Moderates United

Identity is a quality of feeling generated in perceptual and actual movement.  It is not a thing.  In general, it seems to me that if you are relaxed and engaged in something, you have an identity.  When you are sitting, worrying, you don’t, because you are by that very process preventing the emergence of the sense of identity, the quality of feeling that we call identity.

Now, obviously, you exist in time and space.  I am an American.  I was born in Texas.  I live somewhere, drive something, have dogs.  But my culture as it exists today does not “nest” me.  I am not surrounded by like-minded people who expect me to act a certain way, and who I can in turn expect to act a certain way.  This cultural cohesion is retained to some extent in rural areas, but almost entirely gone in large cities.  We are atomized.  We go into our closets at night and consume feelings projected from we know not where.  Do we feel the movie sets?  The actors when they are NOT acting?  The script writers dreaming up the latest sadistic murder, or punchline?

My intent with all my work is to help create something like a common culture, that people WANT to embrace, and which permits all sorts of creative, synergistic diversity.  But for the time being, we are largely on our own, to guess and make our way like children learning to walk.  This is not a tragedy, but an opportunity.  We are certainly in no way CONFINED by our culture.

That was point one.  The second, related point I wanted to make is that I think our personalities and following behavior patterns can be expressed as one or more wave functions.  People that are highly congruent only have one wave.  They are what I am terming monophasic.  I don’t know if it is the best word, but I’m running with it.  Most people are polyphasic: they have multiple competing selves, motivations, emotional energies.  They want and fear at the same time.  They act for something, and against it as well.

In strength training, muscular growth–hypertrophy–is perhaps one fourth of the constructive growth of strength.  The overwhelming bulk of it is getting more muscle fibers to fire, getting them to fire more often, and getting them to fire AT THE SAME TIME.

Behaviorally, congruence, effectiveness, is getting all your phases into a single wave function, with one movement, forward.  When you are congruent, your awareness can be focused on the task at hand fully, which makes everything more interesting.  If you are doubtful, holding back, allowing some relic of your past experience into the fray, you are less effective, and life is less fun.

For my part, I think I can see, finally, where my second, self destructive, phase comes from, and am increasingly able to disrupt it, which can only work to the good.

Few thoughts.

I was talking with a very interesting Austrian a couple weeks ago, who had gone on UFO sighting expeditions.  Apparently one of the big names right now is a guy named Steven Greer, who argues that alien craft have crashed, and been reverse engineered, and that private, non-governmental entities have the ability to build and fly these things. 

Interestingly, this interview with Edgar Mitchell (6th man on the moon, Ph.D rocket scientist from MIT, non-flake) shows he shares these views:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=9tKWElDHhY4

Apparently Greer is arguing that once the “War on Terror” has run its course as an impetus for government seizure of political rights, the next step is what would amount to an alien false flag operation, in which flying saucers being flown by humans would be used to instill fear and panic.

Yes, of course this is out there.  But I have studied the UFO issue for a long time, and there are far too many credible people publicly offering very detailed accounts of events only explicable within a radically different paradigm for me to feel the evidence is weighted in any direction but belief in the reality of extraterrestrials, and extraterrestrial craft.  In another interview, Mitchell speaks of personal conversations he had with Roswell inhabitants present when the craft crashed, and he said there is ZERO ambiguity that it was an alien craft, and that bodies were recovered. 

As I comment from time to time, I feel the strength of a mind is the quantity of disparate and even contradictory ideas it can contain at one time.  The world presents itself in a series of what might be termed “perceptual problems”.  They ask us: what am I?  How is this BEST understood?  If your only tool is a hammer, they are all nails.  If you only have one paradigm within which you CAN operate, you will do violence to all problems which are not actually BEST understood within that paradigm.  As I showed, I hope, clearly with my Tubaform heuristic, you can explain everything with the same ideas, if they are sufficiently broad (“Marxism”–so called; Freudian psychoanalysis; Darwinian evolution).

But if you think of a problem as unscrewing a mechanism with screws of a very specific size, and with very specific insertions–say triangular of a very specific size–then the more tools you have available, the more likely you will be to be able to see what is in front of you.

