s4Azw4#aid=P-0eGGOo_Qw

This song pulls a lot of things out.  It gets at the sadness and disconnection of modern life, and drug use as one poor way of coping with it.  It has often made me cry.  I understand the sentiments expressed deeply and intimately.

It seems to me my role in life is to develop a firm enough grip and a strong enough back to pull these people out of their hell holes, and enough vision to send them on their way to something better.

Actually, a better metaphor is holding the rope.  Everyone has to climb on their own, but it’s a hell of a lot easier when there is something to hold on to.

I will add something perhaps a bit odd (although you expect that here, no?  My, uh, ideosyncracies are on full display).  Some 4 or 5 months ago I had an intuitive and strong connection with a Tarot card called The Fool.  The details don’t matter, but it came to me in a meditation, and at the time I knew nothing about Tarot.

Last week I realized it would be a good time to begin establishing a relationship with the future.  I have always lived in present, because that is where severe trauma drops you.  You live in a moment.  I have always had the intellectual capacity for planning–I am intelligent–but imaginatively I have never been able to connect to the future.

So I thought I’d get a Tarot deck.  The one I pulled out was the 3 of Wands, which based on the description is probably the best single card in the 72 card deck to continue the work begun with The Fool.

Here is the description.  I could not imagine a more relevant or positive card for what I intend over the next year:

On the Three of Wands, we see a figure standing on a cliff looking out
over the sea to distant mountains. From this height, he sees all that
lies ahead. This is a card of vision and foresight. When we want to see
farther, we climb higher. By going up, we increase our range and remove
ourselves from the immediate situation. We detach and gain perspective.

In readings, the Three of Wands can tell you to take the long view.
Don’t react to the heat of the moment, but step back and reconsider. See
how the present fits into the greater picture. This card asks you to be
a visionary – to dream beyond current limitations. It can indicate
premonitions or other intuitions about what is to come.

Taking the long view is an aspect of leadership – another meaning of the
Three of Wands. When we see far, we have the knowledge to guide others
to their best future. Someone who knows the way can show it to those who
follow. When you see the Three of Wands, know that now is the time to
accept your vision and be confident that you can lead others to it. [emphasis mine]

A leader not only sees far, but he is willing to go there first, if
necessary. The Three of Wands is also a card of exploration. Compare
this figure to the Fool
who is also on a cliff edge. The Fool steps out in innocence, not
realizing he is going to fall to his fate. The adventurer on the Three
of Wands is also willing to step out, but with full awareness of what he
is doing. His courage is more informed, if less spontaneous. The Three
of Wands encourages you to move fearlessly into new areas. Let the ships
on your horizon take you far out into unknown seas.

I have not written in my journal for months.  Two reasons occur to me.

First, I was reading this website yesterday: http://www.pursuit-of-happiness.org/science-of-happiness/?gclid=CNzym6nTsr0CFbBj7AodvRIAkQ

Their first recommendation is to “express your heart”.  It occurs to me that is what I do here.  The fundamental difference between my journal and this blog is that I am making things public, and that feels to some part of me much more like an intimate conversation.  Yes, I likely share too much, but as I have said before, I also think our civilization is characterized by mass alienation, both from one another, and from our own feelings. I can claim to myself that I am setting an example, doing something useful.

And in any event the beauty of this is I have complete control.  I am never interrupted, and I can go as deep and as long as I want.  I do have friends I share things with, but no one who is willing to consistently go the places I go.  My emotional pain tolerance is, I think, quite extraordinary.  My practice–my Shugyo, to use the Japanese word for asceticism that I have always liked, and as I tend to call it for myself–would I think be much too much for many.  No one comforts me.  I have no one to run to with a complete expectation of openness. I am subject to constant psychological attack.  And yet I go on.

Sometimes I think of the Tibetan Buddhists who spend as I understand it 3 years, 3 months and 3 days in solitary meditation.  Think of all the things that come up: every fear, every worry, every imaginable demon.  And yet they go on, and are cleansed at the end.

I used to be completely and utterly serious all the time.  I had no sense of humor.  I never laughed.  I didn’t wear a trenchcoat and boots, but if I have felt more able to express myself, I might have. I felt no freedom to express anything.  I spent most of my time more or less wanting to shrink into a hole, EVEN THOUGH, and this is an interesting point, I never would have admitted it.  I had no idea WHAT I was feeling, because I was able to live in my head, in both ideas and fantasy.

I did learn to laugh, but it has felt like I have two houses.  I have the one I built for my children, which is well lit, orderly, happy, full of love; and another one, that is dark, filled with ruins, rain, wind, and dark clouds.  It is not, by and large, angry, and I feel grateful for that at least, although I am at times also prone to bouts of inappropriate anger.  I am trying to speak the truth, because I feel close to being able to do something about it.

The other idea which occurs to me is that writing and feeling are two different things.  Writing about feelings is not feeling feelings.  All art is like this.

