Moderates United

Here is an interesting fact: the actress in Eyes Wide Shut who played the OD’d hooker, and the corpse in the morgue, was NOT the same actress as that in the mansion, whose name was Abigail something.  The two apparently got in a bit of a cat fight, this being likely the most significant film either will have been involved in in their careers.

Here is my take: what if Kubrick wanted to dangle the illusion of an overarching order–something tangible at the end of the rainbow–but take it away? Davis, in an interview, said she somehow hurt herself in the circle, which is why the other gal took over in those scenes.  But why not suppose the change was demanded by Kubrick himself?

There was no murder.  I am increasingly convinced of it.  Both times the girl warned him, men in masks were easily close enough to overhear her.  Add this to the fact that even though Davis was apparently present in the orgy somewhere, that she was not the girl warning him, and what you have to conclude is that it WAS a charade, and that even though it was NOT the same girl who warned him who died, that Ziegler saw no reason to dissuade Dr. Bill from that possibility, since they wanted all the leverage they could get for him to keep his mouth shut.  And it worked, more or less, since the fear and confusion caused him to break down when he saw the mask, and even if Nicole Kidman has been the one who secretly found it and left it out to see how he would react, she did not say.  She loved him, I think I might say, convulsively, not patiently; reluctantly and perhaps by force of will.

And Kubrick, in the end, was saying there is no order at all.  Good people like Domino get diseases, everyone else is running around chasing sex and things, and there is not even a despotic order ruling the whole thing: just a bunch of prurient and odd rich people with strange tastes they indulge from time to time, out of ennui and perhaps long-standing habit.

It is an odd joke, one he perhaps felt well content to make his last.

There has to be a better word, but I do like that it contains the word reaction, as there is something chemical–alchemical?–at work, an interplay of elements whose aftermath leaves something qualitatively new.

Abreaction is leaning into negative emotions, embracing them, emphasizing them, enlarging them, experiencing them more fully–for the first time, if this is a truly unresolved trauma.

I have been doing a lot of this over the past several weeks.  We hear about positive self talk.  Fuck that.  I’m doing negative self talk, about how I hope I fail, that everyone hates me and wants me to die, that nothing I will ever do will succeed, that I should be ground into the dirt.  .  .etc.

And this is working.  What it is doing is bringing up latent emotions, and what might be termed non-verbal dialogue, which has been in my consciousness substantially all my life, but largely unrecognized, and to the extent it was, fought.  “You say I need to die, but I say I want to live”, back and forth, endlessly.

There is no conclusion to this.  Each “side” achieves momentary victories, but always there is a loss of energy, of enthusiasm, of connection with the inner self, of vitality.

So I decided to give this voice free rein to verbalize literally anything it wants.  What has been happening is that my chronic anger is subsiding, I feel more calm, and I can think more clearly.

What I am realizing is that when I get angry over “nothing”–today, for example, the fact that cancelling a print job on my printer yields roughly 10x as many pages of gibberish as actually printing the document would have–is that the anger–the defensiveness, the sense of being under attack, the sense of needing to justify myself, the need to strike out–was already there.  It was induced by the voice.  I suspect most people with chronic anger issues–and I do want to be clear this is not a major issue for me, but it is an issue–are the same.  They are fighting battles in their heads by proxy, and I think sometimes it is the very concreteness of the proxy–the bad driver, the IRS agent, the thoughtless coworker–that makes them attractive.  At least they know WHAT they are angry at.  The alternative is an emotion without a cause or object, which is very confusing.

Stan Grof talks about traumas of commission and omission.  I believe these are his words.  It is clear enough how to abreact actual abuse, but how neglect?  How lack of love?

Ponder a parent who watches a child in pain, struggling helplessly with something, who watches the child, while the child is watching him or her, begging with their eyes for help, and who walks on without doing anything.  Is the net content of this interaction, in which nothing has apparently been done–no one hurt or helped–neutral?  Of course not.   A clear message has been sent: you don’t matter.  I don’t care whether you live or die.  It might actually be more convenient for me if you died.

This would technically be a trauma of omission–love not given–but I would argue that in important respects all traumas are traumas of commission, in that somewhere, somehow, love that could have been given, understanding and help that could have been granted, was not.  Certainly, there are limits to how much, say, the workers in an orphanage can provide love and comfort to all the children.  But has “society” still not chosen to care, also?  I think this is the way it works.

