Moderates United

Everybody wants to be around people who make them feel better.  Even misanthropes and hermits–people I can relate to–want connection; they just fear, based on experience, that people will make them feel worse, which is why solitude is preferred.

Here is my question: are you a fulfilling person?  If you want to be fulfilled, if you want satisfaction, and you are not BRINGING it, then how are you anything but a thief if you are taking it?

I think many people do fall in [a mutually reinforcing narcissism], then  fall out of a [mutually reinforcing narcissism].  Some sing songs about it.  But that is not love.

How can you improve what you bring to the table?  How can you become overflowing with gifts?  If you want satisfaction with others, this is a good, perhaps primary question to ask.

If you have no answers, I will suggest starting the eKumNye program.  Or do a Holotropic Breathwork workshop.  Those are what have worked for me.

Here is what has not worked: Progressive and Autogenic Relaxation (although as I undo emotional knots I am going revisit particularly the Autogenics, which I feel had a great deal of therapeutic potential; I just have not been able to relax enough to get results); yoga; self hypnosis; NLP; Feldenkrais (which has a great deal of merit, I think, but does not strike at the emotional root of things); pilates; martial arts (Ninpo Taijutsu); various workout regimens; self help books; psychotherapy; time in nature; drinking; pot; sex; other forms of meditation, including Zazen and mantra meditation and probably other things I am forgetting.

Nothing helped me as much as Kum Nye and Holotropic Breathwork, both of which started with the insight that you have go through the emotions, to process the emotions of your trauma.  Talking about it does something between nothing and make it worse by making it permanent.  To process, though, you have to have a method.  These are methods.

I agree with the fundamental principle Zig Ziglar articulated, that we are all “born for success”.  Why, then, do so many of us live lives that are far less than we are capable of?  It is not a lack of time, or in general a lack of opportunity, or even the ability to SEE that opportunity.  It is a lack of patient, daily, goal directed, coherent, organized behavior.

This morning, awakening from a night on the town, I stepped back from a cycle I now see in myself.  What I realized is that if you terrorize a child ONCE in a beating it does not have the emotional maturity to understand, that child will internalize that beating and make it a part of a recurring cycle.  It will cycle between the bad and the good.  It will “beat itself up” both in obvious ways like excessive self criticism, and relationships that are in part masochistic and unfulfilling, but also in more subtle ways through lowered expectations from life globally, generally.

You can’t live in that place where you were crushed forever, so you leave it, and have moments of relative happiness, but since the original pain was unexpected, and you don’t know on an unconscious level what to expect from the future, you feel a sense of acute anxiety if the next beating is too far in the future, so you bring it on yourself.  You self sabotage, you learn to live in feelings of lowered excitement, you compromise.

And in my own life, I now see for the first time, I have cycled between the beatings and the emotionally dominant atmosphere, which was low level anxiety and emotional detachment.  If you compare to the beating, it is relatively more pleasant, so you feel you like you doing yourself a favor in leaving that place.  You can create, through cycles like this, the feeling that your life, on balance, is in balance, that you are doing well, everything is fine, it’s all good, just a few bad moments here and there.  But you can be miserable because NOWHERE in the cycle is there AUTHENTIC happiness, love, joy, creative engagement.  You don’t have that reference point, so you don’t know you are lacking it. 

And I want to be clear that this has been the norm for human history for almost all people.  Almost everyone who has ever lived has fallen far short of their potential. What is unique about this time is we can shout this truth from the mountaintop without being crucified.

The purposes of life are to learn to love and be loved, and to pursue goals, purposive work.  Our goals are to learn to connect with others, and to connect with creation in a teleological way.  Life has these purposes, but they are sundry and appropriately pursued by all in their own unique and thus beautiful way.  It is the seeking and the finding that makes us unique.

I look around me, and I am not unique in the nature of my emotional scars.  On the contrary: people whose parents genuinely nurtured them to love and be successful are few and far between.  The only thing unique about my past is the extent to which I have engaged with it, found my centers of distress, and walked into them and asked for an explanation, and listened long enough to get it.

I have reached some truly deep places.  This realization is filling me, somatically, with anxiety, but it is the feeling of a poison I long ago learned to accept and ignore slowly leaving my body; a cancer being denuded of nutrition.  The fangs of the snake are being removed.  There will be few, if any, more injections, and I will walk down the road lighter.

I am feeling peace, and wish you the same, friend.

I would like to repropose an old idea, with a modification. To my mind the Germans have proven beyond reasonable that light transmision within the body is biologically important and coherent as a field. Their thesis is that cancerous tumors are parts of the body which have lost contact with this field, and are growing without intelligence. A tumor is “fieldless” organic matter.

We know that when light of certain frequencies is shine on any organic system, it reacts coherently, like it inhaled the light, then exhaled it. This is a principle piece of evidence for the biophoton theory, as dead systems do not react this way. They react just like the unintelligent mattet that ignorant claim we are made of.

Here is my idea: wherever the tumor is, find the frequency at which the healthy tissue responds, and take turns irradiating it, then letting it shine back out, in an analogy to breathing. Over some period of time it should reactivate the light sensors, and bring the diseased tissues back into the system.

Actually, I may have said this exact idea already. My brain gets full sometimes and purges files.

What seems CERTAIN is that no cancer cure  thst is more intelligent than a club and a knife will be forthcoming until scientists are willing to get beyond their dogmstic ignorance.

You cannot choose your emotions, but you can control your actions through the agency of will. Thoughts are actions, to some extent. Certainly you can suppress them, and repeat them.

