Moderates United

In debating irrationalists like Sam Harris, it is not necessary to dispute ANY of their domain.  It is not necessary to rebut any of their understandings of how the brain works, what regions do what, how neural impulses are conducted, the effects of brain lesions in various parts of the brain, etc.  They own this domain, and it is properly theirs, to the extent they do their work honestly, which I have no reason to doubt that they do.  This is the domain, figuratively, between A and B.

Yet, there is a C.  The continuum does not stop with B.  There are demonstrable, repeatable, empirical observations that can be made which do not exist within their domain; which CANNOT exist within their domain, if in fact the operative paradigms are in fact accurate; if in fact mind is matter, and nothing else.

OF COURSE different drugs create experiences similar to, say, out of body experiences: for example with ketamine.  But does this imply that the experience is necessarily contained in the brain?  Might we not posit that something within ketamine facilitates the temporary separation of consciousness from the body?  Might we not, as an example, do experiments in which we put numbers or objects on top of objects the person could not see from where they are, and see if they could see them when in an altered state? That would be SCIENCE.

It would of course not be accurate to say that what neuroscientists do is not science, but it is categorically the case that what they do is science limited to a paradigm they never question, that of Materialism, which is an empirically invalidated and indefensible doctrine.  If one surveys the history of science, the really big breakthrough, the really useful stuff, comes not from more measurements, but from new understandings of existing measurements.  Quantum physics, as one example, has yielded more benefits, arguably, than any set of ideas since Newton’s Laws of Motion.  But WE DON’T UNDERSTAND IT.  We don’t know, really, what it means for light to be both particle and wave.  We don’t know what a “quantum leap” really is, and even though most people think electrons “exist” this is really not an accurate understanding.  They only exist if we ask them to.

“I don’t know” is perhaps the most useful phrase in science, as it permits progress.  What we have now is many “I do know”‘s that aren’t so.  We have false knowledge, that simply ignores all the paradigmatic challenges to it, that stamps it out, that forbids tenure to its apostles, that forbids publication of contrary opinions.

I would like to excerpt a part of the book “The First Psychic” to detail some of what “science” (really, Scientism) has ignored.  The setup is that a famous scientist, William Crookes (who was knighted for his work, was a member of the Royal Society, and would like have won a Nobel Prize in our own era, having discovered thallium, been the first to isolate helium, invented the first de facto vacuum tube, having done work with cathode rays and more), decided to test medium Daniel Home under laboratory conditions.  Home was famous for levitating heavy objects in clearly lit conditions, having hands mysteriously appear then disappear, having musical instruments play themselves, and the like.

Science, [Crookes] argued, could deal both with fraud and inadequate observation by providing properly controlled conditions and appropriate instruments of measurement.  And a scientific man did not require the extravagance of human levitation, he merely asked that a power ‘which will toss a heavy body up to the ceiling, shall also cause his delicately-poised balance to move under test conditions. In the testing of the existence of any new force it was the quality, rather than the quantity that mattered. [italics mine: note that as an actual scientist he is thinking paradigmatically, which is to say qualitatively]. ‘The Spiritualist tells of heavy articles of furniture moving’, he pointed out. ‘But the man of science. . . is justified in doubting the accuracy of the former observations if the same force is powerless to move the index of his instrument one degree.’ It was in this attitude of open minded skepticism, and with complete faith in the objectivity of experimental measurement, that Crookes announced his intention to examine the phenomena, ‘in order to confirm their genuineness, or to explain, if possible, the delusions of the honest and to expose the tricks of the deceivers’.

Nobody else had shown such willingness as Daniel to be tested, or been so successful under scrutiny. . . And two of the many phenomena reported in Daniel’s presence were particularly suitable for scientific experiment: the alteration of the weight of objects; and the playing of instruments, normally an accordion, without human contact. Both could be tested in controlled conditions that eliminated the possibility of fraud, and neither could be dismissed as hallucination in the way that, for example, spirit hands might be.  And so Crookes went about setting up a laboratory in his London home, and constructing foolproof test procedures that would rule out the possibility of lazy-tongs, self playing accordions, magic lanterns and such things.  And if these experiments led to positive results, they would confirm the reality of Daniel’s feats.

When Daniel arrived, Crookes was not alone.  With him were two men who would verify what was to happen, for Crookes did not want to be accused of inaccuracy, or lack of proper observation, or perhaps of having been mesmerized by Daniel.  The force he was investigating was so controversial that sceptical scientists would suggest any alternative explanation rather than accept its existence.  So in attendance was, firstly, William Huggins, a gentleman astronomer who had pioneered observation of celestial bodies. . .