That is why I only discard out of hand ideas which abuse either fact or logic.  Here, my factual orientation is that many professional, sane people have come forward with stories of aliens and alien spacecraft.  This means somebody somewhere knows about them.  These people do not seem to include Congress, or most of our government.  This means that some private group–a la “Men in Black”, but with more sinister motivations–COULD have control of the thing.

Countless permutations are possible, but for very few of them do I have sufficient data to discard them out of hand.

I am in an internal space, non-verbal space, so I’m not posting much.  I have been thinking/emoting a lot about this process of trauma.  It is INTERESTING that the same experience that might permanently scar one person won’t even be remembered by another.  What makes the difference?

I would propose it is your digestive capability, your processing capability, your ability to integrate.  Thus, I propose four grades of trauma:

1) Life trauma: this you can integrate into an existing sense of self with little modification.  This would include the death at a normal age of a parent.

2) Life trauma that forces an improvement in your sense of self.  Example would be Marine Boot Camp.  Most people leave feeling a part of something larger than themselves, more energetic, and more disciplined.  War, similarly, has this effect on many people; others it breaks–see number 4.

3) Life trauma that forces a degradation in your sense of self.  An example would be a bad marriage, in which to keep things together you have to sacrifice parts of yourself that are important.

4) Life trauma you can’t integrate at all, like premature sexual experience/molestation, or “combat fatigue”.  This goes into a hidden, timeless place which you can’t remember well, but which frequently sends out signals in all sorts of weird ways that it is still there and unprocessed.

Some errors are so egregious they take a Harvard education to rationalize, and a Phd to repeat.

There is no such thing as gun control: there is only CITIZEN control.

I have a Facebook friend who is quite different than me politically, but who for certain reasons I have always tried to respond to more gently than I normally would.  Here is what I wrote in response to his most recent call for increased gun controls (note both that we ALREADY have gun controls, and that our basic position is best expressed as the fight for continued gun freedom).  I doubt it convinced him, but he “Liked” it, so I suspect it did succeed in convincing him that at least my position is not definitionally one of being callous. 

{}. my reading of the actual, empirical evidence is that guns are used ten times by honest people to protect themselves from harm for every one time they are used in the commission of crimes. One statistic will show the pattern: when Concealed Carry laws are passed, homicide rates go DOWN, by a national average of 8.5%. Why this would be, should be obvious enough. Criminals vastly prefer being the only ones armed. This means that, statistically, 8.5% of the murders in all States that do NOT have relatively lax Concealed Carry Laws were PREVENTABLE. This means the living breathing human beings, with families, kids, parents, jobs are murdered in these States simply because guns–like all tools, and they are tools–can be abused. The salient question, though, is: what public policy has the longest, best track record at preventing unnecessary death and violence? Yes, people use guns for suicide. Yes, accidents happen. But the evidence is that the quality of life is best when gun ownership is easy, and worse when it is not. Only 4% of guns used in crimes were purchased legally. Ponder that fact, then add the fact that at the moment there are well over a 100 million guns in circulation, many of them never registered. The practical, empirical, and moral approaches to this question all lead, in my mind, to the belief that we would be better served with MORE guns, and more places to carry them. I am compassionate. I do want what is best for my fellow humans. And after giving this a LOT of thought, these are the policy positions I have adopted as most likely to foster peace, and the well being of our nation.

In this experiment, which is easily replicated–as shown by the Mythbusters link following–measurements are made which are inexplicable within the dominant contemporary models of life.

Please watch this clip.  It is just over 8 minutes, but powerful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGRluepFwdg

Here is a modern replication of this experiment, done some 40 years after the original experiments, but with a Stoelting 22600, the same model Backster used.  It is just over five minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fStmk7e9lJo

In this Mythbusters episode, you will note that they start not just as skeptics, but believing that the very idea is farcical.  In the end, though, as they say, “it’s hard to dispute the ink.”

Watch their reactions, though: having found something potentially very profound, they more or less shake it off and move on.  This has been the history of reactions to Backsters work, which is a shame.  People have a hard time seeing the large.  As Churchill put it, “Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.”

Please do me, yourself, and your children a favor: share this post with absolutely everyone you know who may benefit from it, but PARTICULARLY with anyone you may know in the life sciences.  My goal is that some brave soul somewhere, ideally with tenure, will replicate this experiment in a formal academic setting and get it published in a journal of the sort that will make this work hard to ignore.

PLEASE do what you can to make this happen.  Thanks!!!!

