Moderates United

I’m trying to take this idea of Movie Yoga seriously.  He makes the case that even the most horrific violence can actually be cathartic, if you lean in emotionally, rather than zone out; if you allow the scenes to affect you, see what rises from the depths of your unconscious, and then accept and integrate, affirm and bless, those contents.

So I decided to watch two horror classics, Saw and “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre”.  I watched Saw last night.

As I process it, several plot elements come to mind.  First the emotionlessness, the passionlessness of the doctor.  Even as time is ticking, he is acting as if he has all the time in the world.  6 o’clock comes around, and he is surprised by it.  ONLY when he can no longer act, does the full weight of urgency strike him.

For his part, the kid is hasty.  The movie is bookended by the key he lost in his haste to get the recorder.  Interestingly, had the doctor been on his side, his plodding approach might have won him the key.  But of course the murderer knew that.

It occurs to me that all the characters in the movie have classic hamartias, and that Horror in some cases might be viewed as a species of tragedy, complete with catharsis.

In Movie Yoga, he makes the case that life is characterized by constant death and rebirth cycles, which have four main components: complacency/safety; being forced from safety, but unable to move, being trapped; energetic motion away from the forces oppressing you, running from them, fighting them, and eventually moving towards something; and finally freedom, a completion of the journey.  There are of course numerous examples of this in the Lord of the Rings.  One he doesn’t mention is the womb-like pseudo-safety of Helm’s Deep, and the final need to press out, to forego defensive barriers, in order to win the day, which of course happens at dawn.

This series of steps echoes the physical birth process, which Stan Grof argues is a very important element in everyone’s psychosocial development.  Parts of ourselves can be stuck at each stage, with following life consequences.  The goal, of course, is to facilitate movement, with the idea being that sufficient movement will erode barriers preventing us from consistently being able to travel through to freedom and stay there.

But back to Saw.  I was watching myself, and when the movie started, I was acutely feeling their confusion, panic, anger at confinement, and an overall sense of anxiety.  I found myself standing while watching it.  What was going to happen?  And I identified with the doctor’s final panic attack, when he realized how his passionlessness has put his wife and daughter in grave danger.

And in the end, of course, he failed.  There was nothing he could do when he finally chose to do something.  But we the viewers did not fail.  We can learn from his lesson.  We can learn to value life more, and to live with more passion, more connection, more vitality.

In some respects Jigsaw acts as a deity in the Greek sense.  He even wears a pig’s head, and dresses as a priest.  He acts as a daemonic spirit, where daemon can mean god, demon, fortune or fate.

He is evil, of course, but the point of the movie is to interact creatively with it.  What do the events on the screen teach US, the viewers?

It is worth noting that Greek tragedy is quite violent.  Cannibalizing children, incest, rape, and of course murder feature prominently, particularly, I read, in tales concerning the House of Areus.

I have work to do, but will likely post something on the Texas Chainsaw Massacre after I view it.

 Posted here: http://prospect.org/article/sex-economics-and-austerity#comment-20506

It is as interesting that someone should try to defend Keynes via his homosexuality as that one should attack him.

Reality is simple: you cannot spend more money than you take in forever.  You cannot borrow money forever.  You cannot borrow or spend your way to prosperity.  We borrow over $1 trillion dollars a year, and interest ALONE on our national debt will soon exceed the Pentagon’s budget.  These are not “right wing” speculations.  They are facts,  Period.

Further, the more important aspect of Keynes personality we need to look at is his lifelong association with radicals like Leonard Woolf, Lytton Strachey, and most ominously George Bernard Shaw, who was one of the first people he wrote when completed his masterpiece of BS, the “General Theory”.

Read the last chapter of that book.  What is unmistakeable even for an average mind is that he was Fascist, and I mean that in a technical sense.  He wanted potential government control over all aspects of economic life, with large, supportive corporations to be left alone as long as they toed the line.  He praised in his lifetime the economic policies of Adolph Hitler.  He in turn was praised by Benito Mussollini–the former Communist who came up with the name “Fascism”, kids–who called Keynes ideas “pure fascism”.  Yes, that is a quote.