Alongside Huggins was Edward Cox, a Serjeant-at-law [sic] and former MP who had a keen interest in the phenomena being tested.  Cox had attended many seances, and was considered by some a balanced observer.  He had denounced certain mediums as frauds, upsetting many spiritualists in the process, but he had no doubts that some of the extraordinary phenomena he had witnessed were genuine. . .

The somewhat strange apparatus for the first experiment was set up on one side of the room.  There was a table and chair, and beneath the table a steel cylindrical cage.  Inside the cage was a brand-new accordion that Crookes had bought himself, and which Daniel had neither handled nor seen before.  Daniel sat down, placed his hand within the cage, and held the accordion, keys downward, with thumb and middle finger at the other end.  From this position, with his every movement being watched by witnesses on either side, he was expected to have the accordion play.

‘Very soon’, Crookes reported, ‘the accordion was seen by those on each side to be waving about in somewhat curious manner; then sounds came from it, and finally several notes were played in succession.’  Crookes assistant went under the table and saw that Daniel’s hand ‘was quite still’, yet, ‘the accordion was expanding and contracting’.  It then began ‘oscillating and going round and round the cage, and playing at the same time’.  As the observers confirmed Daniel’s hands and feet had not moved, ‘a simple air was played’. Daniel then took the accordion out of the cage ‘and placed it in the hand of the person next to him.  The instrument then continued to play, no person touching it and no hand being near it’  Moments later, they ‘saw the accordion distinctly floating about inside the cage with no visible support.’

Next they moved over to the other side of the room, to the scent of the second experiment.  There was another table, and attached to its edge was the end of a thirty six inch mahogany board.  The board extended horizontally from the table, its far end being supported by a spring balance that hung from above.  Daniel placed his fingertips on the near end of the board, which was resting on a support at the end of the table.  In this position, rather like having a seesaw with the fulcrum at one end, no amount of pushing down at this end could move the other end.  Nevertheless, his task was to affect the weight of the board, which would be measured by they spring balance at the other end.  Crookes and Huggins stood on either side, ‘watching for any effect which might be produced. . .Almost immediately, the pointer of the balance was seen to descend.  After a few seconds it rose again.  This movement was repeated several times. . The [far] end of the board was seen to oscillate slowly up and down during the experiment.’  Daniel then placed two small objects, a card matchbook and a small hand bell, between his fingers and the board, to show he was not exerting any downward pressure. ‘The very slow oscillation of the spring balance became more marked,’ Crookes reported, and Huggins saw it gradually descend to an additional downward pull of three and a half pounds. To check that Daniel could not have done it by pushing, Crookes stood on top of the end of the board, but even when he ‘jerked up and down’, he could not move the index more than two pounds.

In July Crookes made the announcement.  It appeared in the Quarterly Journal of Science, of which he was also the editor.  It might have been published elsewhere had his fellow scientists allowed it, and it might not have appeared at all had Crookes not been the editor.  It went was follows: ‘These experiments appear conclusively to establish the existence of a new force, in some unknown manner connected with the human organization, which for convenience might be called the Psychic Force.

The term was certainly convenient: Cox had already suggested it.  ‘I venture to suggest’, he had written to Crookes the previous month, that the force be termed Psychic Force; [and] the person in whom it is manifested in extraordinary power , Psychics.”

Daniel Home was literally the first person to be called “Psychic”.

Now, can this testimony be doubted?  OF COURSE: by definition all scientific claims can be doubted. That is the point of experimental replication. We don’t believe in Cold Fusion because nobody could duplicate it.

But to the point here, any guesses how many other scientists sought out appointments with Home to see what he could do for themselves?  None, to the extent of my awareness.  That experimental setup was never replicated with Daniel, even though he always took all comers.  As one more example of scientific abdication of responsibility, Michael Farraday was invited to a seance with Daniel, but refused to go because no one could tell him in advance EXACTLY what would happen.

This attitude is not skepticism.  It is not scientific.  It is a fear-induced negative hallucination, in which things which are plainly there are ignored and made to vanish so that a previously established world view can continue without challenge or interruption.  Scientism, put another way, is no different in principle or practice from a religion premised on faith.

I have tried to make this post several times, and not quite pulled it off.  I think I can see clearly enough now to do it, though.

