Moderates United

Pursuant to my last post, I think Postmodernism could be summarized as “there is no problem because there is no solution.”  Put another way, that philosophers could stop worrying about problems of meaning because they weren’t problems at all.  They could simply talk and talk and talk, mainly about the process of talking, and because the very method they used was PREDICATED on failure, they never needed to worry that the process would end.

These people created nothing useful, and worked hard to destroy things–like common sense morality, as in the Golden Rule–that were.  Countless thousands of years and lives have been wasted on this drivel.

Another way of thinking of this might be “there is a problem, and we have a distraction: look at those shiny beads!!!”

Imbecility and irresolution.  The world is filled with it.

As I progress in Kum Nye, it is causing a considerable amount of pain.  I am pulling up things that were well suppressed.

As I think about it, the ability to create psychological numbness is an important protector of our sanity. It enables a sort of circuit breaker, after which you stop processing.  The down side is that you lose a part of your consciousness, your ability to be emotionally present.  The upside, though, is that you can keep going without killing yourself.

Here is the point I wanted to make, though, my ability, now, to access these layers is entirely dependent upon my complete confidence that there is an out, that there is an end, that at some point, if I only keep moving, only keep doing these exercises in a reflective and interactive, focused way, that my pain will end.

And I would generalize this.  I would submit as a general principle that the only way we can begin to process trauma is if we can see an end to the process.  It helps working with people who have endured something similar, and worked their way out of it.  They are models of what is possible.  This is why it is so helpful for fellow survivors of your trauma to be with you.

And this is the genius of the Buddha’s Fourfold Path, which states not just that “there is a problem”, but that “I have a solution, and here it is”.

Part of the problem of “Modernity”–which we might usefully define as “the disintegration of effective moral discourse through sloppy thinking and flawed models of reality”–is that it is stated over and over and over that “there is a problem”.  The essence of Existentialism is stating that there is a problem, then asserting there is no solution.  Angst is authenticity.  Not very attractive.

Effectively, this has meant that we have created an emotional crisis, then denied a way out.  No exit.  This can ONLY lead to, what?  Numbness.  Moral and psychological numbness. Making our present realities uglier, less rich.

This is the root, psychologically, of Cultural Sadeism. I am certain of it.

But there IS a way out.   All of my work points to it.  Ontologically, in how we “are”, the solution is in my view Kum Nye, perhaps with occasional Holotropic Breathwork sessions.

Cognitively, the answer is Goodness.  I have outlined what I view as a solid philosophical treatment of it, which I believe is internally consistent, useful, and not contradicted by any part of reality of which I am aware.

Scientifically, we have to integrate the empirical fact that reality is much more complex that solid bits of matter interacting with one another.  We are connected as spirits in intimate ways with the visible world, and our souls survive the deaths of the transportation vehicles that are our bodies.

Environmentally, we could put every man, woman and child on Earth into a house with a yard, and fit them in Texas.  The Neo-Malthusians, the Neo-Hysterians, have lied about the extent of the dangers we face.  There is no global warming, or at least no man-made global warming.  Resources are not running out.  We are not in danger of mass starvation. 

The people who created the panic NEED a crisis in order to justify their existences.  Again, they are in inward pain which forces them emotionally into numbness, which is manifested by abstractions which have as their outward aim the remediation of some alleged problem, and which function internally, in emotional reality, as vehicles for cruelty, which I have said many times is a sort of outsourcing of pain.  If you cannot feel your own, you seek it in others.

All of our problems, individually and collectively, have good solutions.  All of them.

In my personal view, based on what I read and what feels right to me, we choose our lives before birth.  I chose my life.  I chose my parents, knowing full well that it would cause me considerable grief and suffering.

What my parents taught me was invaluable, which is how to diagnose mental illness by what is NOT there.  We assume lunatics will act like lunatics.  We picture people walking around talking to themselves, or going on stabbing sprees, or making endless doodles on the wall, or cutting themselves incessantly.  We expect them to talk about voices in their head, or to see things that aren’t there.

