Moderates United

I like this movement system.  It is a really good way to get going in the morning, and about the most efficient system I have found both for basic core work, and for stretching out the major muscle groups.

Here is one link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjtslbrFbLY

Here are verbal descriptions of them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Tibetan_Rites

For the spinning, I have found that I can separate myself from the dizziness.  You pick a point you return to while spinning–like figure skaters do–and when you have done the 20 or 21 rotations, what I find is that the point keeps moving, like there is a wind moving, but that if you simply let the wind move, that eventually the dizziness disappears entirely.  I have gotten to where I can do 20 spins fast with almost no recovery time.

For the second, I like to raise my arms, too, to touch my toes.  That is not in there, but I like it.

This is my most basic exercise system.  If I do nothing else, I do this.

Here’s another video.  She is quite easy on the eyes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJElLrpBetc

I liked this column: http://townhall.com/columnists/starparker/2013/04/29/how-abortion-has-changed-america-n1579604

She says: “Let’s be clear that pro-aborts and pro-lifers differ on far more than
technicalities about when life begins. They differ about what life is.”  I agree.

She says: “It takes a certain deadening of the heart, of the soul to read the
description of the little baby clasping his fingers and toes as the
doctor jams his scissors into his skull , and still believe this should
be permitted.”  I agree.

We need to be clear about the logic of the “pro-choice” movement (quotes, because one half of the people involved gets no choice): there is no difference in principle between removing a woman’s gall bladder or kidney, and removing and killing a viable child.  This is the logic of “My body, my choice”.  This is the logic of Kermit Gosnell and those who defend him.

She says: “Since Roe v Wade, we’ve given birth to a new materialistic culture of
narcissism where reverence for life itself is gone. Life has become a
commodity and people use each other as cavalierly as they destroy
innocent young life.” I agree.

What was the logic of abortion choice?  That women would fare better when allowed not to have children they did not want, and which they somehow “contracted” from consensual sex that was done unintelligently.

What has been the effect?  Are women empowered?  Given that the most abortions are performed in poor black ghettos, it would seem not.  Can we say that killing thousands of little black babies every year is somehow improving our communal life?  Yes, the statistical likelihood is that they would have become de facto wards of the State, but this is only true because Democrats prevent all economic policies from being enacted which would likely generate economic growth in the ghettos.

I think Star Parker is right that tolerating abortion requires a coursening of the spirit, a hardening of the heart, a chosen violation of natural human instincts to protect and defend the defenseless.

In all my moral/ethical writings I talk about looking at the effects over time and across populations of certain types of behavior.  As I see it, this is the only wise, the only true way to get at the heart of morality, which is about elevating the human spirit, and increasing feelings of peace, joy, and belonging.

Abortion clearly does none of these things.  All one can say about it is that it provides economic advantages to irresponsible and frivolous people.  That is not a sufficient defense to warrant not opposing it, at least in most cases.

And to reiterate what should be patently obvious, there is no Constitutional right to abortion.  It is nowhere to be found, or even hinted at in the Bill of Rights.  Roe v. Wade in important respects paved the way for the patently unConstitutional Supreme Court defense of Obamacare.

Mediocrity creates mediocrity.   Stupidity and lack of principle can become habits, particularly when reinforced by vigorous propaganda.

Astonishingly, Obama has declared a proxy war on Christianity, in what is arguably one of the most religious groups in the country, the Armed Services.  Here is one link.

They hired themselves a bigot, who does nothing all day but hate on the religiously adherent.  What is the game? 

Obviously, in a general way, the goal of all Leftists (Cultural  Sadeists) is to destroy any coherent social structure outside the relationship of the isolated individual with the State.  Religion and tradition generally are both enemies to be destroyed.  As I have said, in my view the inner core of the gay marriage push is to denigrate and marginalize traditional family structures outright.  Gay marriage has NO history anywhere in recorded history, anywhere on the planet, and now we are supposed to consider it a fundamental right.  It is not.

Specifically, though, I think the Left has realized that for any coup to succeed you have to have the military on your side. There is no other way, and DHS cannot make up for this gap.  Logically, then, why not wage a war on religion, and by extension on all social conservatives?  By a process of gradual elimination, people more open to radical new political forms may take over the ranks.