Think about what it means to submit to God, to surrender your will to His Will.  How is this idea communicated to you?  In most cultures, it is as a child, and in most cultures submission to GOD is submission to your PARENTS.  The will of God and the pleasure of your parents is conflated, usually for life.

And as an adult this pattern continues.  The more rigid the religious code, the more thoroughly you are taught to surrender your will to community leaders.  Islam, self evidently, as THE self-defined religion of submission–it is in the name–does this perhaps more rigidly than any other faith.

Plurality of opinion gives way to unity of opinion, and unity of action.  This is INHERENTLY unhealthy, uncreative, and works directly to prevent the emergence of individuality, and the individual moral judgment and GROWTH that happens in conditions of freedom.

Put simply, Islam as a creed is probably the least creative religion in the world, for the simple reason that its actual expression consists in rote conformity to rules expressed reasonably clearly in books no one is allowed to question or expand upon, and such conformity attends child raising in the cultures which take their faith seriously.

I would contrast this with Judaism, the members of whose traditions are arguably–I would say certainly–the most creative and productive of any group on Earth.  Jews are less than 1% of the world’s population, but have one some 40% of something (large number; I think that is close) of the world’s Nobel Prizes.  In its basic patriarchic tendency, and tribalistic certitudes, it is similar to Islam.

I have been wrestling with what differs in it. 

First, I would think that there is a life energy created by constant threat of violence, and a constant feeling of being an outsider. 

Secondly, I would submit that even though Judaism has mainly male prophets, it also has a number of very important women, like Esther.  It is also significant that whereas in Islam the FATHER dictates the religion of the child, in Judaism it is the mother.  This is of course much more logical, as there can be no doubt about the maternity of a child.  (and it is perhaps because of this that Islam is so harsh on women, and so protective of their virginity).  Cultures which value both the feminine and the masculine are in general more balanced.  This is a rough and unsubstantiable assertion.

Thirdly, though, I would submit that the sheer number of Judaic cultures as they have developed in the diaspora has more or less necessitated the inclusion of considerable diversity of action.  You can be eccentric and genuinely individualistic, yet retain your membership in the group.  This is important.

You have orienting beliefs.  For example, you have the Ten Commandments, and the whole of the Law (whose Hebrew name I am forgetting at the moment), which consists in roughly several hundred MORE commandments.

Yet, I would submit that the history of Judaism has forced upon it heterogeneity of opinion, individualism within family and small community groupings, and prevented the emergence of a clerical class as exists in Islam, a class which issues fatwas, and the like.

Christianity had such a class.  The Catholic Church WAS the government for long stretches of history, and until the very recent past all kings had to keep their respective church in mind when rendering decisions.  All of this worked to homogeneity of thought and action.

Could one perhaps say that today submission to authority–to the “experts”–is taught, but that this submission has no moral value unless and until one agrees to the incorporation of political views (socialism in all iterations always having claimed to better manage human life in the form of a better machine) within the larger submission to “science”?  Could one not further posit that such submission has psychological value, even as it corrupts the minds of people unfortunate enough to make this Faustian bargain?

I have long had a very interesting, instructive, and vivid dream life.  At various times, I have flown high in the sky, walked through walls, levitated objects, talked with animals, breathed underwater, used my hands as flashlights, died in my dreams, seen both heaven and hell, seen angels, and fought and defeated (and often run from, as well) all sorts of dark forces.  I have had lucid dreams every  bit as real and vivid as waking life.  I was once in a corn field at night, with the breeze blowing, the moon in the sky, and able to see my body in every way that one can in what we call “waking” life. Every pore on my body was awake and alive. It was very pleasant, and of course a bit strange.

The other night I had a very useful dream.  I have been trying to figure out how we internalize violence against ourselves, how abuse becomes self abuse, and how far it goes.  Can we not, for example, posit that everything we need for perfect happiness is ALREADY present, in as-yet unmanifest latency?

I was wandering in a forest, and came upon a train of people, seemingly pilgrims, who were traveling up a hill at night along an unpaved trail.  They seemed pleasant enough; the wagons were painted in a forest green, I think with some yellow, almost like circus wagons.  They felt like gypsies.

I began talking with one of them, who said they were on their way to a sacred ritual.  An aspiring initiate went through the catechism for me, in which he would swear an oath to God with certain gestures, then kneel and swear the same oath, at which point he would be decapitated.  Of course, I was horrified, but the procession continued; they got to their stopping point, and many were killed.  I managed to save one somewhat chubby, indecisive man, who came away, but kept looking back like he had missed something.  The executioners, of course, were not pleased, and fell on me.  Several grabbed me and tried to smother me.  I got away, then they started throwing very thin, very deadly spears at me. I created a weapon to block them with.  Finally, I saw a freeway, and began running as fast as the cars and escaped.

