Moderates United

 Posted here: http://www.forbes.com/sites/harrybinswanger/2013/12/31/obama-to-americans-you-dont-deserve-to-be-free/2/


I will add, that it is a good thing I have no issues with being alone, or being the only one saying something.  I have to be perfectly honest and admit that I consider a lot of authors on the Right self-congratulatory jackasses as well.  


Can I be the only one who sees the patent abuses in front of our eyes?  As far as I can tell, I am the only one to propose what I consider to be a solution that is in the right zip code, which takes both a moral and a practical approach to problems of poverty and structural inequality which WILL NOT BE SOLVED IN OUR CURRENT SYSTEM.

The present default assumption among our power elite seems to be that a massive failure of the American project–a large down-sizing of our standard of living, beginning now, and moving “progressively” forward over the next two decades, is the only answer.  Bullshit.  Bullshit.  BULLSHIT!!!!!

 
The critical point you are missing is that our BANKING system is not Capitalist.  It has never been Capitalist.  It only amasses enough Capital to justify money-printing, which is its actual business.

Look at every economic crisis ever.  With no exceptions I can think of, money creation through banking was the prime culprit.

To take the most obvious example, I just finished the book “Lords of Finance”, the principle argument of which is that the gold standard caused the Great Depression, because it was deflationary.

Why is deflation bad?  Because it increases the cost of loans, which causes more loan defaults, which causes bank defaults which furthers the deflationary spiral.

But if the money supply were not constantly being expanded, it would not hurt anyone if it contracted.  If everyone were not leveraged to their eyeballs, the cost of loans would be relatively unimportant.

Put simply, did we not have a fractional reserve banking system, and a federally chartered but privately run Central Bank, the value of our money, of our labor, and of our innovation would have steadily increased over the course of the last century, making problems of poverty, unemployment, and healthcare disappear entirely.

Be bold.  Think big.  Given 100% reserve banking, we could not have had the Great Depression.  We would not have had the 2008 crash.  All these banks do is bet money, then cry to the government for taxpayer money when their bets fail.

Henry Ford put it roughly this way: Our banking system is very much like me parking my car in a garage, someone else taking it out for a drive without my permission, wrecking it, then asking me to pay for it.

How is this just?  Socialists are quite eager to blame “Capitalism” for our failures, but their methods don’t work either.  What they have going for them, though, is that their arguments are primarily MORAL.  There is a MORAL case to be made as well that banks have NO RIGHT to take from people, through inflation, the wealth they create with their own hands.

Keynes noted after the First World War that not one person in a million really understood the predatory theft that monetary inflation implied.  I would put the number in the billions.  All these years later, and even ostensibly intelligent people fail to grasp what is being done, day in and day out.

I: simply want to assert,, the right to:::::use punctuation any way;!!!!I please.

I am a bit fastidious at times, and I know I’m screwing up here and there.  My vanity compels me to admit it, but my fun compels
me
to
keep
doing
it…….
!

>>>?

It is such an obvious point that I have almost certainly said this before, but the reason people with emotional problems so often wind up dispensing advice is that it is a covert means of dispensing advice to themselves, without in the process granting that they need it.

So often, as a condition for surviving trauma, one–here I speak very specifically about me, but I think this point can be generalized–develops a split between head and heart.  The head retains in this split the capacity to describe emotions, even the emotions of its heart, but it always conveys them in its own vernacular.  It puts them in words, where the heart puts nothing in words.

I wake up every morning feeling hated.  I wake up every morning like there is nothing I can do today, or any day, ever, for the rest of my life, that would make me love myself, or feel loved by someone else. I could win the Nobel Prize, save a small village, cure cancer, rectify all the world’s ills, and it would not be enough. It is small wonder I often sleep in when I can.

Gradually, I am working my way through this.  The process is unpleasant: I have to enter this emotion deeply and stay there.  I don’t like it.  My courage tires.  But I do finally see a way out.  I can and will make this turn.

Being me, though, I think in broader psychoanalytic and cultural terms.  In my own case, my issue, very simply, is that my mother did not want me, and resented me for the first few years of my life, which she expressed through verbal and physical punishments I suspect were entirely disproportionate to the “crimes”, and never counterbalanced these punishments with sufficient affection for me to feel like I was not hated.  Given how demanding even wanted kids can be, I would assume this is common.  Look at average street, and you will see very few truly happy people, able to give and receive deep affection easily.

