Moderates United

Stan Grof coined this term, usually abbreviated “Coex”.  Being something of a vain pedant, I would like to propose for my own purposes the term “Resonant Constellation”.

The basic idea is this: within his psychological paradigm, we “consist” in experiences gathered in the transpersonal realm (Archetypal and/or past life experience and/or Collective Unconscious), the perinatal realm, and the biological/historical realm, and sometimes groups of things get stuck.

If we posit that the essence of living well is allowing experience of all sorts to flow through you without objection, without grasping and holding, effortlessly and smoothly, then anything which causes you to get stuck is bad.  Certain experiences create a textured surface on which other things get stuck.

As an example, an unusually bad birth can cause all sorts of life long predispositions to certain bad emotional states.  Being stuck in Matrix 2–that period in which contractions have started, but there is no escape–can create a life long tendency to assume being stuck is the nature of life; that nothing you do has any meaning, or ever can have any meaning.

You start with a predisposition, from birth, then as you live your life and process your experience, you have difficulty allowing things to flow through.  Your default assumption is that sustained movement of any sort is impossible, and your belief becomes reality.

I like the term Resonant Constellation, because I feel like if you touch any experience in this constellation, you trigger the whole group.  It is a sort of holograph, in which ever part contains the whole.

Likewise, if you can fully process any core element in this constellation, you weaken the whole thing, and then in goes swirling away, into Matrix 3 and then 4.

It is an interesting idea.  If mainstream psychiatry fully integrated Stan’s work, it would change our world in short order, I do believe, because the underlying paradigm is that we were MEANT for health, that in almost all cases, absent severe organic trauma or defect, we have all the tools we need not just to survive, but to thrive.  How many of you can honestly say you are thriving now?  I doubt 1 person in a 100 can, the world over.

Meditate on this phrase. See where it takes you.

What is the life denying opposite of a gentle rain? A subtle poison?

I felt clearly today that there is no path to spirit but through the senses, through the body.  If there is value in asceticism, it can only lie in sharpening and refining the senses, and specifically in eliminating barriers to experience.

On this topic I will add that an interesting thing about contraction and release–of various sorts–is that the expansion following a contraction need not stop with the previous form and boundaries.  The contraction creates the possibility of growth, which may seem paradoxical, but isn’t.  You change form in one way, making a following change easier.

I felt too that most of what is done in the name of religion is in almost all cases social and not spiritual technology.  Group ritual is no doubt comforting in many ways–people who go to church, for example, live considerably longer, making widespread failure to “prescribe” church all the more conspicuous–but it does not further inner growth.

It seems to me as well that you cannot do exactly the same thing for many years, and expect to continue growing.  Just as you have to vary your routine in physical training, so too must you in psychospiritual training.

I will add, that it is very hard to see where emotional growth ends and spiritual growth begins.  They are closely related.  Neither has anything to do with intellectual growth, whose sole purpose is to create structures within which psychospiritual growth is made possible and/or more likely.

May you fail better today.  May you find and travel a path which goes nowhere and remember those paths which do.  May you feel misery and pain, and remember with gratitude the possibilities of joy and contentment.  May you see ugliness and remember the importance of beauty.  May you hear noise and dissonance and realize, perhaps for the first time, the value of harmony.  May you smell something which disgusts you, and by contrast enter into the vital and omnipresent world of scent.  May you taste something which offends you, and recall with satisfaction the countless good meals you have received, and appreciate more those you have yet to receive.

May you realize that the world is open, and that only we are closed.

Simple question: what is the potential scope of the effect of the decision of any single person or body within a system? If it could affect everyone in a system, then that system is formally Anti-Liberal.

If it affects at most a handful of people–or if it must be combined with the decisions of dozens or hundreds of others–then that system is Liberal.

I will note that this includes within it the tyrannical potential of direct Democracy of the Athenian or French Revolutionary sort, in which a group of people, but ONE body, has the power over life and death for anyone it chooses.

Within our system, there are many bodies–two houses of Congress, 3 branches of government, 50 state governments, countless local governments, and a system of law which by design restricts Federal control of any number of things, including gun ownership, criminal justice, and speech. There are firewalls to block the effect of a decision, in answer to which relative unity of view must prevail for large scale policies.

In places where people are peaceful, gun ownership has no effect on crime.

In places where people are violent, banning guns works to increase violence.  This applies even when guns themselves are not used in the crimes.  This was the experience both of Britain and Australia. If the goal is a better quality of life, people control with respect to gun ownership is retrogressive.  It makes things worse, life worse.