I analyze this on three levels, two of which I will share, and the third of which I will keep for myself after admitting I left one or two details out.  I would also in the process like to submit several techniques I use in dream analysis.

My immediate interpretation was that this is the rough mechanism of “zombification”.  These people were not dying outright.  They were dying to themselves, to their own judgement, to their own potentiality.  And there were those only too willing to play the role of executioner.  There are always executioners.

When I look at the left in this and other countries, when I contemplate the stomach turning atrocities done in the name of compassion, the mind reels.  But I cannot help but feel that many, many people in this world are lost, and there are those who say to them: come with me.  Let me protect you.  Let me remove from you all the worries and troubles of life.  Let me show you the compassion of submission, of admitting the futility of living your own life, of drawing your own breath, of choosing your own steps.  Let us do it for you.

And I look at all the people shilling for Barack Obama;  We have in recent days come to have strong evidence pointing to the conclusion that he has virtually no compassion, no regard for others, no benevolent plan for the future, and nothing to offer but sorrow.  People WANT the promise to be true, so desperately that they are willing to sacrifice their own minds on the altar of conformity; of virtue expressed by unceasingly doing and thinking as they are told.  This is a particularly awful crime when done by journalists, and those who would aspire to lead us.

I could go on, but will simply submit that in response to patent truths like “we can’t borrow a trillion dollars a year without consequence” get responses ranging from “Bullshit”, to (Daily Kos) “our goal here is not to discuss policy, but to make sure it gets implemented.”  How can you know that your ideas are sound if you never submit them to critical scrutiny?  You can’t of course, and this is how bad ideas have babies and metastasize.

This is, however, superficial analysis, and one fully encapsulated in my expression “Cultural Sadeism”.

It gets more interesting when you add the idea that all characters in all dreams are PARTS OF YOU.  Those demons you fight?  You created them. Every character in every dream is a part of you, and if you were flawless you would know only dreamless sleep, or visions of heaven.  I’m not, and I don’t.

Framed this way, I was sacrificing myself to myself, and watching the process.  This process felt eternal, and likely is on-going in me.  What does THIS mean?  That is a much more interesting question.

I have in recent days been thinking heavily about the nature of trauma, and trying to separate actual trauma from its after-math.  It is not getting hit, or enduring emotional cruelty that matters, but what you make of it, how it continues to reside in you, hidden.  How does it hide?  What is the mechanism that captures and prolongs it?

I look at the moment before I get hit, or before someone says something cruel that came from some unacknowledged part of themselves, such that they don’t even realize, consciously, that they are attacking me.  Integrated into ordinary life, over a long period of time, what becomes internalized is the pre-reaction, the protective flinch, the covering, the armor.  This is what endures.

But I think there is a second element, the punishing element.  Whenever you get TOO relaxed, long after being removed from the situation, there is a secondary protective element that ALSO attacks you, so you don’t lose your defenses, so you don’t allow yourself to be blindsided.  This is the part, in me at least (and I think for my own purposes at the moment, a bit more self revelation than normal is appropriate, since in part I am trying to provide something recognizable and useful for others) that hates that unprotected, unguarded child (OMG: am I at the “inner child”?  God don’t let me become whiny).

In order to survive, you have to sacrifice some part of yourself, the one that reacts outwardly with anger to things that should occasion anger, and which do in normally developed people. And on a deep level, I think there is this voice that says “don’t go out there.  They will get you.”  So when you “go out there”, you get attacked.  So you have these parts of your consciousness that are at war with one another.  Healing consists in integrating them, in developing sound reality testing on a DEEP level, such that you are neither meek nor cruel, but open to pain, and, thereby, open to pleasures of the most meaningful sort, those of affection given and received, and living life with a sense of purpose that goes from the tip of your head to the soles of your feet, and which is not rejected nor attacked anywhere in the middle.

Anyone who had read this blog for long has seen repeated meditations on the meaning of Horror films, and of violence in our media generally.  What is it?  What need does it serve?  This is of course a complex phenomena, and many answers are possible with respect to many sorts of people, but one I will suggest, that I may not have suggested before, is that those sorts of movies are the food that what I will call the aggressive self protective instincts feed on.  They induce fear, and by inducing fear justify continued emotional contraction, which both reduces emotional injury, and prevents emotional growth.