Why were he and his Russian wife allowed to travel the Soviet Union without supervision?  Because they were regarded as ideologically safe.  George Bernard Shaw praised both Nazism and Communism, and there is no reason to believe Keynes did not share his fundamentally elitist and amoral worldview.  Keynes simply thought Fascism was more intelligent.

People like you are ruining this world by stupidity, by allowing vicious and evil human beings to continue their quest to destroy all semblances of a truly Liberal political order, and all traces of anything approaching honest morality.

You know, the sun you see today is not the same sun you saw yesterday.  Both the sun and your eye have changed.

The opposite of an opposite is a continuum.  Non-duality does not preclude the existence of difference.

And the point I wanted to make here: all vices and virtues exist uniquely and in dynamic ways for all people.  The way I express vanity may differ in small but significant ways from how you express vanity.  The way I indulge anger may differ from how you do.

Practically, what this means is that it is easy to blind ourselves both to our virtues and our vices, because they do not exist in us precisely the way we seem them–or feel we see them–in others.

If I admire the courage, say, of Achilles, but do not express it in his way, does not mean I am not brave.

If I resent the egotism of another, that does not mean that it has not found a place in me, and nestled comfortably in some dark place in me I refuse to see.

I find the process of self discovery–which in many respects is also “other discovery”, because it facilitates deeper connection–endlessly fascinating.  Some may see this as self absorption.  Maybe they are right.  I don’t know.  Likely, the final answer is

Per the recommendations in the book Movie Yoga, I rewatched the Lord of the Rings over the last few days. I own the movies, and have watched them a number of time.  I will share a few thoughts.

First, it seems to me it would be useful to use the same practice I use in dream interpretation in Movie Yoga.  In what way does EVERY character represent some latent aspect in you?  Can you say you are fully without hunger for power?  That you have abandoned all slavishness in you?  That you always use moral reasoning and empathy in all your decisions?  Or, conversely, do you not have untapped potentials expressed by the elves and wizards?

Secondly, I have long wondered about the extent of the macabre in Tibetan Buddhism, such as the ritual use of human bones, and their practice of cutting the bodies of their dead into pieces and feeding them to vultures.

Like most people, I have long separated myself from evil.  Hell, I have a site dedicated to the exploration of Goodness.  Can we really say, though, that evil is out there, and not that it is a quality of energy which is always present to our experience in potentia?  It is always RIGHT THERE, waiting, as is Goodness.

When I watch movies, they start trains of images flowing, some from the movie, many completely spontaneous.  It is literally like watching movies my unconscious is creating as it goes.  Sometimes it is interesting, sometimes not, but I have learned to watch, as there is always something which some part of me is trying to make conscious.

In my meditation, I had images of cannibalizing Gimli.  Now, I like Gimli as well as anyone, so what was this?  It is rage.  Achilles, after he had wounded Hektor, told him he wanted to rip the flesh from his bones and eat it raw.  This imagery–and historically in practice–this has been an Ur-image of primal bestiality and anger.  This means I am tapping into some unrecognized spot of rage, primal rage.  This is a good thing.  Kum Nye literally means “massaging the emotional/spiritual body”, and what I found was a pocket of tension.

Immediately after this image, I had images of Saurumon laughing and smoking with Gandalf, in an open spirited and happy way, in a time long before his fall.  I had images of Gandalf showing a bad temper in his younger years.  We see him only after he has conquered that bad habit.  I saw that many of the soldiers for the Rohanese and Gondorians beat their wives and abused their children.  I thought of an imaginative book which radically rethought the Lord of the Rings, by telling it from an orc’s perspective: http://www.salon.com/2011/02/15/last_ringbearer/

It seems to me that only by embracing our capacity for evil that we can see clearly, that we can finally purge ourselves of it; or, as I should put it, perfect the process of purging ourselves of it daily, by learning not to cling to ideas, habits, or emotions.

We can posit, I think, that the heart of existence is joy.  This is what the mystics teach us, and I believe it.  What prevents the emergence of this truth is a protective coating of habits, which the Buddhists and others have described in great detail.  One of these habits is rejecting experience, rather than diving into it, and bobbing back up.

Now, what I am describing can of course be abused, and is not suitable for people who are on the edge.  But for those with strong wills and solid reality testing, it is quite interesting.