But insanity has a curve.  There are grades of insanity.  And it is quite possible to under the thrall of very primal, very basic emotions, and to act quite genteelly, as George Bernard Shaw does in saying “Sir or Madam, please be kind enough to justify your existence.”  Do we not speak of “Shavian wit”?  Shaw was a functional psychopath.  He believed strongly in mass murder.  He supported Hitler.  And his plays are still performed often to this day.  His legacy has seen no reckoning.

What Shaw was missing was empathy, and its fulfillment, Love.  He was missing the most important emotion possible in a human being.  Seeking it, without being able to name or even imagine it, he came upon Cultural Sadeism as an ersatz moral compass.  He came upon something which does not exist, “Society”, and came to see in it all possible good, all possible moral development of precisely the sort he was incapable of.

I look at my parents and what I see are automatons, with as little true freedom as insects.  That is of course a gross exaggeration, but somewhere within them is a complex, or set of complexes, of unprocessed traumatic emotions, things they simply cannot integrate into their consciousness, which drive them, and which, to the point, prevent them from the exercise of true empathy, from truly being able to connect with an outside world.

And I see important and substantial similarities between the world I grew up in, in which everyone was expected to pretend they were happy even when they were miserable, and that which the psychopaths working to build a global socialist order want.  Perhaps that is another reason I chose my parents, to be able to see this connection.

Until you can truly and fully relax, you are much less than fully human.  Until you can take pleasure simply in existence, you are less than fully human.  You are insane.

In important respects, this in my view is what the Buddha actually meant by “suffering”.  You can’t know how trapped you are until you become free.  You can’t know what other emotions and sensations are possible until you feel them.

You have likely not heard of the book American Betrayal.  Read this review:  http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/09/26/Its-worse-than-a-conspiracy-it%20-s-consensus

Our social order is insane at the moment.  We have lost the capacity for basic moral reasoning, or at least a large segment of our populace has.  They live in a zombie world, where they recite propaganda.  Leftists–Moral Sadeists–have made it so they can say up is down, and people will nod their heads and go out and repeat it. 

Take Syria.  The “rebels”, most of whom are not Syrian, are cutting the heads off of Christians, and torturing children. They are literally cannibalizing their enemies.  None of this was happening under Assad.  All of this is new.

And Obama says “support them”, and people who have claimed to viscerally oppose war their ENTIRE LIVES now say that we should support Syria.  This is insanity.  This is a loss of moral agency, of the capacity for principle based behavior.

Prior to the last election I posted about a dream I had where people were voluntarily allowing themselves to be decapitated, in a ceremonial procession.  This process has been going on for a long time.

If you want to find zombies, look in our halls of allegedly higher learning.  You will find genteel, well dressed, polite, polished people who are INSANE, who justify by ignoring the slaughter of MILLIONS of men, women and children; who ignore the massive and predictable horror in South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia that followed our reckless and indefensible decision to abandon our allies there.

These people are not only still with us: they are running our government.  Why won’t Obama bend on Obamacare?  Simple: his vision is a totalitarian world in which he gets the massive narcissistic supply of being a dictator, and taking control of healthcare is only one short step in the direction he envisions.  Not only does he not care about the predictable and preventable suffering that will attend the idiocy that is Obamacare, he intends MUCH MORE.  He wants it to get much, much worse.  He won’t suffer.  His family won’t suffer.  And that is sufficient.

Do you think Fidel Castro has EVER cared about children being treated for cancer with expired aspirin?  Of course not.  He is a sociopath.  Functionally, so too is Obama.  So are all of these people.  These ideas make them like that.  They can rationalize in principle the destruction of principle.  They have found a way to discard all the advances of Western civilization, and fall back to the darkest periods of the human race, before any social order was possible.

And I want to be clear that OF COURSE they can found an order based on power and the fear of that power.  But that is not a social order.  We do not become more connected.  On the contrary: this is the limit of alienation.  This is making all human beings alone and solitary, without hope, without a sense of being.

In a formal sense, this is the essence of evil, because it is the polar opposite of love.

