Moderates United

Came across this quote:

A myth is something which never happened, but which is always true.

It occurred to me yesterday, in a moment of deep reflection, that belief is what connects our sense of self to our experience.  It is what connects mind to heart, what merges them.  It is what enables certain perceptual possibilities to emerge.

I have long felt that atheism does something to people.  I have danced around this quite a bit, and likely said roughly what I am about to say, but hopefully not exactly this: the problem with rejecting life at the core of the universe, at the core of experience, is that it makes one feel an object, and feeling like an object causing a dimming of life energy at the core.  Clearly, many atheists live interesting and adventurous lives.  But it has always seemed to me some spark was missing.

And Cultural Sadeism is about failing to connect with experience at all.  It is the head connecting to the head,which is connected to an IDEA of connection, of universal salvation, of universal liberation, freedom, happiness, love and hope, all abstract virtues for people capable of none of them.  It is a retrogressive, cultural tautology.

There is more to say about this, but I haven’t figured out what yet.

Here is what to my mind is an interesting thought experiment: could we perhaps judge the importance of virtues by how hard they would be to teach to a robot?

What got this train in motion was realizing that you could teach a robot “tolerance” with a few lines of code.  You simply have it reply to all behaviors and utterances “I accept this”. It doesn’t matter what the behavior or idea is.  You blow goats (to use a Wayne-ism)?  I accept this.  You are a mass murderer?  I accept this.

It is only in conditions of repugnance, of visceral rejection that tolerance truly becomes a virtue.  It is only when you find it hard to accept someone that accepting them, via empathic identification, becomes a virtue.

And love, inherently, requires judgment of an extraordinarily subjective kind.  It is not saying “good job” and hugging.  These are mere outer manifestations, that again could easily be programmed with a few lines of code.  “I hear you.”  “You matter to me.”  Code.

What it takes is a capacity to understand others, and help them on their own journeys, to help them learn to help themselves, to love themselves, to grow and expand.  And this would not easily be taught to robots, even if humans even now approach being machines in their own programmed, stereotyped, reflexive reactions to a variety of stimuli.

Being nice, likewise, is a robotic virtue, if chosen as a default.  If you feel genuine connection with others, kindness come naturally.  But Ted Bundy knew how to be polite, and nice when it suited him.

The further I dig, the more strongly I feel that we all must retain some connection with our shadows, because failing to do so blinds us.  It removes affective and perceptual possibilities.  We are animals, too, still, here in this world.  This fact does not disappear if we fail to acknowledge it.  It hides.

This is an old koan, readily familiar to those of a certain reading list, and immersed within certain cultural habits.

My own two cents is that it is impossible to meet the Buddha, because he does not exist.  Given this, there is nothing you CAN kill.  The Buddha spirit is quite safe, and so are you, as long as you are committed to death.

This is offered in the spirit of facilitating perceptual risk taking.

If this is cryptic, shouldn’t it be?

I’m getting ready to do my Kum Nye, and it just hit me that I resist it, not just because it sometimes brings up unpleasant emotions, but because it “misdirects” me from a day I otherwise would have tried to spend in a single emotional state.

Do we, in our culture, grant in any way cycles other than those of machines?  Yes, we have 8-ish hour workdays, and we have weekends, and we have holidays.  All of this makes us efficient at making and distributing things.

But how many really decompress at the end of the day, or end of the week, or in the course of a one week vacation filled with screaming kids? In our culture, some lucky few–the smarter, more foresighted, more talented, more lucky–have 10-20 healthy years at the end of a career to “find themselves”.  And some do.  But I think many merely continue the distractions that got them through their days all their lives.  And most of us, of course, can look forward to nothing but hoping our health holds while we work our way into final senescence.  Anyone who thinks the promises of our government can be kept is a fool.

In my own case, analytic distance–can we call it the Vulcan Stance?–served me well at one time, but no more.  It takes a lot of will, a lot of energy, to prevent spontaneity; and precisely because there are large parts of me crying out for release, spontaneity is what I need.

But at times I surrender without realizing it to the dominant tone of our culture, which is about work and pleasure, with church thrown in for some at the end of the week, and taken seriously.

Where is the space for self discovery?  As I have been arguing for years, it is absolutely economically possible to create a society in which automation frees up the time for people to spend as much time as it takes to become deeper souls–or more in touch with the soul that was already there.  I think we are already there.  We simply have a profoundly unjust, anti-humanitarian system, run by and for bastards who ALSO have no conception of what a life well-lived would feel like.  Cocaine and sex have their limits.  I suspect they all figure this out, and substitute power, pure and simple, as their principle, life-defining drug.