Think of some angry art you have seen–Picasso, say, whose work in his best known period has always felt to me like a big Fuck You.  How do artists remains in similar emotional places all their lives, when the idea is self expression?  How is that H.R. Giger has apparently remained in much the same place for the last 30 years?  Why is no happy stuff coming out (that I know of)?

Here is the thing, you can approach a feeling, interrogate it, take pictures from all angles, sculpt it, paint it, sing it, write poems about it, act it out in a drama, and put it into countless forms, and never process it if you never ENTER it fully, if you never allow it to possess you fully, to burn its fire within you.

In my view, only “primitive” art can be cathartic.  My “poem” of the previous post was the level I am talking about.  Nothing refined, nothing sophisticated, nothing that takes a lot of craft.  Nothing, in short, that would get published or hung on a wall.

Can I perhaps redefine “good” art as that which promotes effective abreaction? 

No.  I would add a level of art that I will call “mythic”.  This is art which pulls things out of people. like Giger, either negative things, or sublime things, which allows people to feel feelings that were there, but unnoticed, of a positive nature.

These things are complicated, and I feel like I am wandering, so I’ll leave it at that.  I’m sure I will have more to say presently.

I woke up this morning and ate a tangerine.

It was good.

It occurs to me–and I will readily grant I am in some respects trying to pass off a truism as wisdom–that precisely to the extent you try to force a child into a box, into an inorganic restraint, onto a path they would not have chosen, you weaken permanently, perhaps, their capacity for honesty, creative expression, and true emotional resilience.

Think of your stereotypical Church Lady (SATAN!!!!, not Santa): was she not forced into an artificial box early on?  Has she not spent her life denying any number of emotions, well in excess of the merely sexual?  Does this not make people angry and frustrated, even if they cannot express these emotions CONSCIOUSLY?  Of course, and of course all this gets out, one way or another.  Think Westboro Baptist Church, which I will not even attempt to defend.

Think of Islam.  I cannot imagine a cultural order better suited to the suppression of individuality (other than  Communism, with which it seemingly has much in common).  Everybody–all the men, I should say, who at that still have more chance at self expression than the women locked up in their homes–has to do the same thing (prayer), the same way, at the same times, every day.  And if they don’t, they are condemned.

Heaven and Hell are absolute, irrevocable, eternal, and both contingent on conformity to the dominant cultural forms.

Is it any wonder so many are so eager to kill themselves?  Obviously, it is in their faith (actually, suicide in the pursuit of mass murder is not, but how can I quibble with the clergy who extol then excuse it?), but it seems to go deeper, to an actual social NEED, to something people want.

Now I have no issues with Christianity or Islam per se.  If I had to pick a “faith” it might well be Sufism.  But to extend this example, the Sufis have been and are persecuted for apostasy or heresy.  Many have been killed in Iran, at a minimum, in recent years, and that despite the brilliant Persian poetry of men like Hafez, Rumi, and Omar Khayyam.

There are countless ways to break people, and all of them are easier when they are young.  That so many continue to be practiced in the modern world shows how far culture has yet to progress.

My kids are on the same sports team, and I was talking with the coach the other day, and he commented on how different they were.  I’ve always sort of taken this for granted, but I got to thinking about it: part of my role as a parent, I have realized, is eliciting their individuality, teasing out what makes them unique and interesting and different.  I am not “placing them in. . .” but rather drawing them out.

Just one seemingly small example: my youngest does not like the volume control on the radio to be on an even number, and I indulge her in this.  There is no good reason for it.  I could easily just demand she stop being irrational, but I go with it.  It is small, and seemingly important to her.  I tease her, of course, but I let her get her way.  If I clamped down on her, I would not just be clamping down on that one thing, but many things.

It sounds perhaps like an exaggeration, but it is not: my singular gift in parenting is in knowing what to do by doing the opposite of what my own parents did.  I was crushed, absolutely, ruthlessly, and with no remorse.

We all have to get to our Real Selves.  This is the part that, definitionally, is real, and by contrast everything else is some degree of lie.  Most anxiety, failure, depression, anger and other negative emotions come from being out of touch with this vital, mutable, emotional place.

In my own case, I am beginning to arrive.  My Real Self is an electrical hurricane; it is Fear itself–not “fear of”, but Fear. I think I discussed my vision of needing to hug a giant rotating circular saw.  I pulled it into my chest in my “dream”, and it killed me.  As I mentioned, I have been doing this repeatedly.  This morning I looked into the eyes of a demon that used to haunt my dreams as a child.  It would hover over me, while I was in a state of sleep paralysis, and I could not open my eyes. I could feel it breathing though. 

This demon symbolizes many things.  This is one area I will not discuss in detail, but I finally saw it this morning, and it scared the crap out of me.  But I kept looking, kept going there, over and over and over.

I inhabit my Real Self and it is a bloody red pancake.  It has no height.  But I truly, really do have faith in the Inner Healer, that rectification, reorientation, renewal are an integral part of being human, if we simply keep moving.  If we “go there” things happen, things organize, light starts seeping in, and what needs to be fixed, gets fixed.