During my cross country trip, I listened to the 12 hours of Greek philosophy, 6 hours on Buddhism, and 6 on the Iliad.  I am sensitive by nature, when I want to be, and wow many impressions were left. 

I will say that I used to want to catch ideas the way you catch a butterfly, to cage them on a page somewhere.  I decided recently to stop that, to watch them come and go, and if I miss a few, so be it.  Whatever is important remains within me and will come back at the appropriate time.  Many of the ideas I had on the trip in reaction to these lectures I have lost, but some keep reappearing.

One is that we could with justice point to our current social problems as grounded in mistakes made by the Greeks.  For one thing, they neglected the role of the body in perception.  There is no equivalent in the Greek tradition to sitting meditation, that I am aware of (some, say Pythagoras, may have had it, but if so, they did not speak of it).

For Aristotle and Plato, living–loving Truth–was synonymous with thinking, with thought, with the efforts of the brain.

But so much of life is NOT thought.  There is a passage in the Tao Te Ching where Lao Tzu says something like “how do I know this is so?  Because of THAT.”  That is him pointing to something real, which cannot be confined to the book.  What is a liger?  I could Google it, or, if one was in the room, I could say THAT.

In the lecture on Buddhism someone was asked if some thing or other was true or not true.  He did not answer, and was considered clever for it.  What is the sound of one hand clapping?  One accepted answer is apparently to clap with one hand without saying a word.  As far as I can tell, to the extent koans have ANY utility, they are to point to the incompleteness of language and thought.  You could do that equally by relaxing in a wonderful bath, taking it in fully, then pondering briefly the futility of attempting to render your experience in words.  You can either evoke from others imaginings, memories, or simple images.  Not even the most simple experience can be fully rendered (as animal fat is rendered) into language.

So what make language the measure of all things?  I am of course only one of many to ask this question.

There is something inherently reductive about the requirement that action be based on logic.  Logic is only a part of ourselves, and very much one of the least important aspects of our actual experience, of life as it is actually lived experientially.

How do intellectually deranged people like Richard Dawkins come into being?  By making the use of logic the ONLY means of approaching truth, and simultaneously making the apprehension of truth the only purpose of life.  Materialism is not a scientifically sound doctrine.  Matter, as far as we can tell, does not “exist” in any final way, and our best guess is that our own consciousness–or some supreme consciousness we may as well call God–is what causes the latent to manifest, for the world to exist.

But only within a materialistic, which is to say energetically static, standpoint, can we say all the questions have been answered, all the problems solved, the nature of human existence solved, using logic, and only logic.  You cannot perform logically sound operations upon fluctuating premises, such as the stipulation of a  connection between cause and effect within our own perceptual domain, in ways that can be measured.

My brain is tired.  I did not exhaust this theme, and am not quite sure I hit the points I wanted the way I wanted to, but I’m going to stop t

I recently listened to a 12 hour treatment of Greek philosophy.  I had many reactions, of course, most of which I will likely never post here (that is another topic), but did want to find that I found Socrates’ thoughts on writing his ideas down interesting.  Effectively, his position was that ideas live, and that writing them down calcified them in some way, such that they could no longer interact with others in a living way once he was dead.  Dialogue was no longer possible, and he preferred being forgotten to being misunderstood. 

This is an interesting perspective.

Is not all writing dead, and resurrected by the reader?  I was wondering about some of my own writing, and how I would respond to questions about it.   I would have to rethink myself to the place where I wrote it, which I hope would be regressive, since I would hope I have grown since then (yesterday; five minutes ago).

Each resurrects writing in their own way, even the author.  I myself can’t remember what I believed 5 years ago, not in detail.

Can there be an honest writing of the future?  I don’t know.

Talking out loud again.  May make sense, maybe not.  Gibberish is sometimes the idiom of the open.

I would like to define Spirituality as I understand it as “The perfection of normality.”  Is it normal to feel desire when a heterosexual man sees an attractive woman?  Of course.  My spirituality simply offers him the choice of using that normal, natural desire to further his own spiritual growth by chasing her around, or to let it go immediately as not compatible with his current goals.

