Moderates United

If I were to offer a universal blessing of the Buddhist variety, I would not invoke compassion at all.  I would say something like “may all sentient beings be gifted with appropriate work, and the capacity to enjoy it.”

We need to abolish this concept of final rest.  Relative rest is a necessity, but it is my belief that even when we die, there is work to be done.  Movement is in the nature of this half of the universe (there is in my belief another half, a latent half, and since all structure is latent there, so too is all movement), and we may as well get used to it.

As a side note, I would include loving relationships within the category of work.  You cannot simply exist with others.  You must give them your attention, your affection, your time.  It is simply work that is rewarding, and like work well done, it need not feel arduous, and can be quite pleasant.

I will add, too, that this thought comes about from reading about the smaller Tibetan Prayer Wheels.  They also chant various mantras, like Om Mani Padme Hum.  I was fiddling around with that one, and noticed that it causes my breath to come out in slightly different ways.  If we posit that much emotional “baggage”–undigested experience–is held in the chest and manner of breathing, then this mantra is a more or less physical intervention to help release it.  That is my view, at any rate.

We know so little.  So many of our supposed thought elite live in a wasteland and never go anywhere interesting.

What is class warfare–which is only in actuality ever waged by the State against those it considers undesirables–but cultural eugenics?  Nazism and Communism only ever differed in how they defined undesirable.  We view them differently today because the propaganda of one was unmasked by military defeat.  The other is trumpeted to this day from podiums across the nation, making moral clarity impossible for most.

We read Denmark is one of the happiest nations on Earth.  In my view, this is because the communities are of a size where people can feel like they belong; they have a common culture; and nobody is really poor.  I think one could even make the case that egalitarianism is an OUTCOME of moral development.  It emerges when a people is ready. If compelled, it is NECESSARILY violent, since inner growth cannot be forced.  You need to learn to see more, not less.

What socialists claim to want is a world where everything makes sense and everyone lives in harmony.  Yet, their first step–that of rejecting individual moral distinctions and the possibility of moral growth outside of their political program–makes success impossible.  Where moral growth is needed, they reject it, and at that in the name of morality.

The point I wanted to make, though, before my fingers go away from me, is that I had this pleasant image the other day of finding myself sleepless one night, and getting up and walking down to a local church, where they had these Tibetan prayer wheels.  I imagined seeing someone there, perhaps someone I knew, and walking around turning them silently for an hour or two until my mind settled, then going back to bed.

Practices like this are seen as “primitive” by some, and for my part I don’t think prayers get “sent” anywhere.  But how emotionally healthy is it to focus on good intentions from time to time for an hour or two in a community sanctuary?

The Chinese are evil.

I really am an odd, odd duck, aren’t I?  C’est la me.

Here is a better analogy for what banks do: they take a dime from a thousand people, and give it to the person receiving the loan of $100.  The person, of course, does not feel like the money has been stolen, so my analogy with a hold-up is not right.

But inflation saps wealth–even if so subtly that, as Keynes observed, not one man in a thousand can detect it in ordinary circumstances–and it is created, by and large, by the institution of fractional reserve banking.  Inflation happens when the economy is good because the banks are lending.  We have relatively low inflation now because they are NOT lending.  Simple.

Obviously, they create the money more or less from scratch, which doesn’t sap the wealth of anyone, UNTIL it circulates.

Once you learn to grasp what banks do, and how large the gap is between what SHOULD have happened, and what DID happen, it’s a bit like dropping into “They live“.

In my meditation the other day I saw clearly that the important part of sex is the emotional.  Feelings have an almost concrete reality, and when two people approach one another, they do it first emotionally, if they are going to connect.

Now, this is obvious, of course, but I really do think our culture feeds the idea that the act itself is what brings the pleasure.  In my considered view, masturbation is more pleasurable than sex with a woman with whom I am not prepared to also be emotionally intimate.  And in my view, many, many men are like that: they masturbating with a partner.

You can’t be fully emotionally present with another person unless you can get to the point where you can relax fully, and be intimate with your own being, your own reality.  I would take the affective states I reach in meditation over even the best sex 100 times out of 100.  Emotionally detached sex makes me sad.  I’ve had quite a bit of it, so I know.

On a related note, I got to thinking about the contrasting roles of the Parasympathetic and Sympathetic nervous systems.  The first is what generates sexual arousal, but it’s the second which is involved in orgasms and ejaculation.

It seems to me that in a healthy human the Parasympathetic dominates most of the time, as characterized, among other physiological markers, by a high Heart Rate Variability (you can look it up: the Heartmath website is a good place to start).  This means that sex is easy to enter, and arousal is easy.

I think there is a profound difference between the sexes, though, when it comes to this.  I think a high activation of the Parasympathetic nervous system is very important, and I think in our world most women, like most men are 1) beset with constant stress; 2) often feeling disconnected emotionally from their men, and quite possibly from their own feelings.