And the quest for power is monophasic too, isn’t it?  Perhaps this is how it creates shelter from the wind: lust never changes.

In order to adapt, you must change, you must grant you cannot control the winds and waters, even if you can both sail and swim, even if you can interact creatively with the conditions you find.

If I go up, I do not want to go down; and if I go down, I do not want to go up.  This is an odd aspect of human existence.  We are not robots, and I think it is precisely because mechanisms provide final shelter from the need from change that so many people WANT to die, WANT to become Terminators, meta-humans, programmable devices.

All of the bad philosophy, and the deficient metaphysics backing it, results from deep seated emotional failures, the principle of which is the defiant need for rigidity in the face of an intrinsically mutable–and here we can paraphrase this as “interesting”–world.

God,

Grant me the grace to embrace every day, knowing that my destiny is to be shredded.  When I look at a thousand saws, eager to cut me to pieces, let me walk into them knowing that I will be reborn on the other side.

Nurture within me the capacity to die.  Nurture within me the capacity to walk into death.  Bless me with the courage needed, and the love to know that life is everywhere, that You are everywhere.

God, let my thousand fragments fertilize this earth with needed life, and grant me the rain to blossom over and over again.

So let it be.

Hell must be extinguished one person, one soul, at a time.  This was the essence of the Buddha’s insight, in my view: both that it can be extinguished, and a series of methods by which to do it.

We live in Hell, and do not realize it.  So much more is possible, both in this world, and beyond.

I got the chance to go to the Bluebird Cafe in Nashville last Friday night, where they had four of those sorts of talented, committed, passionate artists that get described as “up and coming”, which is regrettably often–but certainly not always–a euphemism for “not quite A-List”. As one of them put it, there is really only room at the top for about 12 people.

It is an “intimate” place, which means small, but frankly it also does create a sense of being close.  I talked afterwards with all four people, and got some sense of them as individuals.

A variety of styles were on display, with some very quiet and contemplative, some loud, and some funny.  I laughed a lot.  One of the singers, Mark Narmore, had a very funny song about how Neil Young got placed on the prayer list of his 70 member church in the middle of nowhere, Alabama.  He did impressions of Bob Dylan, and Neil Diamond, and others.

Paul Sikes was my favorite.  I got his autograph and CD for my kids.  Here is him playing one of his beautiful songs: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yov6Ne2KoDE

And being me, I was both participating, and analyzing.  In such a lowlit room, filled with art designed to evoke emotion, I felt like I was in a temple of sorts.  This temple is devoted to making us more complete as human beings, but only if we REACT.

Now, I have a booming laugh.  This likely does not come across in my posts, but I have a very lively sense of humor and love to laugh.  I laugh without reservation, and not being a small person, it is quite loud. And I laughed a lot.

But I cry too.  It embarrasses my kids, so I held it in, but much of what I heard, of heartbreak, of sacrifice, of deep suffering, moved me.  Paul’s songs, and a few of Mark’s, really moved me. Mark cowrote this beautiful song, recorded by Tracy Lawrence: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLfHM4IX1uM

He said the third verse more or less came to him in a dream, from God.

Courage is a beautiful thing.  Stubborn persistence in what is right is beautiful.

And I felt: this place is dedicated to the evocation of I have seen therapeutically reduced to NOSC, or Non-Ordinary States of Consciousness.

Do we not all need to “escape” to our deeper selves, regularly?  If life is a river, does not much get caught in circling eddies next to the shore, perhaps trying to escape the water, but unable to?

We live in water, but does not it usually seem safer for many to remain dry?  But can we?  Not without losing life, not without creating gaps, lacunae, that are not life. Life is about emotion. It is about feeling.  What I think many miss, and what is central to my own embrace of what gets called “Tantra” in spiritual traditions, is that the path to deeper emotions, deeper connections, deeper experiences BEGINS with being present here, with all the apparatus God gifted us with.  Yes, it sometimes seems a curse, but it is not.

This led to some contemplation.  What is an “ordinary” state of consciousness?  Is it not the FEELING that we are in control, that we are engaged in a purposive activity we direct?

What then is a non-“ordinary” state of consciousness?  Is it not a feeling that feelings are coming to us, that we are being “moved”, that the contents of our consciousness are being directed, by our deeper self, by something oceanic?