So a trauma of omission gets abreacted as self loathing, self hate, a feeling of helplessness, violence towards a self which seemingly deserved it–how else to explain these lacks, these gaps?

What I am trying to process, what I have been trying to process all my life, is the fact that not only were my parents incapable of empathetic, nurturing love, but that at many points in my life they more or less rooted for my failure, watched me flail around helplessly, and did nothing.  They just moved on, without emotional involvement or connection.

Now, as I have often said, I don’t feel sorry for myself, and I don’t want this to be a Daily Me.  At the same time, we as a society are so inured in some ways to one another’s inertia and anomie and disconnection, that I think truth telling is warranted and useful at times.  It tells us what is out there. 

And my feelings go through a sort of one way valve, in which I can express myself honestly, but need fear no blowback or emotional aggression.  You  can’t get to me.  I have far, far too much practice surviving emotional assaults, having endured them daily for most of my formative years, and in internal dialogue since.

I think clinical, therapeutic psychology, in the long run, will need to turn to teaching and eliciting deep emotions from people in emotional distress.  It will need to teach them not to hurt less, but to hurt more until they hurt less.  The solution to PTSD is Hell.  But is one large Hell that ends not vastly preferable to daily small ones until the end of a life blunted by a dependence on emotional pain killers or one sort or another?

Stan and Christina Grof’s book “Spiritual  Emergency” was very useful to me in this regard.  It broadened by horizon tremendously as to how much emotional pain someone can take, and my ideas about embracing difficult emotions come from them and Barry McDonagh’s “Panic Away” series;  primarily from them, though.  It is a focus of that book.

This movie definitely works on the mythic level.  Kubrick, who in some respects dealt in myth his whole career, considered it is best film.  I have been reading reviews, detailing the vast quantity of latent symbolism, like the luminescence of Christmas lamps, the theme of Rainbows, etc.

I’ll keep processing for a while, and as always reserve the rights both to contradict myself and to be stupid at length.

Few thoughts for now: many of the robed figures at the “mass” were likely women, likely wives.  They participated by watching.  The whole thing had little to do with sex, and everything to do with social solidarity.

The funny thing about psychology is that when you choose to transgress some line in your self, in your soul, you are driven almost inexorably to rationalize it, to justify it.

Doris Lessing talks in one of her books about the process of breaking a woman to become a prostitute.  The idea is simple: persistently, over a period of time, take her over a line she has drawn, then pull her back.  Force her to go farther than she wanted or intended, then reintegrate her.  Then do it again.

Over time, the boundaries and lines disappear, and she decides it doesn’t matter.   This is how children are “seasoned”–I believe the term is–for pedophiles.  Many are apparently very meticulous about it.

This raises the interesting question: is participation in these rituals voluntary?  Can you be given an invitation and refuse?  Certainly even if one rejects the idea that violence was an ordinary part of the process–that Mandy did in fact overdose, and that the mask was actually found and placed on the pillow by Alice, as apparently was explicitly the case in the book upon which this movie was based–would there not still be cultural and social and political and business sanctions? 

So, in important ways, it seems to me these people were also “.  . . just prisoners here, of our own device”, as the relevant song Hotel California puts it.

Power constricts, too.  It is unfree.

The other point I wanted to make is that the only place in the movie where I felt real tenderness was with the prostitute, Domino. In the midst of all this sex, where was there solace, genuine commitment, genuine peace?  Nicole Kidman wants to fuck at the end, but as I think about it, it almost feels like a way for her to express anger at Tom Cruise while simultaneously pulling in as far as she is willing to.  She feels gratitude they pulled back from the precipice, but the word “forever” doesn’t feel right.  It looks like it is giving her a headache.

The phrase “loveless fascination”, from a song by the Church I have always liked, comes to mind.

What is the purpose of life, besides rutting, besides what we might call “goatism”?  In what way does Kubrick’s vision grant new hope, new dispensation?  As critics at the time apparently objected to, his sex is not even very sexual, it is not even animalian.  It is perfunctory, ritualized, as one assumes the sex between Kidman and Cruise will be when they get home.