You likely did not see this: http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/princess-diana-assassination-plot-claim-2275500

I have long felt, based on a dream I had, that Diana was murdered.  Here it is alleged that a bright light was put on the car while in the tunnel, presumably while they were being chased and possibly sideswiped by an SAS team put on the task by the British royal family.

I have long felt Diana was either pregnant or considering it, even though if my memory serves she was 38.  I don’t know where this came from: the dream, a gut, or a thought.

But here is my point.  The British do not have a Constitution. They have a body of habit, a body of habit which technically still includes the House of Lords as a body with power, and which technically still recognizes the Queen as the Monarch of the domain.  As far as I am aware, she still has veto power over any legislation, and seemingly the power to command anyone to do anything she wishes, even if this power is never used.

Any criminal investigation is going to focus on the actual perpetrators.  But they are going to immediately point to orders, and the allegation is going to be that the orders came from the grandmother (or, at that point, I think it was the great-grandmother) of Diana’s children.  How far could any such investigation go?  Could it not be suppressed?

Here is the interesting question: one of them is in line for the throne.  I have spent a life not caring a whit about the British royal family, but I think it was William.  Surely HE, if no one else cares whether or not his mother was taken from him to protect the pride and pretensions of his own family?  Will HE initiate a serious investigation?  It seems likely the SAS members involved will still be alive.

My instincts fail me at times, but my gut tells me Obamacare has the potential to be the ruin of the Democrat Party.  Historically, because of their solid control of our institutions of allegedly higher learning, the trickle down high schools and lower, and most of the (m)ass media, they have been able to redirect blame for their numerous and patent failures.

But not only did Obamacare pass without a SINGLE Republican vote, without even so much as Republican INPUT in the conference meetings they were not invited to, but even now Obama is apparently going to allow a government shut down to avoid ANY compromise of even the slightest amount on this bill.  Even now, even when the looming problems are quite clear, and already in progress, they are clinging to this horrible piece of legislation, as if some miracle, some Deus Ex Machina, is going to somehow convince the American people that it is a good idea.

But this will hit people directly.  They will lose jobs, and coverage.  Their premiums will soar.  The Federal Budget will bloat even further.

Idiocies like Minimum Wage laws, unnecessary regulatory constraints on businesses, “Stimulus” spending and the like are abstractions most people don’t get.  You have to be smarter than the propagandists to see through their lies, and most people aren’t.  It is a source of embarrassment to me as an American that we even CONTEMPLATED putting Barack Obama in office, much less elected him twice. (Still, I look overseas, and see much MORE stupidity).

In this case, though, no amount of propaganda will get people their jobs back, their old coverage back, their old doctor back.  No amount of propaganda will put the extra money back in the bank that struggling families are now having to pay extra every month to cover their premium increases.  No amount of propaganda will explain how a doctors visit that used to be scheduled within the week, and work out to an hour of waiting, will now take a month, and occupy half a day.

There will be a clear Before and After.  Obama treats people as abstractions.  They don’t matter to him.  It is a matter of indifference to him if Obamacare actually works for the stated purpose, if it furthers his aim of centralized control of everything.  He has demonstrated a clear willingness to tell bald faced lies in support of Obamacare.

But he is lying in support not of a momentary policy initiative, not in support of something he can deny next week, but something which affects substantially all Americans in intimate and clear ways.

We may be past deserving freedom–at least enough of us to drag the rest of the nation down with them–but I think it is at least POSSIBLE that in the next couple years large numbers of people awake from their trances, and start seeing what is actually in front of them, instead of imagining what they were TOLD is in front of them.

One of the principle tasks of the child of a narcissist (or in my own case narcissists) is to develop a sense of self.  What do you like?  What do you dislike?  Nobody ever asked me that question with regard to the important parts of life.  I never asked myself.  Life became this very heavy, very unpleasant task of endurance, of tolerating deep and violent internal conflicts between the fake self I developed to fit in, outwardly, both in my home and the world, and an unknown, dark real self, which has within it the capacity for self expression, for taste, for opinion, for genuine, deep pleasure and communion.