Here is an interesting statistic: “College kids today are about 40 percent lower in empathy than their counterparts of 20 or 30 years ago,” (from here).  If true, this has several interesting aspects to it.  First, if emotional empathy is down, then the RISKS of being open are up.  This follows inevitably.  And this would explain not just the normalization but the valorization (academese for “valuing of”) of psychopathy.  As I have pointed out, in the first “Silence of the Lambs” Hannibal Lector was a villain, albeit an interesting one.  In later iterations of the franchise, he was the HERO. 

Read that article.  Without quite saying so, he half wishes he were a sociopath/psychopath (synonyms: psychopathic is clinically insane; this is a different animal) because then he would be free from worries, from fear, from remorse, and thus more “free” to live his life.  This is the same thing Apollinaire (a radical leftist, it should go without saying) meant when he called Sade the “freest man who ever lived.”

Liberty breeds confusion, when people are stupid; and most of our modern intellectuals are stupid.  It is my sincere belief that if my own treatment of Goodness were taught at a college level, people would actually be liberated.  This is not, I don’t think, naked vanity, but a considered opinion based upon someone who is widely traveled, well read, and who has engaged in conversations on varying levels with people of all walks of life for decades.

In my own case, the story is that I got outside the cycle sufficiently to see it as it was.  The fat man was my weak sense of self, still driven in some regards to return.

Clearly, in some respects, we are unfree.  Anyone who denies it is in my view expressing unwarranted optimism.  At the same time, we not FULLY unfree.  There is room for what I have called “nonstatistical coherence”. We can choose where to direct our attention, and when done long enough, opportunities will open up spontaneously that would not have occurred had we not chosen where to direct our minds.

There is more to this that I am still working out, but I am getting close to the root of the thing. 

I will add, though, that the essence of “spiritual” development is achieving emotional wellness.  Meditating will achieve nothing if it does not integrate the emotions, if it does not access and release deep realities. In some respects, the highest attainment possible on this Earth is to be “normal”.  So few people ever aspire to this, and far fewer attain it.

Vanity, in most respects, is and always has been the coin of the realm, making the only sane ones those who cannot exist within its order.

This is the word, not legacy, drive-by, mainstream, or any other versions I see.  They are COMPLICIT.  They are an extension of a political agenda that can ONLY be furthered through a combination of active deception, and–more commonly–an active avoidance of unpleasant truths.  Only Fox and conservative websites are reporting on the seeming fact that Obama left our men to die in Benghazi, when he had options; and that he then LIED about it–blaming it on a “spontaneous” demonstration in reaction to a video released many months ago–plainly to avoid the political fallout that would attend both his patent failure to provide needed security on the front end, and patent failure to protect them when they were under attack.

And where the hell is the coverages of this story, that Obama has ALREADY granted the Iranians the right to produce nuclear weapons?  WTF?

It increasingly seems to me that even though we theoretically have access to news outliers, that the fact that most people their news from sources that are simply unwilling to do their jobs with anything approaching integrity or competence, means that we are ALREADY in an information-controlled state.  We are ALREADY halfway to Fascism, when principle no longer trumps policy objective; when truth telling is less important than getting political objectives implemented.

As Peter Bauer said in a link I posted a year or two ago, it is horrible that leftists, confronted with the constant and dismal and misery-inducing failures of their policies, choose not to find and pursue new policies, but to view the implementation of the policy, itself, as success.  This is indicative of a manic and compulsive mindset that is not different in practice from a cult.  I will deal with that in my next post.

I have used this phrase from time to time.  The following quote from Thomas Merton expresses well what I intended (I cannot recall how well I myself expressed it):

Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most
difficult sacrifice. It demands greater heroism than war. It demands
greater fidelity to the truth and a much more perfect purity of
conscience.

I will add that he has a lot of good quotes, here: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/t/thomas_merton.html

As I see it, the point of a so-called “Peak Experience” is not the experience itself, but its effect on the whole of your being, which is expressed daily in how you love, work, and feel.  The point is not to “capture” or seize or otherwise rape and possess something beautiful.  The point is to remember, in ways overt and subtle, conscious and unconscious, something that enabled your qualitative gestalt to improve, just a bit.

People get addicted to experiences.  Let us say it is traveling.  If you go out and hitchhike across Asia, and if you left an asshole and came back an asshole, you did less of what matters than someone who patiently learned to work without distraction, or become just a bit less upset about pedestrian things.