Most leftists–all, if we only include actual and latent Cultural Sadeists–lack a coherent meaning system based on a sincere sense of connection with others outside their political involvement–which is to say personality involvement based on power and conformity.

Obama does not believe in God.  He does not relate to or care about poor people.  He does not relate to or really care about poor black kids in single parent homes living in poverty.  Nor does he truly hate the wealthy, per se.  He rubs elbows with them daily.  Nor does he oppose privilege.  He enjoys it every day, and works to build it for his supporters in a thoroughly nepotistic way.

What he believes in is distinction: he and his against everyone else.  He KNOWS, based on long experience, that the invocation of hate can win him power and all that goes with it.

Yet, we ARE connected, and it can be shown, empirically.

For me, and here is the crux of this post, the most important thing we can do is generalize awareness of Cleve Backsters work, and do everything possible to get it incorporated into the modern life sciences.  It will work to erode atheism, and that in turn will work to erode the ENTIRETY of the Leftist project.  I truly believe this.  ALL of it is based, ultimately. on flawed metaphysics. 

Personally, I have had cards printed up, and have decided to start sending letters, physical letters, to biology professors, challenging them to try and replicate Backster’s work.  I am also going to create a one page summary of my economics plan, and challenge economics professors to consider it.  This, too, has the potential to radically alter our political landscape.

There is a need to maintain the battle in the center.  We should not let up at all.  Yet, we also need to understand that you can’t win an argument.  You can overpower someone with reason and fact, but that doesn’t mean they will change their mind.  They just hate you more.  A very special set of circumstances has to be in place for people to more or less grant someone else moral or intellectual superiority, and one key element is usually the ability to do so without a perceived loss of dignity.

Working on the metaphysical level–which is what this is–enables that, in my view.

I will summarize the ideas in my next post, and encourage those with the inclination to share it with any folks they know involved in the life sciences in any form, but particularly plant biologists.  Our goal is to get findings published in a well regarded journal that quite simply are inconsistent with materialistic atheism, and thus the dominant thrust of our age.

I rarely use this word, quite consciously.  Its meaning has been overpowered by overuse.

Still.. . .

I spent the last week doing (W)holotropic breathwork, and came back with some little tingle in me that might be love.  I look at people, and I see the scars, the hidden wounds, the worries, uncertainties, constrictions of motion.  If I do this long enough, I think I will come very close to being able to read people’s minds, without using psychic abilities at all.

And I can look people in the eye and say without words “your wounds do not scare me.”  Many people–particularly very wounded people, of whom I met a few this week–have throughout their lives seen fear in people’s eyes when they tried to share their experience.  This song expresses this nicely, and the video compliments this well: Lyle Lovett’s “Pontiac” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEk7_Y4JRA0  (I will add, that his wife won’t stop talking because his eyes make her uncomfortable, but neither of them know what to do about it.  Such is the human condition.)

I rarely quote Gandhi either.  It is cliche.  I put few people on pedestals.  Yet: “be the change you want to see in the world”.  Do you need comforting?  Do you feel sad?  Then comfort others, and be happy.  They are like you.  No different.  The chain must be broken.  The cross must be borne.

Politically–one of my preferred means of expressing what might be termed love–it seems to me that we have developed a very vocal, engaged group of conservatives.  Even on the HuffPo, there is quite a bit of dissent.  I see many well reasoned, factually congruent arguments across the internet, which did not seem to be the case 4 years ago.  There is no reason to believe it will subside.  How can it?  All the arguments are valid, and things are getting worse.  Love for our children, and respect for those who came before dictates a fight.

For me personally though, it seems like my highest and best use is in writing, which in turn necessitates reading.  I want to write a book on my economic plan, and I want to develop a church, both of which will take time that is probably NOT better spent arguing with fools on the internet, or even typing here.  I lack discipline, so I may well continue to post here often, but my plan is to try to redirect that energy into the less immediately satisfying task of reading books.

I do also have a plan to start writing professors of biology and economics, which I will deal with in the next post for simplicity.

Beginners mind is unconscious skill. (OK: not so bonmotish, but hell, I like it).

Misery is often a means but never an end.

I’ve been off in the desert, literally and figuratively, the past week.  I’ll have more to say soon enough if anyone has missed my public ideosyncrasies.