Culturally, I wonder about several things.  Clearly, the early bonding between mother and child sets a template for that child’s life.  It is critical.  In my own case, I have found getting emotionally back to that period is extremely difficult, and pretty much impossible using most normal methods, like Depth Psychology (although in some cases hypnosis may help).

[Now, I feel the need to say again that I get that in many respects worrying about these things seems itself a variety of narcissism, of selfishness, that I should just “get on with it”.  I have “got on with it”.  I have two happy, successful kids, a decent career, an education.  But I wake up every morning feeling hated, and I don’t like it.  Problems remain problems until solved, and this is the solution.]

In American culture, it is common to move around a lot.  One effect this clearly has is diminishing the number of females around a young child.  I don’t suppose narcissism is more or less common in other cultures, but what it seems to me is likely is that even children with mothers unable to give honest affection can still find a caregiver in the person of an aunt, or grandmother, or cousin.  I suspect it only takes one person to set that template of feeling loved.  That that person’s presence has been made by the circumstances of our culture and economy mathematically less likely has not been much commented on.

Nor has there been much discussion of the fact that a mother with an outside job is likely to have less energy for giving affection and order to that child.  When we (we is of course me, for one) comment about the superficiality of our culture, can we not trace one source of this to the role electronic media play in parenting, a role made larger by women who work outside the home?  No game, no TV, can talk back to a child the way a mother can.  The machines are superficial, to begin with, then the programming is awful (there were a number of shows I flat out refused to let my kids watch, like Rugrats, and Spongebob.  With regard to the latter, I can literally feel intelligence leaking out my ears watching it, and my kids, now older, feel the same way): small wonder we are raising odd, emotionally detached, deeply unhappy, confused kids.

Then God.  “God hates us all” is apparently an actual book, but was a fictional book in the series Californication, itself likely based on the life and work of Charles Bukowski.  We (I, and then perhaps you) read:

In his autobiographical novel “Ham on Rye” he talks about his physically
and mentally abusive father, along with his apathetic mother.

Freud–being an atheist, lacking knowledge of quantum physics, of the fundamental weirdness of “reality” as best we can determine it–supposed that God was a construct made necessary by psychodynamic necessities or conflicts of some sort.  I don’t know the details of what he proposed, as they are not germane to my purpose here.  Suffice it to say that he viewed God as fiction.

Now, the nature of reality, the nature of life, the future of our self awareness when our bodies cease functioning: these can all be brought within the empirical domain.  They are scientific questions.

And “Science” (always beware when someone is bold enough both to reify the work of many millions across millenia, and then speak on “its” behalf, especially if they self describe–always inaccurately–as “skeptics”) tells us that the God concept makes sense.  If we think of God as an infinitely rich informational field connecting all life and all existence in an eternal moment–a thought, of course, that won’t really fit in our heads, but does give us a starting point for discussion–then God likely exists.

But how we FEEL about God remains, like all feelings, psychodynamically driven.  And if our early experience is violence and abandonment, that feels like the NATURE of “existence”, does it not?  Had Sartre felt truly loved when he was 2, would he have written what he did?  I don’t think so.

So often “The love of Truth” is simply another way for clever people to project onto reality, to “ontologize”, if I might coin a word, their own head iterations of heart sentiments they cannot process.

Do you feel unloved?  Then “reality” is cold.  God is extinct.  Science, then, will be your “langage de l’amour”.  Or perhaps you will write about the hate of God.  In some way, your metaphysics will be emotionally driven on a deep and in most cases entirely hidden, unconscious level.

Manifestly, it has proven psychologically very, very difficult for scientists to broaden their perspectives to include God, to include available data, and available models integrating that data into a much more interesting–and most likely more accurate–worldview. 

I feel better.  Something there needed to be said.  Now a psychological burp of satisfaction, and on to a meditation–a medication–I don’t look forward to, but will do nonetheless.

If you cannot brew tea, why learn the flute?

In stillness I see what has value in motion.

In silence, I see what sound matters.

Can we not posit that to embrace something you must first realize you are separate from it?

I don’t like getting too personal–although of course I do by implication in my chosen topics and opinions often–but it seems appropriate, today, the day when even non-drinkers get drunk, to meditate in public on my drinking.

For some years, regardless of how I might define the term myself, I have been physiologically an alcoholic.  I have drunk enough on a daily basis that I got withdrawal symptoms if I skipped a day.  Not serious symptoms, not DT’s, but enough that it always made more sense just to drink than to not drink.