What is creativity?  I have said before that it is uncovering some small section of the infinite possibilities that are already immanent in the universe.  It is discovery.  But I would say that most creative people–and rightly or wrongly I like to place myself relatively in that category–often find that their best stuff comes to them spontaneously, and that the role of craftsmanship, of art, is placing them into a communicable media in an effective way.

The juice, the essence: this comes to us, unbidden.  But what some people do better than others is ask for it, and listen to the answer.  Inherently, this implies an ability to place aside what we call the “ego”, but which is really the habit of stability, of being unmoved, unchanged (we think, wrongly), of always being in control.

And what artists do is both listen to this voice, and very importantly, spend ordinary time, conscious time, directed time, developing the capacity to translate inspiration into communicable form.

Now, I know that usually NOSC refers to things like LSD experience, shamanic trance, deep hypnosis.  But do these things not exist on a continuum, one which BEGINS with the capacity to channel experience?

I am a conservative hippy.  I see our modern, mechanical world, and see a NEED, a deep, unprocessed NEED, for something like drum circles, for smoke in the air, for yelling and screaming, and emoting.

This makes us more human. Or, more accurately, it makes us more available to our own experience, more able to be present when important things present themselves.  It allows us to hear what was already there, to see what was already there, to feel what was already there.

And experientially, phenonomenologically, do we not alternate all day long between ordinary and non-ordinary states of consciousness?  One can deny this, but one cannot escape it.

Is Scientism not an effort to escape from this, which is to say an effort to escape from madness, as seen from a mathematical perspective?

We have anchor points now, do we not, in “absolute” truths like F=MA?  A squared plus b squared equals c squared?  E=MCsquared?  These truths connect us to our visible world. They allow us to predict and thus control experience.  They put a man on the moon, and food on our table.

But we can’t live in this world.  It is precisely the effort to do so which, in the modern world, had led us astray from the paradises we might have built.

There is nothing wrong with math.  It, too, is beautiful.  I intend one day soon to teach myself the Calculus which eluded me in college.  I have a Teaching Company lecture series on it.  It, too, is a creative blessing.

But the curse of Socialism is precisely this: it is an effort to reduce human experience, human life, human emotion, to formulas, and to paper over the resulting horrors with lies–mathematical lies, to be sure, carefully created, carefully deployed, carefully orchestrated, as if lies could also be beautiful.

What is a lie, though?  It is a subtraction from experience; it is something that makes us less human, less evolved, less loving, less happy.

I will leave you with a song about life, another song cowritten (he would certainly want to share the credit) by Mark Narmore: What I love about Sunday.

In my considered view–and I am historically quite literate, and quite capable of extended abstraction–this song contains the kernel of the success–thus far–of the American Experiment.

I was drinking my tea this morning, and the word “microtrauma” popped in my head, and I thought I would do a brief post on it.

In every interaction with other human beings–and as far as that goes, within our own heads, but most of that is a distillate of times long ago, when actual people were involved:  there is the chance for understanding, and misunderstanding, for connection and distance, for building, and for not building and for destroying, all in subtle ways.

There are times, and we have all experienced them, when our own open expression of emotion makes possible the reaction in the other of love.  This is the reaction we expect.  When it is not forthcoming, this is a communication.  A decision has been rendered, even if no words are ever spoken, even if you never ask the question, and they never verbally provide the answer.

I think the children of parents congenitally, temperamentally, incapable of empathy–which is really nothing but a precursor of the larger capacity to express love–learn to accept this process, and learn to stop tacitly asking the question, but more importantly reject the question itself since, never have received a positive answer, it comes to seem a ridiculous question.

Microtrauma is the thousand tiny cuts, which add up to a pattern of a large trauma, but without any perceptible, single precipitating event.  You were not molested, you were not savagely beaten, or forced to go without food or shelter.  In fact, your parents mouthed both in public and private the pieties they were supposed to. If they never said they loved you, that was the way of the world then.

And in truth, saying “I love you” really is superfluous, because the reality is what it is, and on some level everyone understands what that reality is, even if they cannot consciously access that understanding absent considerable work.

In my own case, I tell my children constantly that I love them, but I also mock them regularly, as indeed they mock me.  Our back and forth banter at times would likely offend traditionalists, who so often mistook and mistake outer form for inner reality. I respect them and they respect me.  I love them, and they love me.  Our very confidence in this allows us to take it for granted when we have fun at the expense of each other.

As far as microtrauma, could we perhaps call it “Psychological Fabianism”?  Fabianism is about breaking down all social rules, all culture, all instinctive affections, all honesty, all honor, all love, all duty, in the name of “Social Justice”, and in reality as a result of deep seated psychopathologies on the part of those who follow this path, which is defined morally entirely negatively, as seeking to cause individuals to lose their way morally, and in turn to come to depend entirely not just for material goods, but their very sense of the self on the State.