I cannot say if this is an intelligent strategy, but it appears to be the one being pursued.  It would seem to me that a large backlash is quite possible among those who choose to stay in, particularly if ably led by senior command officers, who if capable of war-fighting, one would hope would also have the balls to defend the basic rights of their troops, which would include free social interaction, and the freedom to speak of religion, which has provided countless soldiers over millenia with much needed comfort.  Even the SERE books used to speak of the manifest and much tested value of a belief in God in surviving extreme situations.

Time will tell.

Buddhists posit three types of suffering–which as I have pointed out, consists both in actual felt pain, and unrealized, unsuspected, potential happiness/elevated experience.

The first type is what country singers and blues singers sing about.  It is poverty and following difficulty and resentment.  It is dishonesty in others.  It is being a double amputee.  It is hunger, both physical and emotional. It is all the felt sufferings of mind, body and spirit, which we call pain.

The second type is a sort of pooling of resistance and tension in response to change.  It is holding on to what is passing by.  It is disruptions in the smooth flow of breath because we want one thing to be true and not another.

The third type is the most subtle, what they call “conditioned existence”.  Put most simply, it is having a self that we want to retain, to hold on to.

I was listening to this series on Buddhism several weeks ago, and when he came to the part about conditioned existence, I inexplicably started sobbing, in a way I have not done in many years.  I was driving, and it was a bit inconvenient.  I nearly pulled over, but it passed.

Conditioned existence is feeling trapped by your history, unable to break free and fly.  It is in the very structure of your body, how you have learned to move in response to your particular psychosocial history. 

I watched a bird land on the very top branch of a tree last week.  Conditioned existence is that bird thinking that because it is on the top of the tree, that it has realized its full potential, and forgetting how to fly.
You can feel that shrinking, like plastic wrap in an oven.  Just because it is transparent, does not mean that it does not hold you.

We all live in cages.  We choose these cages because they provide our “four walls of freedom”, to paraphrase Merton.  But this is an illusion.  We were meant to roam open oceans, and fly in empty spaces.  It is fear that holds us back.  We create the walls. Those walls protect us from out there, from the knowledge of freedom.

I have been feeling like I am in a vast ocean lately, being tossed to and fro by waves.  We live in a world which even on the surface is in constant motion.  Often in my meditations, I find “memories” popping up of movies I have seen, which have the same or even greater emotive power than my own memories.  Who are we, if we consist even now in our inner core of someone else’s story?  Are we not, now, in large measure living someone else’s life?  And are those who create these stories, themselves, not living in world’s of fantasy?

The word guru, in Sanskrit, means “heavy”.  I have been feeling that I need to get deeper and deeper in this ocean, until I reach a point of rest, where the waves no longer move me here and there, often without me knowing, or even having any way of knowing, since there is no set comparison point.  Everything is in flux.  This is the experience of modernity, at least as they teach it in the universities.

What I have noticed, though, is that every time I do Kum Nye, something different happens, even with the same exercises.  Every time I start, I don’t know what is going to happen.  Sometimes it is very pleasant, and sometimes difficult emotions come out, like extreme anger. And it occurs to me it will ALWAYS be like this.

Part of the appeal of the Buddha in iconography (I will note in passing that the Buddha, in contradistinction to most Greek philosophers, is often, perhaps generally, pictured in his whole body, whereas the Greeks content themselves with busts; I will comment on this some other day) is his tranquility, the peacefulness and calm on his face.  We think to ourselves that he has passed beyond pain, to a state he can maintain without effort forever.  We think that you can finish the task of suffering on this earth.

I have decided this is an illusion.  The Buddha, rather than being in constant repose, was in fact in constant flux.  He accepted fully the vicissitudes of this life, and balanced himself relative to them a thousand times a second.  When he went deeply into meditation, what he saw was another beautiful realm in constant motion, and another realm even beyond that, beyond light, which itself is a form of gross matter.

The universe never stops.  Consciousness never stops.  Peace consists in accepting this.

The image I like is surfing.  A surfer can never master the ocean.  That is much too large.  What he or she CAN do is master the interaction, by consistently using to the fullest potential all the opportunities, the evanescent formations, granted them, in a skillful and diligent way.

I met the Devil again last night.  He tried to frighten me, tried to get me to join him, but I am far beyond that.  He does not scare me.  What I saw, though, is that he is the spirit of this world.  This Earth exists on a very primitive spiritual level, which exists as a proving ground for souls that need to learn basic lessons.  Just as a drill instructor has to be hard on his students, the Devil instills the possibility of all sorts of evils and temptations to humans.