For a long time I was the guy at the party who, given an open bar, would consistently overdo it.  Otherwise, I’d have a few beers every night, and maybe a bit of gin to wash it down.

As my tolerance and disposable income grew, so too did my consumption–mostly at home, but I was no stranger to a few bars.

At a certain point, I got Barry McDonough’s “Panic Away” kit, which helps you deal with panic attacks.  I have only had one, at an extremely hard point in my life, but I believe in collecting tools, and this was one I wanted, since I did not want to be that helpless again.

The essence of his method–and by the way I recommend this to anyone who deals with anxiety on a regular basis; it is worth the money–is to accept the anxiety, and ask for more.  Rather than moving away from painful emotions, you move to them, you kill them with kindness.

I got to thinking: this has to apply to more than anxiety, and decided, when I drank, to direct my attention to my dark places, to the emotions I could not process sober, could not confront sober.  I figured if I was going to be drinking anyway, I may as well make it useful.

I did this for a year or two–I honestly don’t remember–and made progress.  At a certain point, I realized I needed to do Kum Nye seriously, and figured signing up for the eKum Nye program would help, even though all the exercises it covers are already in the books.  I figured correctly, as it gave me a more formal structure for my practice.  In theory it was unnecessary; in practice it was.

It is an interesting fact that my two Kum Nye books are literally the only books I have carried with me since I was a teenager.  I bought them in a New Age shop in Rancho Bernardo, California, back in the 1980’s.  I think I knew they were useful, but I always feared them. I feared them, since I knew that with emotional release a lot of really shitty emotions would come up.  They did every time I started the process.  It was like sticking my finger in a light socket.  I knew I needed to do it, but lacked the recovery skills to keep doing it often enough to get through it.  I was alone, because of my life history–which among other things involved getting yanked from every place I developed an attachment to throughout my childhood–and because my traumas isolated me, as indeed they do everyone who has suffered in particular ways.  It is a defining symptom of unprocessed trauma.

But my drinking therapy got me far enough that I was able to combine it with Kum Nye, and that has been the situation for the past six months or so.  About 4 weeks ago, I decided to quit drinking, and have reached a point where I go days without drinking.  It is always hard, because I have opened up many emotions, and they come to me, and I am unprotected.  But I am developing the ability to recover, and I can say that today I can feel a point coming where the role alcohol played–the important, beautiful, needed role–is no longer needed.  It propped me up, kept me from falling, but now I can stand on my own two feet.

This is a wonderful Christmas present, one that has taken a lifetime of work.

I will share a dream I had last night.  There was a drag racing track, with a very unusual feature: a right hand turn.  You had to make the turn, THEN accelerate with all the power those engines have.

I was noodling around in a bookstore today, and came across a book I had read a review of some time ago, “Trip to Echo Spring”, which deals with the intersection of creativity and alcoholism.  It is likely a book I should read, since alcohol has played an important role in my life for some time.  I can’t say I have wrestled with alcohol: on the contrary, it has unquestionably been a net boon to me.  All the same, why I drink is to me a very interesting question.

This book seemingly has the metaphor of water throughout it–she visits the sites where several writers, like Virginian Woolf, drowned themselves, and she deals with a story “The Swimmer”–and I would submit that this metaphor has occurred in my own dreams.  I was once told more or less explicitly to stop drinking and start swimming.  I took this literally, and bought myself a suit and some goggles, but I don’t like swimming.  It’s funny, but it’s true.  I likely will take it up before long, but I am for now dealing at its root with my own unfreedom, exploring it, understanding it, massaging it, to use the Kum Nye metaphor.

And I see now that the image is metaphorical.

Let us let water represent emotion, and the ocean deep, uncontrolled emotion, and the swimmer someone reconciling himself to emotion.

Can we not posit that many reject, in what we might term Ordinary State of Consciousness (OCS), the possibility of the ocean?  When I say emotion, I mean all emotions, good and bad: joy, love, hate, sadness, anger, attachment, obsession, sex, sex, sex, power, powerlessness, belonging, rejection.  Emotions have all the shades and varieties of clouds.  None are the same, even if we speak of types out of the necessities imposed by language.

And can we not posit that many writers, in unleashing their creative potential, always unleash at the same time unprocessed demons–which I have recently begun to believe are those cages we have internalized that seek to limit us?  Can we not say, perhaps, that they are driven to create by what they fear, and simultaneously liberated and enslaved by entering through intoxicants Non-Ordinary States of Consciousness?