Many would question my capacity for rational or scientific thought in saying this, but I truly do believe there is something to astrology.  There are many ways to interpret charts, but in all of them I have an extremely prominent Mars.  Whatever the source, there is something in me that will not quit in the pursuit of learning how to live and how to learn. It throws me against the rocks over and over and over, breaks me over and over and over, but I keep going.

All of this, all of this introspection and examination, is in the pursuit of learning how to achieve effectively in the outer daylight world.  All my life I have had constant eruptions of unwanted and inappropriate emotion, had constantly to use willpower to keep myself on task, and I truly believe I am on the verge of ending this.

And I will say that I would much rather learn how to learn that be born with knowledge.  It is much, much more useful.

Success for a leftist is going from failure to failure with no increased self awareness or sense of responsibility.

Nod to Churchill.

 From here: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/22/climate-change-deniers-have-won-global-warming


As I have said often enough, my comments seem to have a knack for disappearing.  This one is mildly snarky, but nothing remotely like most of them.  It is my content people object to.  Cognitive dissonance for the True Believers is an epically unpleasant feeling.

Your comment  that global warming is as proven as the murder of Jews and dissidents at Auschwitz cries out for psychosocial analysis.  You are not apparently unintelligent, and presumably read something or other substantive every day, so your capacity for thought does not remain fully unexercised.

Why then consider something proven, when every hypothesis–which is what a climate model is–has proven wrong?  You do understand, do you not, that guesses as to what might happen do not count as what some quaintly call “facts” in what most of think of when we refer to this process called “science”?

Do you remember Al Gore telling us in 1998 that absent drastic changes the polar ice caps would be gone by now?  I do.  Well, they seem to be growing, despite much greater increases in CO2 than was predicted.  The major change is that Al Gore’s purported humanitarianism has made him one of the richest politicians on the planet, and at that one who uses the most energy.

The “science” can be analyzed point by point, and it breaks down at every level.   This is what I did in 2008, before Climategate made it impossible for any serious person to believe the discussion was unpoliticized: http://www.moderatesunited.blogspot.com/2008/01/global-warming.html

What I have since learned is that atmospheric CO2 is ALREADY absorbing 100% of the radiation which it is capable of absorbing.  How do those pushing this agenda get around this?  They abuse physics. They claim things can happen which have never been measured in any lab.  They lie: that is how.

You need to get out more.  You need to talk to more people who do not have glazed eyes and permaworry lines on their faces.  You need to study the scientific method, and you need to step back and ask what, if anything, has been proven, other than “weather happens.” 

As should have been obvious, I had some really good emotional breakthroughs this morning.  This afternoon, I did really well on Lumosity.  I crushed my previous score on one, and got Top 5 on everything else. This despite the fact that I have been doing this thing six months or more nearly daily.  I’m top 2% in my age group now, and should have 1% soon.  Once I get my diet and exercise routines dialed in–both are shit right now–I”m going to shoot for 1% across all age groups.  I’m pretty sure I can do it.  I’m just getting started.

That is me indulging vanity.  Now the point I wanted to make.

There is clearly a link between emotions and even what we might term mechanical processing/RAM sorts of things.  The brain obviously in some ways is a machine, but it is a machine within a web of emotions.  Unprocessed emotion can dictate what you see, how well you see it, and how fast you see it.  They slow you down and make you stupider and less agile.

When one looks at rigid dogmatists, like the proselytizing atheists–who I tend to think of as paradigmatic dogmatists–what you must see FIRST is corrupted emotion, frozen in time, and directing their capacity for honest thinking away into more congenial–but wrong–climates.  The first line in my Grand Inquisitor is “Myth always preceded philosophy” (or something close to that).  This is my point.  Myth–primal beliefs about the nature of the world, of people, and of one’s self–always happen before one starts the process of “reasoning”.

You can debate facts, but you cannot debate myth–at least not until you get people deep enough to realize that deep rooted assumptions about the world can in fact be questioned, and may in fact be wrong.  Misunderstanding this fact is often fatal to productive dialogue.

You cannot reason about people, per se. They are a mutable, reactive surface.  You can only use reason consistently about objects.  Math we can all agree is a use of reason, of logic.  Its practice–if not its inspirations–is devoid of emotion, or the need for emotion.

As I say, though, there is emotional logic: it is simply not linear OUTSIDE of the emotional sphere.  There it is linear, but not in a way we normally think of.

In emotional logic, if you want to avoid accessing suppressed and dangerous emotions, you must live in your head.  If you live in your head, you have to do something, and you have to justify that something.  Logically, this would involve immersion in an activity devoid of the need for emotion.  “Science” fits this bill nicely.  But you have to go further.  You have to protect yourself from the possibility of unwanted emotion.  How to do this?   By making the world into objects.  Objects are susceptible to logic, where people are not.  Thus a metaphysics forms from childhood trauma.

These points are subtle, but what I am showing is how intelligent people become stupid–or rather, one of the ways.  There are many.

I am going to wander in this post.  When I’m not sure how to start, I just start.

Abreaction means “to react away from”, from the German Abreagierung.

Sublimate: Chemistry .