I would stipulate as a general rule that if your emotions are not serving you, they are hindering you, and that if you are suppressing them you are losing a great deal of your action-potential.

I would stipulate as well that positive thinking only stimulates positive affect where it is already present.

Sartre claimed we could choose emotions, but I think he was emotionally constipated, and lukely a clinical narcissist.

I would argue that a religion is a social system concerned with preserving behavioral norm and beliefs, whereas spirituality is an individuslistic effort oriented around growth. Clearly, thete is overlap.

What got me thinking about this wasvthe Amish. Their child rearing likely does involve breaking the children “for their own good”. You build a peaceful society, but not one in which growth is encouraged. Rather, conformity is required.

Couple analogies:

Religion is to spiritusluty as Statism is to Liberalism.

If Statism is “one size fits all” (the nerd in me must reference “one ring to bind them”) then Capitalism is “what do you want, and how can Ihelp you get it?”

Free markets create countless creative liaisonsss between producers and consumers. That is why they work.

As a general principle, as a default tendency, is it useful or cruel to undermine in others comforting illusions (or at least what I see as illusions)?

Somebody posted one of these things where you pick an image then see whst it says about your personality. The five I read all fit me reasonably well. I pointed this out, then felt badbecause this is a method for making people feel special. It makes them happy.

I apparently figured out there was no Santa Claus well before my 5th birthday, so I cant remember wha it may have been like. I didnt want to raise my kids to believe in him, but I got outvoted and gave in. In my own life I hate lies, and Santa Clsus is a lie.

But perhaps I am a grinch. I have no answer her. Just thinking aloud.

If we take the metaphor of “fathering” to its logical extent, we have to admit that there are good, bad, and horrible parents. Albert Schweitzer had a fathet, but too did Joseph Mengele , Adolph Schickelgrubet, and Vladimir Ulyanov.

The metaphor does not take account AT ALL just how we are to weed out the good parents from the bad ones, and in practice, to state it tsutologically, those who seek power seek power. It was precisely to keep domineering and cruel fathers from gaining general influence anywhere that distributed system was constructed how it was.

If we imagine Communists as parents, they are domineering narcissists who not only do not want their children to develop, but who sctively seek to break their will so they become carbon copies of themselves. They beat their children severely, torture them psychologically, lock them in rooms all alone, and kill the ones who insist on retaining a personal sense of self.

On a lesser scale, consider Father Bllomberg: obesity is UP, not down. I predicted this. Adults can buy two smaller drinks rather than one larger. Thet can est more just to piss off their father.

No person lacking true empathy is fit to rule anyone.

Im sitting inAmish country, surrounded by beautiful rolling hills, the morning fog, watching buggies and women with bonnets on riding bicycles. It is easy to forget this America exists, where doors are unlocked, people are honedt and diligent, and even though most homes have a gun, very, very few are fired in anger. It is prceful like rural Switzerland is peaceful. When we hear constantly about how violent America is, we forget that in terms of land mass, most of America is like this. Where whites predominate, there is peace.

Yes, I went there, but you know I am right. When we compare the US with Canada or Europe, we are actuasly safer than some nations  like Britain, once you the statistics out for non-whites. Convenient or not, this is fact.

But it has not always been fact. For long periods of history, blacks were no more violent than we were. All the crime, all the blight, all the horror which stays mainly in their own neighborhhods, began when thecleft started trying to use blacks to get power, by pretending they cared. They did not care. They dont care now. Barack Obama would gladly set the ghettos on fire, if he could blame someone else, and get more power in so doing.

And culturslly, what IS the problem, today. Aside from the lack of economic opportunitied createf by asinine leftist ideas, on a deeper level blacks have not processed both the traumas of their past, or thrir PRESENT, in which for most violence is a constant threat.

Ponder this: is a pimp really that different from a slaver? Do they not assert, by threat of force, the right to the labor, body, and wealth of their thralls?

Here kiis an idea: before the black community can “grow up”, mature into a group of peaceful, diligeent, serious people, they will, emotionally, have to have a genuine alternative to permanent dependence. People like Barack Obama, in working to make this increasingly difficult, sre cursing them, not helping them.

It occurs to me as I look at my own emotional energies that the true toll of being molested is not so much the physical act, so much as being forced into an accommodation with someone CAPABLE of that.  The abused or neglected child is forced into a sort of Stockholm Syndrome.  It is all the time when you are NOT being molested, but being forced to act normal, being forced to live in denial, that truly causes lasting damage.  Authenticity and emotional honesty become impossible, and are quite often never again attained.

And in my own case I have always felt like I was molested, but I wasn’t, at least as far as I can tell.  Both my mind and my gut tell me I wasn’t.  But what makes sense to me is that the same sort of energy, that same combination of emotional detachment, and excessive clinging was present, and had a similar effect.

And I’m not sure why I’m using this as my journal.   I suppose the orthodox answer would be boundary issues, which I have certainly struggled with.

But in my heart, I do also wish humanity well.  I want everyone reading this to take courage in their own struggles, to see that many other people are secretly facing similar demons, and handing them an ass-kicking.

I used to debate leftists often.  I spent hours daily for a number of years, logging many thousands of hours in all.  I enjoyed the process of pounding them on the head because they were stupid.  I enjoyed shutting them down, which I nearly always did.  You can only defend the indefensible so long.

But as I grow, I see that I, too, was using this process to express anger, hurt, and cruelty.  My ideas were sound, but my approach was not.  The simple truth is that you cannot convince anyone of anything, in almost all cases, in an antagonizing manner.

The process was useful in helping me clarify my own ideas, but I am not that angry any more.