I need him.  I need him as a goad to do better.  He is my ally, in important ways.  All that one can do in this world is offer an alternative to the status quo.  All one can do is offer an escape from the spirit of this world.  You cannot finally conquer evil, since it exists for a purpose.

Life is an adventure.  Every moment is an apocalypse and a new dawn.  Accept this, internalize it, then chase it like a child chases a kite.

Dzhokhar could be pronounced “Joker”.

Tamerlane killed millions of people.  Scholars estimate that his military campaigns caused the deaths of 17 million people, amounting to about 5% of the world population.

Were these two citizens?  It appears they were on student visas that they overstayed.

Tamerlan was married.  Here is a story about her.

I am waiting and watching this story.  It seems to me it is more complicated, in both the execution of the crime, and it’s timing, than two random, uncontrolled kids.  They feel more like a sleeper cell, activated for a purpose.  Was the handler the Saudi the Obama Administration immediately allowed to escape the country?

It is also clear to me that we already have plenty of safeguards in place.  These two, if they are not citizens, should have been deported the moment it became clear they were not students, and particularly once we were told by the Russians that they were implicated in Islamist terror.

As context, more people were killed in Chicago by illegal guns the week of the bombing than were killed in Boston.  As I have said before, the category of “terrorist” is no different in principle than that of criminal, with the vast difference that its use POLITICALLY is vastly different.  It makes for effective propaganda.

Finally: you have forgotten that a nuclear armed power was threatening to fire nuclear missiles at us, haven’t you?

Why turn the other cheek?  Does it help the other person?  Is it metaphorical?

Here is my take: our task is to eradicate fear entirely.  To the extent that we brace in advance for bad events, to the extent that we fight fights in our minds, we fear.  At their hearts, police officers and soldiers are some of the most fearful human beings on the planet.  And stupid hippie chicks some of the most fearless.

We KNOW, of course, that bad things happen to people.  Christ himself was murdered in a very unpleasant way.  If you live life recklessly, bad things become much more likely.

But for my purposes, I want to get what I call “the knife” out of me, by which I mean a defensive posture, a protective posture.  I read that Marines are taught to have a plan to kill everyone they meet.  This is precisely what I do NOT want, what is in me, now, and which I feel is interfering with penetrating to the emotional and spiritual depths which most interest me, which pull me, tantalize me.

There is a large, large world out there that can only be reached by consciously disarming ourselves, and walking naked and bowed.  That is my feeling.  I may change my mind, but that is what appears most real to me, now.

Never abandon either the rice bowl or the brush.

A month or so ago, I was doing my Kum Nye exercises, and it hit me that all possible conditions in others which I might find objectionable coexist in me.  Everything I need to recognize and change in myself I can diagnose by noticing what I react to in others. 

This was quite an interesting realization.  I am violence.  I am superficiality.  I am pettiness.  I am greed.

I can sit at a lunch session in Beverly Hills, with stereotypically superficial human beings possessed to the soles of their designer shoes with cupidity and vanity, and I am that (Tat tvam asi).

I am death and darkness.  I am cruelty.

Goethe once said, approximately, “nothing human is foreign to me”, and I think this is what he meant.

In large measure, what we call our character is our effort to separate ourselves from what is out there, from the dark, cold seas, and windswept mountains, and dismal, overheated bogs.  But we are that.

This is, I suspect, a closely guarded secret, for the simple reason that most people will not be able to process it, and because if you do not have a light shining through you, it is quite easy to get lost.

But the essence of true wealth is owning everything that is and could be.  This is a worthy happiness.

There is much I am not saying.  I may some day, and I may not.  If this is annoyingly cryptic, I apologize.

I have been busy the past few weeks, and of course have thought a great many things, which I will pass along sooner or later, but wanted for this moment to say this: it is perhaps best, in philosophy, to contemplate what will make you laugh the most, the most openly, and the most deeply.

In my view, it is contemplating how absurd we all are.  We are all packages of mistakes, vanities, pettiness, error, judgementalism, sloth (which even the outwardly diligent are generally guilty of when it comes to deeper thought), cupidity, and self satisfaction.

Look at those around you.  Find their flaws.  Then realize you have the capacity for those very flaws yourself.

I am not speaking theoretically.  I am not saying it would be desirable for people to think like this.  I am saying that in my own experience, all that is needed to calm the most robust conceit is honest perception.

You can love that which you are, can you not?  You are that.

I will expand greatly on this in a few days, weeks, something.  For now, I am going to simply enjoy watching my own absurdity and that of others.