Can we not see the ocean as potential, and grant the possibility of rejecting this potential in ordinary waking states?  Can we not say that people with serious, deep emotional issues are afflicted by dryness without alcohol, and an admixture of terror and joy which get expressed through creative synthesis when high in some form or other?

As I said a few posts ago, Charles Bukowski’s tombstone apparently reads “Don’t Try”.  Can we not add: “Let it”, where it is a spontaneous flow which emerges when allowed? He was an alcoholic from an early age (13, if memory serves).  He apparently tried early on, and failed.  Alcohol let him move without trying.  That is why he consumed so much of it.

It not the task then, liberating creative energy without lust, without fear, without panic, without compulsion?  Has not most of the creative energy of the last century within our dominant cultural sphere been traumatic and unhelpful, because mixed of both toxic and life-bearing elements?

I am thinking out loud here, but I think there are some thoughts here worth considering deeply.

Bit rambling, so be it.

Being me, mostly, I got to thinking “what if Heidegger had had a tool like Kum Nye, that he used consistently?”  It is, I think, a good question.  He thought a lot ABOUT Being–Dasein and the rest.  But when he bought his coffee in the morning, who was more emotionally present: him, or the person serving him?  Chances are overwhelming, are they not, that it was the person serving him, who perhaps because Heidegger thought “deep” thoughts considered him his superior?  In my own worldview–can I say Weltanschauung?–Heidegger of the two was vastly the inferior, since he had made an apparent virtue of actual existential retrogression.  It does not matter how deeply you THINK about being: if you are not there, then no one is.  You are operating an unclever machine, which spits out informationally flat 0’s and 1’s.

Or take Sartre: “L’etre et le rien”.  He sat at a cafe, high on speed, and drank coffee and wine all day long, smoked furiously, and wrote 10-20 pages of something most of his adult life.  Was he there?  No: he was cruel, he was angry, and in my own moral cosmology this means inherently that no, he was not there.  He did not think he COULD be there, and one could perhaps look at his entire life’s work as an extended rationalization of a failure necessitated by being stupid. Or, put more precisely, by being unwilling to allow his emotions to percolate, process, and “rationalize”, both due to inherent lack of deep awareness, and due to lacking a METHOD.

I am superficial and ignorant enough to take the two as types, the first of Fascism, the second of Communism. In Heidegger’s case, he had “feelings” for Nazism.  After his initial infatuation he lost his enthusiasm, but he in my understanding never resigned his membership, and never fully rejected the Nazi project.  How would he have conceived the Nazi project?  The formation of Home in conditions of existential confusion. (again: I am not well versed on this topic, and am perhaps projecting as much as analyzing, but I still think this basic project is useful).

Hitler, in my view, was a much better man than Stalin.  Objectively, Stalin killed more people–particularly once one factors in the Comintern and its role in mass death the world over, not least through leading agent Ho Chi Minh, and the mass deaths he facilitated throughout Indochina.  But more importantly, Hitler was capable of at least loving ideals.  I don’t think anyone capable of such atrocities would be capable of loving actual people, but Hitler clearly operated from a wellspring of deep emotion, which is what made him such a powerful orator, and charismatic leader.  He truly loved his vision of the German people, and he truly wanted what was best for them, as he conceived it.  He wanted for them wealth and power, and security and stability.

Stalin had none of that.  He was a calculating machine, which loved no ideal, wanted no concrete outcome, had no attachment except to power for himself.  He recognized no truth outside of power, no reality outside of power.  He had no love for the Russians or any other nation.  He rejected his homeland of Georgia in rejecting his name.  He had no place, he wanted no place, he dreamed of no place for those he “led” through abuse.

I repeated a claim a few weeks ago that Camus was murdered.  I wonder if Stalinist Sartre knew of this, if in fact that is what happened?  He would not have cared, would he, since his whole life was rejected in the course of his arguments as to why and how he and no one else could exist, despite his furious and sadistic exhortations that that was the “essence” of life, to the extent it had one.

I am a Liberal.  Period.  To my mind, adding “classical” is to accept the lie that modern “liberals” are anything but people who do not exist, and so must grab power in the name of others to protect themselves through power from the lie at the core of their beings.

I reject, of course, Fascism.  I simply reject even more strenuously the creed that Obama and others seemingly still carry, which has no love, no life in it: nothing but lies and death, moral and physical.

I have been doing eKum Nye level 2.8 for some weeks, off and on.  This is the 18th, if my math is correct, module I was emailed after enrolling in the program.