It is worth keeping in mind Kubrick was an atheist.  He died five days after the completed film was delivered.  Some have seen in this conspiracy, but my final conclusions are both that that scene was nothing to kill anyone over; and even if it were, the time was before the film was done, not after.

No, I think he watched his completed movie several times over, watched his completed vision, looked at life as he saw it, realized that his creative work was done, and his life energy just left him.

For a vision of a more spiritual sexuality, watch Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Andrei Rublev”, where such sexuality is attacked by a Christianity obsessed with pain, suffering, and self denial, likely all in direct contradictions to Christ’s actual teaching.  There is a scene in there with a naked woman swimming strongly across a river crossing paths with a boat filled with monks that is among my favorite visuals in any movie.  She is unstoppable and innocent.

They now are saying that it is most likely to have been hijacked.  Here is my question: how many runways exist in the areas where it could have gone which could handle the landing of such a plane?  It cannot be more than a few dozen, I would not think.  Can their activity not be checked?

And if a runway was built just for this plane, we are at a whole other level of conspiracy.

I don’t like this scenario.  It is to my mind quite sinister: no ransom has been demanded, no claims of responsibility have been made.

There were no claims of responsibility made on 9/11 either. Could this be a prelude to some global, qualitative increase in the command and control apparatus unknown parties seem to be trying to create?

Alternatively, could we posit that most people were killed, and those trying to fly the plane were passengers unequipped to pilot effectively?  Still, it would seem they could perhaps have made radio or cell phone calls.  I don’t know the logistics of this.  According the radio expert, oxygen would not last as long as the flight, although exactly how long–when most people were not breathing and thus conserving oxygen for the rest–it could last for a much smaller number of people is unclear.  Could they have turned off communications accidentally?  How certain are experts that a catastrophic failure could not have caused the same effect?

Would it be possible to create a computer simulation that mimics what was seen–the sequence of communications failures, including the transponder–in which people are in fact piloting the plane, but poorly, and in the wrong direction?  We have all been lost on country roads.  Can it not be hard to know where you are and what direction you are going, when you understand nothing in front of you?

It will be interesting to see how this plays out in coming weeks and months.  My gut is that this plane, wherever it went, will never be found.

Edit: I will pass along another idea I saw someone else propose: what if the electronics on the plane were so scrambled that the pilots remained at the helm, but could not tell where they were, what their altitude was, or what direction they were heading?  This would account for seemingly random direction and altitude shifts.  And what if efforts to fix one electronic system damaged another?  This would account for systems going down at different times.

I reiterate: the hijacking explanation does not make sense to me.  Every historical hijacking that I know of has been done for a reason.  I will add, that whatever the facts of the case, we can expect global elitists/feudalists, to do what they can to exploit the situation.
 

That piece also reminded me to point out that Stan Grof’s 3rd Perinatal Matrix contains both sexual and violent elements.  Blood and body fluids, sexual ecstasy and war.  Walpurgis Night, and ritual cults.

I will note that he used LSD in his therapeutic practice.  He was a psychiatrist, and under controlled circumstances he would prescribe specific amounts of LSD in the same manner any other drugs would be prescribed.  He would of course sit with his patients, through their experiences.

And the idea for the Perinatal Matrices came about simply because certain thematic and cathartic elements kept showing up over and over and over.  People remembered their births, both figuratively and literally.  It may be that the brains of infants can’t form memories right away, but in my own view clearly the field which contains them, which is the root of life, does.  Logically, if newborns can’t form memories, then it would not matter in the slightest how they were treated upon birth; that we place importance on getting them nursing quickly shows that common sense and experience indicate their early experiences do matter.

And to be clear, entering into these non-ordinary states, letting this content come up, proved to be of enormous therapeutic value.  People felt better.  They were freed from negative emotional patterns that in some cases had haunted them their entire lives.  That fact alone indicates value in this idea.

I don’t know much about him, but he came up in this piece: http://vigilantcitizen.com/moviesandtv/the-hidden-and-not-so-hidden-messages-in-stanley-kubriks-eyes-wide-shut-pt-i/

This movie is extremely evocative, and gets at deep realities about what it means to be human, specifically to be sexual. Nicole Kidman’s performance was amazing, I thought.  It just seemed honest to me when she was simultaneously fantasizing about the naval officer, and feeling tender towards Bill.  Emotions get all mixed up like that, in both men and women, with the difference that most women spend far more time feeling and processing them.