Men like to chase women.  Sexual activation for us is pretty easy.  But women have to be relaxed and happy.  This is of course something only an idiot would feel the need to say, but there it is.

Which makes me wonder about the phenomenal success of “50 Shades of Grey”.  The success of that book really does call for an explanation.  I have offered several, of course.  The whole essence of BDSM is assault and dominance by one party or the other.  Being tied up could only activate the Sympathetic nervous system, I would think. Or do they only feel the ability to relax when someone else is in control?  That may be getting closer.  Does it represent a more or less mechanical operation of the necessary nervous systems?

But it seems to me that however we interpret it, it is very hard to see it as emotionally healthy.

I will add a third point.  I was listening on the radio today to “Me and Mrs. Jones”, and wondering about fidelity, and relationships.

My old fashioned view is that marriage is a good thing, and should be for life.  For obvious reasons, I don’t think sex should be an end in itself.  I think the relationship, the friendship, should be an end in itself, with sex a means of deepening emotional intimacy and sense of connection.  Again, anything other than that and you are masturbating with a partner.

But so many people are restless.  So many men, in particular, don’t want to feel “trapped”.  And I am divorced, so I understand this feeling fully.  But would it not be USEFUL if we as a culture started, in large numbers, to adopt patterns of healthy emotionality?  Specifically, if more and more people would learn and use effective personal growth platforms like Kum Nye and Holotropic Breathwork and Autogenics?

In my view, all our problems would fall away–rather, we would both not create the problems in the first place, and what troubles remained would be more easily managed with sang froid and even enjoyment.

The Globalists, the bastards, think that humanity has to be pushed into a hole and fed bread and water for it to survive.  No, all we need to learn to do is be happy with less, and there are technologies for doing that.

But think what a marvelous tool for health sex is, within a happy, committed relationship.  You operate your nervous system from one end to the other.

Few thoughts.  Oh yes, of course I need to be somewhere, which is why I’m sitting here typing!!!

I think my practice of defining “culture” as persisting solutions to the problems of meaning, truth, structure of power, and economics is useful.  It is a heuristic, but one which I think covers the fundamental tasks of life. 

We all have to have a means of transmuting pain into something positive.  Work that is “meaningless” is unenjoyable.  Work that is “meaningful” is rewarding.

We need some sense of place or direction.  This is in part a function of meaning, but we also need a means of navigating our physical world.  Historically, truth has been passed down parent to child, in terms of how to eke out a living, what to believe, how the world is structured, what their role is, etc.

You have to have a system for dealing with disagreement, such that they are not resolved through violence.  As libertarians like to point out, quite often the solution winds up being on-going structural violence, but some system of rules needs to be in place and someone needs to enforce them.  In an optimal society, the rules are internalized and enforced with wisdom and diligence by each individual.

You have to have a means of feeding, housing, and clothing yourself.  Obviously, economic systems can range from autarkic subsistence to our current, highly complex system in which buyers, sellers, and manufacturers can each be on different continents.

The point I want to make here is that culture is a means for the creation and DISTRIBUTION of meaning, truth, power and wealth, and that in a free system the higher the quality of each, the greater the distribution.

As an example, Leftism is a cultural artifact of the 19th century, when it seemed likely that everything boiled down to atoms, and that life was meaningless.  As a reaction to this belief, it denigrated the previously assumed capacity for individual human moral thought and action in favor of a new oligarchic system based on the lie that the architects of such systems intended for themselves anything but on-going and complete power.

As a meaning system, it works for a certain number of people, but only those who are implementing and pushing the policies, not the people on whose behalf they are supposedly working.

As an example, Nancy Pelosi, although quite willing to cash the checks that come to her as a result of the power she has gained as a result of her politics, can also be assumed to have a certain sincerity in her belief that what she does helps the world rather than hurting it.  It provides a meaning and structure to her life.

But if one were to go to Hunter’s Point, in San Francisco, or East Palo Alto, what one would find would be masses not just of economic poverty, but of moral poverty, of meaning poverty.  Her meaning system has not been distributed, because it is based upon lies.

In an information-controlled country, which is much of America (since the complicit media have a large audience and are in a position both to kill stories they don’t like, and to spin the ones they can’t ignore), truth is not distributed.  It is hoarded by a small elite.

Power is hoarded with socialists.  Wealth is hoarded by socialists.

Hell, my brain is tired, for a variety of reasons.  I had not intended this as another attack on the most pervasive evil in our world.  The point was the distribution.  Do with these thoughts what you will.

Some of the ideas I’ve gotten from Kelly Starrett, particularly the use of lacrosse balls to smash open tissues, have been extremely helpful.  It has been an enormous support to my meditative and overall personal mental and emotional fitness work.

It occurred to me that just as all tissues in a body, when healthy, move with freedom, so too all the elements of our “personality” ought to as well.