This level includes a very simple exercise, called Heart Gold Thread, which seemingly has a very powerful ability to evoke latent emotions.  Now, the previous 18 or so lessons were a lead-up to this lesson, and it is my understanding it is best to open up other energies nexuses before doing this exercise (consult your physician, astrologer, priest, tarot cards, best friend, chance before trying: I’m half serious, because I can’t claim at this point to know how any of this works), but I will describe it and my own experience.

You simply stand, feet about 6″ apart, and slowly raise your arms, palms down, to slightly higher than shoulder level, and stand there for 10 minutes.  Working up to 25 minutes is a desirable goal.

Needless to say, I hope, your arms get tired and painful.  I have very strong shoulders, but I also have large arms, and 10 minutes, I would assume, is a lot for nearly anyone, at least until they build up.  It seems after a few minutes an impossible task.  I have to lower my arms even now a couple times.

Nothing happens for some period of time.  You are just standing there, wondering what the point is.  You close your eyes, and in a strict iteration put your tongue to the back of your teeth, open your mouth slightly, and try to breathe evenly between mouth and nose.

I don’t know if anything will happen–good or bad–for folks who have not done preparatory work, and would again encourage folks to sign up for the whole program at http://kumnyeyoga.com/e-kum-nye/ ,but in my own case particularly when my arms started getting wobbly, and I decided to keep them up there anyway, powerful emotions would after a time rush through, so strong I wanted to yell: feelings mainly of fear, but also sadness, and occasionally calm.

And like any Kum Nye, you just stay with the feeling.  You let it burn.  You tolerate it, knowing it will not last forever, but that it is or was a part of you that was holding you back, keeping you from manifesting something better.  You embrace it, welcome it, thank it.  Whatever its role was at one time in your life, it was useful, protective, needed.

It is very literally like emotional housecleaning.  It is getting into the corners and attic, and just seeing what all is there, and letting what you don’t want manifest and then diminish.  This process is still on-going.  I am going to start the next level today, but will continue to do this every evening, probably after doing my Emwave 2 for ten minutes, which seems to be beneficial.

So often people feel a sense of powerlessness because knowledge is power, and they lack knowledge.  Most of what you need to know does not consist in “be nice”, despite what our educational system would have you believe.  Being nice is the consequence most of the time for people who are emotionally healthy, with the only exceptions being when it is inappropriate.

The dictum “be nice” is soulless, devoid of meaning, devoid of POSSIBLE affective depth.  In our world we are taught close to nothing about how to become deep, meaning-full human beings.  We are taught how to describe our emotions, but not how to feel them, how to be present now, so that some new present can manifestly (forgive me) presently.

Our culture is weak.  We lack the TOOLS needed to become otherwise. I submit this is one possible such tool that is virtually unknown.

Sadomasochism is the result of it hurting more to tolerate the pain of freedom that to endure either the pain of separation implied by cruelty, or the manifest pains of masochism, which include the overt loss of freedom.

Now, I want to be clear that I mean much, much more than simply sexual sadomasochism.  I see the rejection of freedom all around, and very definitely within me.  I look at my own psychodynamic history, and there was simply no room for my own healthy development of a self.  It was not just not encouraged, but very actively discouraged–punished is the word–in ways I was completely unable to see at the time and for a long time since.

But I feel, I think with some cause, that this basic process is common.  A great many people fail to fully individuate: it is a process of spiritual growth, and our society more or less conflates growth with careers and money, neither of which matter when one is simply acting as an automoton, acting on programming, understanding and truly choosing on a deep level nothing.

Plainly, in many ways we are constrained, as many silly people love to point out.  Yes, of course, there are genetics and family and social milieu.  In principle, this is not in any way a different constraint than that in other days assumed by the process of a deterministic astrology.

What I have stipulated often is that we have the freedom of “non-statistical coherence”, that of making choices which define who WE choose to be, choices that may be small, but put us in a different slot than the one for which we were destined, and that choice can include fully ACCEPTING the path we are on, embracing it, making it our own.  There is a space we can perceive, and in which we can feel freedom of being.  I have sensed it many times.

All evil and all good comes from this process.  Evil is simply the rejection of freedom at the root emotional level, regardless of what the mind says.  As such, it is a rejection of existence outright, both that of oneself and by emotional implication that of others.  At a root emotional level this contradiction between the fact that one is alive, and that one cannot LIVE causes both all manner of cruelty, and toleration and even embrace of that cruelty.

I saw all this in a dream.  I have interesting dreams.