Crowley, it seems to me, was an idiot.  He took what was a wonderful system for perfecting Goodness and all of the open joy that comes with it, and degraded it to sex and power.

Tantra means web, and I interpret this as meaning connection, that we are all connected with one another, and also that our experiences flow together, harmonize, congregate, cluster.  What it builds is an openness to ALL experience.  Everything good in it can be done without sex, and sex alone confers nothing.   It is neither necessary nor sufficient.

As far as power, it seems to me that there is far more resonant potential spending a pleasant afternoon with someone you love deeply, than in ruling the entire Earth.  There is nothing interesting there.  It is dull, boring, insipid.  Power mongers are inherently insipid.

What power mongering is, is a contraction of the soul, of experience, of mind.  It is a permanent spasm, one that never ends.  We see rituals like the one in Eyes Wide Shut as aberrant because they are the solution to this spasm.  They are the antidote to the steam brewing up in human beings tied in knots.

In the past week or two, I have provided all the ingredients for the so-called Left Handed Path.  Everything.

And being emotionally shallow, even if intellectually gifted, Crowley missed it all. One hopes it is not true that people of power and influence have mistaken his tricks for anything of substance.

What happened to the girl, Mandy?  Was she killed?

I’ve been pondering this all day.  The conclusion I’ve reached is that the explanation his friend gave was the best one.

When Tom Cruise showed up in a taxi, they knew he didn’t belong there.  But he knew the password, and they had no way of knowing what else he knew, so they decided both to show him what they were doing, and also to scare him into silence, as they presumably wanted the very existence of these events secret, and he did not know, then, how badly he had erred.  Between the gate and the time he pulled up, they looked at his picture, and realized who he was.

They decided to let Mandy warn him, because it was just possible he would recognize her by her breasts, which differ in details woman to woman.  He would also have reason to believe that she was sincerely trying to help him, as she would have a motive, since he had helped her.  They did their charade, and at the end of it she was so emotionally exhausted, she completed the suicide she had been half heartedly trying to commit for some time.

And his friend was quite sincere in saying they wanted to scare the shit out of him: hence the mask.

That movie is perhaps the best movie I have seen delving into the erotic instinct.  It is on display in many contexts, in many ways.  It drives so many people mad.  It is also holy.  Above all else, it is powerful, both in expression and repression.

are easy to understand/Do what you feel, feel until the end.”  Enigma

Watched “Eyes Wide Shut” last night.  Definitely plenty of material for Movie Yoga.

Few thoughts:

1) Being a man, this just occurred to me, but sex is not just about sexual feeling.  It is about all feelings.  It is about eliciting a non-ordinary state of consciousness, and going wherever it leads you.  It is not different in principle from Holotropic Breathwork, if you let your inner healer, inner guide, take you where you need to go. Every time can and should be different, if you open fully to the energies within you.

2) 50 Shades of Grey.  I don’t think I have asked a woman if she has read these books and been told no.  At least two married women have mentioned it to me with what I took to be a sparkle in their eye–one certainly, beyond any doubt.  I am an honest monk, so nothing happened.

But those books were written by a woman, and I think they take the logic of feeling to its natural conclusion: sex which is more or less purely feeling.  And as I have mentioned, being contracted–tied up, as I understand happens in those books–is followed by a release which need not stop where you started.  It can become a larger circle.  I am not saying that I think those sorts of things are healthy, but the emotional basis for them is becoming more clear to me.  I think over short term periods they could be liberating, but that anyone who does these things long term is simply “stuck in a moment.”, to borrow a phrase from U2.

3) The cult.  I think it worth noting that the orgy was not really about sex at all.  All of these men were presumably wealthy, and able to hire hookers, or find “spares” easily.  What it was about was creating group cohesion, community.  I am increasingly inclined to view the nature of what we call a church–a cult merely being an “odd” and/or secretive church–is altered states of consciousness and a group.  You come together, and you may listen to Plainchant/Gregorian chanting.  You may sing with others, and see an ocean of hymnals.  You may conduct a rite of initiation, and then have public sex while disguising your face.