Anger, sadness, jealousy, greed: none of these are foreign.  None of these are abnormal.  What I would submit, though, is that it is certainly useful to believe that happiness is our natural state, and in point of fact I think this is actually true, in an absolute sense we will be able to see when we pass on.

Our task is to follow a path laid down for us to happiness, which travels through, and attains familiarity with ALL, the side routes of all the normally unhelpful emotions.

I have more to say, but I feel it won’t quite come out right at this time, so I’m going to go watch some more of the Lord of the Rings, and keep testing out my Movie Yoga.  If it works out, I’m going to compete in the Regional Serenity Contest next month.  I think I may even be able to make Nationals. (h/t to the Onion.  That link is pretty funny.)

I just finished a very interesting book called “Movie Yoga”, by Tav Sparks, who more or less runs the official Holotropic Breathwork training.  The premise is that movies can act as triggers for deep latent nexuses of emotional tension, which if accepted and acknowledged, if allowed to flow freely, will loosen deep knots within our psyches, and allow the normal and natural flow towards wholeness with which we are all born.

I think he is right, but that he does not go far enough.  It seems to me that we all crave direction, and in the moral sphere the only directions can be away from or towards our moral goals.  A personality based on a chosen goal is characterized by a deep qualitative order I have called “Telearchy” which provides a sense of relief and freedom in and of itself from the burdens of confusion, self pity, and an unstable sense of what to do in life.

Within (W)holotropic Breathwork, the goal is definitionally Wholeness, and the means of moving towards it the liberation of what they term the Inner Healer.  For those who are hurt–pretty much all of us–release from the prison of self defeating, deeply imbedded, generally unconscious behavioral and emotive patterns is wholesome, invigorating, and useful.

Doing my meditation this morning, though, it occurred to me that if a wound is concave emotionally–if it represents the intrusion of the outside world in such a way that a permanent change has been affected–then there ought to be the emotional equivalent of a convex curve as well.  We can in fact intrude into the world, from the inside out.

Joy, as an example, can be infectious.  Optimism, love, excitement: all can be spread.  What you need to do this is a superabundance of these traits, such that you are not only not deficient in them, but so profoundly filled with them that you cannot but spread your abundance.

In my view healing wounds is only half of what humans are capable of.  We are capable of becoming human dynamos, sources of light and healing energy.  I have at times felt strong currents flowing through me, and my goal is to build this flow as well as I can, which in my case will first consist in meeting my own emotional needs well enough that I am never an asshole (a counterfactual statement, regrettably, at the moment), and that I am able to achieve consistent congruence between thought, word and deed (also not currently a salient element in my own life).

I used the word guru in one sense a few posts ago. I will use it in another way.  Let us suppose that everyone is emotionally wounded, or at least incomplete in some way.  They are not sufficient unto themselves.  They cannot act as radiant lights without context, without emotional support, without people who understand them.

It seems to me there is a limit to what can be achieved within a mass of people, each of whom needs some section of the others for optimal functioning.  Do there not need to be those who are “self-born”, who regulate their own destinies, who can give without taking?  I feel there do, those who can move but not be moved.  We might follow Aristotle, and place their final reliance on God, however we define the referent of this word. I am fine with that.

Such people, though, I would also call “heavy” (guru), and certainly teachers.

I had a mild synchronicity with this word yesterday, which I will not discuss.  For reasons completely inscrutable even to me, I am sending it out here.

If I have any long time readers, you will have noticed I am sometimes almost completely self indulgent, as here.  It is needed sometimes, for all of us.

Somewhere in the Tao Te Ching it says, approximately, “the ten thousand things rise and fall without ceasing”.  This has long been my go-to quote for dealing with change, or really difficulty of any kind.  I recently taught it to my oldest, who found it interesting that something 2,500 years old would still be relevant, and in this case, helpful in dealing with constantly shifting high school social terrain.

I don’t know why, but I get this picture of this vast ocean, and countless things bobbing up and down.  In that vast space, my own ups and downs feel less important, and in any event it is in the nature of the world that what once was, will soon enough be no more, and what was not, will soon enough come into being.

You can shrink from this, or shine a bright light on it and welcome it.