It is very common for me, since in part I am trying to reconcile my own experience with that of others, to see to what extent my own tasks are those of others.  Pondering this, it occurs to me that in almost all times and place, in almost all cultures, the task of “self expression”–which in my mind is an almost defining example of American individualism–has been absent.  Only in the Renaissance, if memory serves, did people begin signing their work in Europe, and I doubt anything in Cambodia or Tibet, or a hundred other places has any names on it at all even now.

We are all unique, and my view is that our task is to learn to get in touch with our own sensibilities, and learn to be creative and loving in how we express them.  Only now, only in a time and place where the very real dangers and difficulties of life have been largely mitigated even for the poor, can we dream of a world in which everyone is afforded this opportunity.

There is so much hate in this world.  There is so much lying on the part of people who should know better, like our supposedly best educated.  This may continue for a thousand years, but it will not continue forever.  The universe does have laws.

As I start to wake up a little, I am more alert to the people I see.  I am watching the patterns of how they move.  I see slumped shoulders, people who look like beaten dogs, false excitement to hide deep unhappiness.

And it occurs to me that I don’t think true love is that common.  Within my own emerging worldview, love is a product of a very advanced, well integrated psyche, and it is giving with no expectation of receiving, simply because of the pleasure one gets from the act of building others up, and doing what you can to help them be who they want to be; in all cases accepting them fully exactly as they are, after doing the work to SEE them as they are.

This quality of attention is a very important part of love, I think.  Don’t we all often feel not just misunderstood, but overlooked?  Don’t you sometimes feel that whatever you think is best about yourself is invisible to many people who matter to you?

Often, I think people mistake psychological need for love.  For example, if someone says “I love you so much I can’t live without you”, to my mind that is not love.  It will feel like love to the person to whom it is said, because it says that they matter, that they are noticed. But in my own sense, if you need the other person, you can never have, paradoxically, the distance to do what is best for that person.  If you are unwilling to let them go, you are unwilling to grant them in principle the freedom to grow, and possibly grow beyond you.

I had a discussion the other day about “Fifty Shades of Gray” with a women, which she was rereading, for at least the second time, but likely more.  She read it as a love story.  I pointed out that in my understanding it was about sadomasochism.  She said that even though the main guy is really busy, he would schedule entire days with his woman, take her shopping (or whatever she wanted), and only then make his sexual demands on her.  For her part, she felt valued because he took the time out of his schedule, and she was also very intrigued by his emotional conflicts, and probably wanting to rescue him somehow.

And I got to thinking that maybe BDSM is really a form of focused attention.  Maybe that is what attracts people.  You get negative attention because you think that is all you are good for, but it is REAL attention, not made up, not fake.  That is all you have ever gotten, even if you lack the self awareness to frame it like that.

But this is an interesting thought: has any society existed ever in which true love was generalized?  Don’t most parents focus on acculturating the child by making them conform to preexisting cultural patterns?

Flip side: what is the downside to being raised WITHOUT dominant cultural patterns?

I’m just asking questions here.  I like to provide answers, but someone pointed out to me the other day that collecting really good questions is a valuable activity too.

First time you’ve seen that word, I bet.  I don’t know what it is about neologisms, but they amuse me.

My point: if, as I believe, all true healing and personal growth comes from within each individual, the only possible role for a teacher is helping that individual learn how to help themselves; and I think the better teachers–and here I have in mind as a prospective candidate a man about whom I know almost nothing as far as his personal life, Tarthang Tulku–instinctively realize that if they are not careful, they will become the focus of attention, and that the progress of people will be slowed if not halted outright because they are seeking answers from him, and not from themselves.  As far as Tarthang Tulku, he has given us a large tool set, building materials, and a blueprint.  What else can you ask for?  The rest is up to us.

As well, I think once you come to feel that the ideal is “out there”, to some extent it becomes unrealizable.  The extent of your possible freedom has been curtailed.  The better model is that it is in you, and simply, at the moment, hidden.

Obviously, there are always fools willing to lead fools, but that is a complex sadomasochistic dance that has nothing to do with emotional or spiritual liberation.  Can I say “a fool and his freedom are soon parted”?