People think you can collect experiences.  You can’t.  You either let them transform you, and then carry them with you as a part of your being; or you objectify them and use them to amplify your ego, never an attractive sight.

I want to add as well that as I think about it, there are many, many ways of creating altered states.  Extreme athletics, really good sex, working to exhaustion, being drunk or stoned, being in an artistic zone–even driving long distances.  The ones that are valuable are the ones you choose to allow to alter you in positive ways, such that you are less scared during the day, more willing to listen openly, more affectionate, more positive, more focused, and happier.

That’s the phrase that popped in my head this morning as an alternative to Cultural Sadeism.  There is a back story.

I travel often, and meet perhaps a dozen new people every week.  Yesterday, I walked into an office to do some work, and was met by a woman who was being subtly cruel to me, because she could.  She seemingly felt no remorse for it. I was just looking at her, and it hit me that somebody did something to her that she never got over.  There was something broken, unreal, ineffective, emotionally in her.  There was a part that should have worked, but didn’t.

When you look at sadists, it is tempting to focus on the evil, the brokenness within them.  Yet, and I feel I may have said this before, you can also look at the GAP between who they are, and who they could be.  You can see what that person, functioning well, would look like.  You can see how they would move if a strangling knot that suffocates them were to be loosened, and their lungs filled honest air.  You can see who they would be if they were actually happy.

It is our task on earth to rescue everyone.  No exceptions.  The method is to choose this end and be effective.  This heuristic is how you get as effective as you will get with broken people, many of whom will never heal in this lifetime. 

“Power sickness” both admits the malady, and recognizes it as such.  I’ll just have to wait and see how far I want to go with it.

Some of you likely know what it is like to be hit often as a child.  I got hit, but I don’t think that was the principle problem.  The principle problem was that I got a stick with no carrot.  It was never clear to me who I was supposed to be to not get hit.  I suppose these 1,000 plus posts may be attempts to answer that question, although of course the actual situation is much more complex.

Thinking back, all these years later, I feel this sense of cringing, that moment before you get hit, or, to the point I want to make here, before you THINK you’re going to get hit, but don’t.

When you get hit, you feel pain.  When you cringe, you tense your body up, in anticipation of pain, but the pain need never come.  You can cringe your whole life and never get hit again.  As Springsteen put it: “You end up like a dog that’s been beat too much/and spend half your life just covering up.”

I think the brave life is to learn how to “uncringe”, how to let your pains be actual. 

I did martial arts for six years or so, where I would leave with bruises more often than not several times a week.  The trick in my style–and I would suggest all effective styles that don’t incorporate outright cringing/flinching in to them–was to take a hit in a relaxed way, to always stay lose and relaxed, no matter what.  That is good training, and physically I’m largely able to do it.  I just need to figure out how to do it emotionally.

I don’t like sharing, but feel this may be useful for someone.

It occurs to me that we might as well refer to all emotional and even intellectual growth as healing.  My thought process in this is that, as evidenced by your expressed capacity to do better, you were in a suboptimal state before.  Even if you did not know it, even if you were already relatively better than those around you, you were hurt relative to where you could have been.  You were less rather than more.

This is a useful heuristic, especially if you a dd the following thought: growth comes to you; you do not go to it.  We have lines for learning.  You can memorize mathematical tables, and you have not really changed qualitatively when you can go up to 20×20, versus stopping at 12×12.  If you were a psychopath before, you will be a psychopath after.

The growth I am talking about is paradigmatic, it deals with your sense of self, your identity, how you move in the world, what you see (what you allow yourself to see), who you care about and why, and to what extent.  If you think of your current self as existing in a certain equilibrium, you cannot CHOOSE to grow.  You cannot feel feelings for which you are not ready . The best you can do is not reject new feelings because they are new.

As I look at my own healing/growth process, it seems to me that everything good comes to me, and in large measure because I am looking for it, I am waiting for it, I am alert to it.  I watch the fog carefully, tirelessly, to see what emerges.

I write a lot, and in my own self estimation some of what I write is very clear, very good, and very creative.  But I don’t feel myself as a creator, so much as a reporter.  The newsfeed comes from somewhere else. My talent is seeing what is in front of me honestly, which involves a high pain tolerance, and the ability to countenance ambiguity and lack of clarity in large doses for long periods of time.

It also involves accepting, emotionally, that I am incomplete and always will be.  There is no rest for the ready.  Yet, what comes along sometimes is astonishingly beautiful, and worth every ounce of effort.