I had the vague impression that I was supposed to be horrified by the idea that our power elite behaves like this.  I wasn’t.  In fact, I think such cults meet a cultural need.  The “math” in our modern society does not add up.  We do not have formal ways in which to contact non-ordinary states of consciousness.  I have argued this for years.  I have argued for temples with temple prostitutes.

Think about this: we all have a lovely vision of a man and a woman meeting, falling in love, and aging gracefully together.  But can anyone honestly say that neither of them does not have to fight off thoughts of being with someone else, likely in many cases for years?  Think Bridges of Madison County.  Yes, it is Hollywood, but there is, I think, truth in it.

Why not a holiday once or twice a year, or every other year, or every 5 years, or something, where both partners can be with someone else briefly?  If both can manage the jealousy, their wandering eye is stilled, and they can refocus on their love for one another.

And to this I would add the regular practice of emotional skill, of experiential enhancement, via something like Kum Nye.

4) Cult, part two. Obviously, the violence–the murder of that woman–was wrong.  But Tom Cruise was stupid.  Violence was not an innate or intended outcome. 

What is truly sinister, what bothers me much more, is that in daylight hours many of these men, now wearing expensive suits. collude with one another to defraud the rest of us, to damage our nation.   They provoke wars, cause famines, and impoverish people who otherwise could be well off.  Our entire world could and should be relatively wealthy, in my view, but our power elite does not pursue this as a primary objective.  Their daylight faces are what are evil.

Everyone who belongs to the Federal Reserve, every bank being given billions of dollars a month in printed money to do whatever it wants with it, knows that it is taking wealth away from ordinary Americans.  They know this.  But they keep doing it.  Money is addictive, and so presumably is power.

Update: http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304914904579434653903086282?mod=e2fb


They are now saying it flew on for at least 4 hours.  That’s much less than the 24 or so I was thinking, but it would both allow people to call friends and family, have it ring, and yet go unanswered.

Actually, I will add this idea: what if as part of a default shut down program, the engines stopped sending data, even though they were still operational?  This would get us close to 24 hours, as these planes can stay aloft that long, perhaps longer on conservation mode.

Why not add my theory?  If it is true that 24 hours or so after it disappeared cell phones were still ringing, and Chat was still enabled–both of which would likely be impossible with phones resting on the bottom of the ocean, then my initial thought was that it was hijacked, taken to parts unknown, and the fate of everyone on board also unknown.

However, why not destroy the phones?

Here is another idea, which came to me following an interview on NPR, which I am proud to say I was able to listen to for almost 5 minutes without getting pissed off (probably because there is nothing to spin here): what if a structural flaw in the Boeing [edit: which the commentator said was something Boeing had warned about] caused a rapid decompression, and the pilots only had time to start turning around before getting overcome, or in which the pilots were overcome instantly, and passengers tried to make the turn themselves, before being overcome?

Picture this: a partial turn, then automatic overrides in the system shut down all communications, switch autopilot on, and await further instructions.  But no instructions are forthcoming, because everyone is dead.  Because the plane is intact, all phones are intact (as I understand it, they have satellite receivers, although it’s unclear if those would continue working).  They are just ringing next to people unable to answer.  A ghost plane flies on for a good 24 hours, apparently due West, and eventually the fuel runs out–it’s been on conservation mode, per presets, but can’t last forever–and the plane ditches somewhere in the middle of the Indian Ocean.  No one will ever find it.

Like everyone else, I have little data, but that is my guess at the moment.  It’s a haunting image.

I will add, that yes I understand it would likely have flown over Indonesia. Given the thus far much less than spectacular performance of the Malaysian air traffic controllers/military, should we expect better of the Indonesians?  Would they have had any NEED for elaborate air defense systems?  I don’t think so.

The life experience of most middle class kids growing up in modern industrialized democracies is that all their material needs will be cared for, and that peace is normal.  They have easy lives and assume that this is the way things are supposed to be.

Many, when they get to college, are exposed for the first time with full force to the quantity of pain and suffering in history.

What political stance is possible, other than what I call Sybaritic Leftism, if they start with the assumption that pain is aberrant and unnecessary?

How EASY it is for ideologues to pull these kids in, simply by promising them an end to human suffering.  Among other things, ease makes people stupid.  It takes a long, long time to get out of it.