Now, few parents plan CONSCIOUSLY to destroy their children’s sense of self, itself the root of the capacity for developing happiness in this world–although these people plainly exist, and we justly call them evil–but as I ponder depth psychology, it seems to me that if we posit that we all have many “selves”, particularly those who have themselves experienced trauma, there is in fact a “self” in such parents that suffers from no illusions, which does in fact consciously and sadistically with damage upon those children.

That self presents itself in moments, in split seconds, in the gap between spontaneous emotion and the well learned habit of concealing it–from both the world, and the banal but seemingly kindly facade which enables social existence.

This is, I think, the role of Sade as role model for many modern “thought esthetes” [in the same respect that I reject the word Liberal for those I split into the categories of Sybaritic Leftist, and Cultural Sadeist, I want to propose a more accurate word for what so-called “intellectuals” do.  Within my typology, you have–at least–the categories “Thought Esthete”, and “Thought Worker”.  I consider myself the latter.  But do I need a type for those who simply use abstraction for the rationalization of emotional pathology?  Probably.  I will have to ponder it]: he breaks away the mask for the terminally confused, those who hate, and cannot admit that they hate, cannot rationalize or explain their hate, who are split between inner demons and a banal, seemingly kindly outer face.

Sade makes all that OK, so that their new mask is placed over their faces consciously.  They can now embrace an evil whose genesis they still do not understand, but which they claim now as their own.

At root, of course, such evil is the result of some combination of large trauma and microtrauma.  It represents a failure of courage, and we must be honest and admit that in the modern world, much of the problem is the failure to come up with adequate REASONS for courage.  We are, after all, merely machines, in the idiotic and counter-empirical prevailing narrative.  What can be expected of us?  Who can look too long at their inner world when all they will find is a cage and  living death?

Our world is made for superficiality; it damn near demands it.  And in that world, how does one process deep inner wounds?  There is no God there.  There is no salvation.  0’s and 1’s are palliative.  All else is suspect.

And think about the risks of empathy in such a universe.  Human consciousnesses built on a house of cards do not want the wind of risk blowing through them.  They do not want to risk seeing people with differing views as humans.  They must view them through the same prism of alterity that has animated all death and cruelty between human communities since the first preverbal protohuman killed a member of another genetic strand for being unknown to him, and thus inherently a threat to all he felt to be familiar and familial.

Of course, I am talking about me.  I am all this.  You can only see that which you have in you.  I have all this.  I have hate and love, mockery and truth, cruelty and salvation.

It is confusing to be me. But only the confused can truly value clarity.  And when one wants to distill something, it is best to be able to draw from a large pool.

When I write syllogisms, and I can do that extremely well at times, it is only because I was able to see in the process my insanity, which is to say all of our insanities.  Madness is inherent to the human condition.  That will be my next post.

As for this post, can I not admit that there are many sorts of exorcisms, many ways home for the wandering?  And on a long journey, are there not little huts along the road, to shelter from the wind?

The refusal to accept the existence of evil makes blindness inevitable.  It forces a sort of negative hallucination, in which what is manifestly there, cannot be seen.

I will put this another way:

If you cannot see evil in yourself, you cannot see it in others; conversely, if you cannot see it in others, you have no ways of seeing it in yourself.

The motion of the world consists in expanding and contracting, expanding and contracting.  Goodness is expansion, evil is contraction.  Logically, then, a blindness to evil consists in a blindness both to contraction, and to a lack of expansion. It means blindness to precisely what is holding you back.

If we posit that the demonic is that which contains you, punishes you, makes you smaller, then a blindness to the demonic means you have no hope of controlling your own life, and will therefore need someone else to do it for you.

I have in mind Sybaritic Leftists, but there is a clear continuum from rejecting Good and Evil in principle, to embracing the latter.  I see references to this throughout the culture of the last 150 years.

These are some of the issues I tried to deal with in my iteration of the Grand Inquisitor.  This here is slightly different language.

I will reiterate that I am a Liberal.  I want more freedom for everyone, to be and do whatever makes them happier, whatever best unleashed their creative energies, and creative bliss.  I simply REFUSE to be stupid, to believe things out of habit, or because they are repeated around me constantly.  All of us were born with consciences and minds, with the expectation we use them.  There is no better system of government than our own, in principle, even if culturally we have fallen far short of the moral courage and honesty needed to operate it properly.