And logically, if people are not to be reformed from their violence via coherent moralities–none of which are on display in the dialogues of our power elites, whose sole focus is soulless egalitarianism–then at some point the solution they will inevitably propose will be the centralization and monopolization of violence in the body of the State.  Drones and cameras will surround everyone; everything will be seen, and police omnipresent.  This is no way to live.

Thus, LOGICALLY, the only way to decrease violent crime without recourse to violent totalitarianism, is through CULTURE, through better ideas, through better economic policy.  Where are the people proposing these?  We cannot go backwards, but we can clearly go forwards better than we are doing now.

One of the persistent criticisms of “Capitalism” [can we not define Capitalism as “that which opposes socialism?”  It would come quite close.  Marx had an enemy, one that he created in his work, and one which was needed to rationalize the totalitarian impulses latent in his writing, which were later made concrete by Lenin] is that it is “dehumanizing”, that it objectifies people, that their only value is their labor cost.

This is patent bullshit of course.  Only stupid people even consider this proposition, but regrettably our universities are filled with stupid people, and they have preaching podiums.

Think about this: in a free society, one relatively undominated by pervasive government interference, you can choose your education, your work, and how hard you work. If you want to get ahead, you work hard, and get more.  If you don’t want to work hard, if your free time is valuable to you, then you will always have less things, but more time.

You don’t get these choices in the “utopias” these amoral assholes STILL want to create, even after so much death and dying, even in the present day.  You are a thing, a number, and you go where you are told, and do what you are told, or awful things happen to you.

Further, this argument conflates the economic system with the social system.  What you do for work need have NO connection with the network of social relations you have.  For everyone who is in your family, or a friend, your value is that of an individual.

Only when the State mediates social relations, only when families are broken into pieces, as happens in most Communist coups, can your value as a unique individual be eradicated.  Only Socialists do that.  No one else.

Leftism is a moral sickness, a mental illness, a passion for death and pain.  Its apostles are people of the lie.  Quite literally every propaganda theme they use can be inverted.  If they talk about freedom they mean tyranny.  As an example, George Soros’ “Open Society” is one which is closed and unfree–and unsocial as well, since it will no doubt have ubiquitous government agents controlling all social interactions that matter.  If they talk about justice they mean injustice.  They mean treating people differently depending on their race, class, or gender.  If they talk about economic progress, they mean programs which will lower the standard of living for just about everyone but them.

The list is endless, and as long as their rhetoric.

I will add, I saw the word Disinformation today, and think it is time to bring it back.

I’ve toyed with putting that on my bumper for years.

My new idea, borrowed from somewhere: put your stickers on a magnet, so you can take them off or rotate them.  You just buy magnetic sheets at Hobby Lobby (nowhere else), glue it on, and cut around.

I think what characterizes trauma is emotion NOT felt.  I think what happens is that something comes along that is so emotionally powerful that it overwhelms the emotional wiring, that you literally cannot feel the whole thing, the horror, the grief, the shame and guilt, the anger.  What lingers then, is the emotional equivalent of an incomplete chemical reaction.  Over and over, through psychic intrusions, through a life constrained in many ways, your unconscious tries to complete the process, but we fear it.  The damn thing keeps coming back.  It won’t let you go.  Maybe it even gets worse.

The only way out is through.  This phrase was apparently coined by Fritz Perls, and it is unquestionably true, in my view.  You have to finish the work, the reaction, and with large things perhaps this has to be done in small doses over an extended period of time.  No, it isn’t fair, but this isn’t grade school, either, is it?  If that sounds harsh, it is perhaps because I am speaking to myself as well.  I am processing–successfully–some really awful shit.

It occurs to me that precisely those sorts of people–often men, but certainly not invariably–who fear emotion tend to be attracted to fields in which they can be productive without it, or in which apparent “objectivity” is even valued.  Sciences of various sorts, of course, are the paradigmatic examples.

Thus fields like biology and medicine become populated disproportionately with people congenitally disinclined to embrace the qualitative side of life–the inchoate, indefinable, mythic, constantly moving side– and THOSE ARE THE PEOPLE who get to decide what constitutes science, what data, what useful research and what frivolous.

I want to be clear: if you are not able to digest emotion habitually, with roughly the same diligence that you digest food, you are stupider than you would be if you had this trait; and this stupidity is made greater and greater the less value you place on feelings.

Feelings are not everything.  One must have reason, and one must have data.  But feelings drive the engine, and if you have not contacted them, processed them, they are driving you.  You only have the illusion of being a sovereign mind, uninfluenced by factors extraneous to the “equation”.