It is an interesting thought that in large measure who we “are” is defined by our dysfunctions.  I would say that it might be a complete definition if we add “passions”.  We are what we chase, and what we fear. We are what we run to and what we run from.

Certainly, genetics plays a role, but just as all people can be taught to play basketball, even if most of them will never become relatively good, so too all people can feel all emotions, and experience all personality elements, even if some more naturally exhibit certain emotions like joy or sadness.

Unlike with basketball, though, I think through effective personal practice, substantially all the positive emotions can be opened up, and all the negative ones either silenced, or made manageable through an increase in digestive capacity.

In important respects, all psychological and spiritual work are are personality mobilizations through perceptual mobilizations; and following which are behavioral mobilizations.

As I look at my world through refreshing eyes, it seems to me our task is to embrace fully the anxiety, nausea, confusion, lust, anger, sadness and every other emotion that comes with living in a world in which we are confronted with an uncertain future.  Embrace it.  Find it, go into it, expand it, accept it.  This is the path of courage and of wisdom.  I feel that strongly.

What occurs to me, though, is that the need to find any sort of stable, unchanging structure or form is in principle a disengagement with experience.  It is a tacit recognition of an inability to digest change and confusion.

One of my many little sort of side projects was to address the most recent expression of an old need for control, John Gray’s book “Silence of the Animals”.  In it, he posits an ontology:

In a strictly naturalistic view — one in which the world is taken on
its own terms, without reference to a creator or any spiritual realm —
there is no hierarchy of value with humans somewhere near the top. There
are simply multifarious animals, each with its own needs. Human
uniqueness is a myth inherited from religion, which humanists have
recycled into science.(excerpted from here)

Has he not used the word “is” with regard to human experience, understood as an object?  Has he not made a foundational truth claim–a claim he generalizes to all of life, here and on other worlds–based upon his OPINION?  How can one speak objectively when one is not an object, when one is a subject?  And how can one speak at all AS an object?  We participate in our experience, both psychologically, and if we trust von Neuman’s logical extrapolation from quantum theory, quite literally.  We interact with the universe directly.

The Buddha posited Four Noble Truths, all of which related to what is IN HERE, in our experience.  The solecism of Western science has been to speak of truths OUT THERE, which can be brought IN HERE.  We can be thought of as machines, and treated as machines, but we are not machines.  Life is different than death.

The truth is we know very little.  If one looks at the outliers of science–biophons, NDE’s inexplicable by neuroscience, apparitions, the measurement of psi–then it is clear that if we are ever to do a strong ontology, it will need wait a LONG time, until all actually measurable human experience has been brought within normative scientific practice; until people calling themselves scientists allow all data which contradicts their cherished paradigms to enter their labs.

People who need to find a final conclusion are to the realm of possible experience what the Final Solution was to the Jews in Europe.  It is a crime against humanity, in my view.

This, to my mind, is the liberating aspect of the skepticism and emotional detachment that is supposed to characterize the scientific method.

But clearly we need a cultural and psychological complement to this mindset.  We need either somewhere to rest, or better ways of moving.  To my mind, the obvious answer is to rest in direct experience, which is what meditative practices like Kum Nye teach.  Rest in work.  Rest in the love of others.

Minds like John Gray are made mediocre by a lifetime of cultural insularity.  They are twisted by fear.  None of this is necessary.

Do we live in an age of partial affection?  I see so many married couples, so many committed relationships, so many friendships where the depth of feeling is absent.  We merely coexist, in too many cases, and props like social media, and for the younger texting, help spare us the full burden of this truth.

And in any event, what can most of us do about it?  We live in a superficial world, characterized by ubiquitous shiny little lives on our TV’s that are mostly lies.

Do you understand that the obsession the United States has with work and efficiency and progress is also the result of a type of propaganda?  The French, most of whom take off the month of August, view us as delusional.  In some respects I think they are right.

Are we more advanced than, say, a Plains Indian nation in the 1600’s, which lived in peace within their own communities, waged war rarely, and within which everyone felt ennested, welcome, a part of the whole?  In which traditions gave structure and purpose to the days, and the full reign of emotion–affection and anger–was possible?

It seems likely that certain globalists, certain narcissistic power elites, want to try to recreate something like a tribe on the global scale.  They can see it in their slimy little minds, but fundamentally, in the end, they are discussing and contemplating the fates of OTHERS.  They do not intend to descend to the roles the rest of us are to play.

I am being a bit–I don’t know what the word is–but I am in an odd mood.  Happy Sun-day.  Tomorrow will be Moon-Day.  And as a reminder, we are in the month named for Julius Caesar.  Next month it will be Augustus, and then the 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th months, in what is a quite odd arrangement, if one thinks about it.

How can one fully track all the relics of the past?  To do so, I suppose, one would have to be fully present now.