I was sitting doing my Kum Nye exercises, and a feeling came upon me that has been increasingly regular lately, which is both that I am growing emotionally AND that this is a formal system for doing it.  People say all the time “I need to work on myself”, or they need to do such and such for “personal growth”.  I am all for Outward Bound or NOLS, or BOSS (I want to do that one). I’m all for, up to a point, sitting down and telling your problems to a shrink.  I don’t think it is a good method for healing injury, but it seems to work for some people.

But what I am doing with this Kum Nye practice is literally scheduling a time for me to do something which I expect, based on experience, will allow my emotions to flow more evenly, to generate increased calm and satisfaction, and which I have every reason to hope will one day allow quite refined states to flow through me.

Here is what Tarthang Tulku has to say: When we truly use our senses, every part of the body becomes alive
and healthy – mentally and emotionally we become fully awake. We
discover we can experience ecstatic beauty at any moment, as if we were
always hearing
beautiful music or seeing the finest works of art. We are even capable
of healing ourselves, for this relaxation quickens a feeling-tone that
itself becomes a self-generating massage, a system of self-nurturance
that expands and develops.

To be blunt, I think I have a pretty good BS detector.  I have been lied to many times, and I think I am reasonably good at spotting sketchy people and practices.

What I have experienced in my own practice, though, has born these claims out.

What I think happens with many people who are suffering from some form of emotional trauma (perhaps I should say, that is more than normal–or better yet, since we all experience trauma and need to to grow as people–UNPROCESSED trauma).  Start over: What happens for many people who are suffering from unprocessed trauma, undigested trauma, is they look for comfort somewhere. 

Drugs, sex, music and booze are always good candidates in the short term, but they have sizable downsides.  So you get into “spirituality”.  These are the ex-hippies chanting OM in the ashram.  They are the flaky New Age types who collect crystals (I should actually be honest and say I did have a powerful reaction to Scolecite crystal once, but only once) and obsess about astrology.

You talk to them, and there doesn’t seem to be a there there.  They are not actually following a spiritual path because they CAN”T until they process all the experiences that are frozen, glued, stuck in the mud inside of them, and their very practice prohibits the sort of open, casual, relaxed but focused exploration needed.  They also lack the technology.

I would submit that perhaps the first obstacle to a spiritual path is the believe that life is supposed to be easy, or that following a spiritual path will necessarily make life’s burdens lighter.  For some period of time, it may make them worse.  It is not pleasant accessing things you had neatly hidden away, locked from consciousness.  But you have to clean house to even START.  This is my firm conviction.  I myself have not even started.  On my best days I am getting faint whiffs of what a good beginning might feel like.

But I think once people are willing to do the work–and again there are countless people who profit from helping you postpone this work–they lack a good method.  I have lacked a good method.  Kum Nye is a good method.  I have done courses in Yoga, I’ve done Zazen, mantra meditation, “sitting”, and the like.  None of them hold a candle to this work.  Not even close.  Not in the same city, much less zip code.

Tarthang Tulku (who incidentally is apparently a big of a recluse, and who certainly is not in it for the fame or money) says, apparently in congruence with Buddhists texts, that Relaxation, Mindfulness, and Concentration are three different things, and that what would be an appropriate practice if you had already mastered, say, relaxation, is not if you are still struggling with that entry level barrier.  You are not only wasting your time (and this is my interpretation now), but making things worse.

Here again is a link to the programs. 

Actually, here are some free programs.

Try it.  Stick with it long enough to get results.  There could be no gift POSSIBLE greater than the ability to generate deep satisfaction at every moment, and that is the goal.  Actually, it likely gets deeper than that, since Nirvana is the end goal, but would that not be much, much, much farther than 99% of humanity ever gets?

Oh, I had an analogy too.  Growing feels like turning sideways to my life.  I was trying to figure that out.  Consider a giant cone, and that your life is traversing one level of the cone at a certain level.  You have a rut, and you go around and around and around, never looking up, and only occasionally looking down.  You understand down, since we all know people worse off or crazier than us (if you don’t, it’s you); but up is something too slippery to keep in mind too long.

Kum Nye is like looking up, and stepping up, to a higher groove, raising the quality of your experience.