Moderates United

I regularly experience strange coincidences. Yesterday I made the decision to focus on my “whale” persona (my personality can be broken into three animals, per an instructive dream I once had, one of which is a whale) versus my aggressive eagle/Garuda self.  It felt right.  It felt time.  The Whale dives deep down into the water, slowly, meaningfully, and stays down a very long time before coming up for air.  It is the source of my deepest insights.  It is not the source of daily arguing on the internet.  It felt right for some reason.

Like many people, I have been worried about the collapse of our nation under Obama (as is obvious to any regular readers I may have).  I had guessed that Romney would be insipid and uninspiring.  By all accounts, I was wrong, and the feeling I have is that the leftists ascendancy may have just reached its high mark, never to return.  True Liberals have been in a fighting retreat for the better part of 70 years; and even though we have had the occasional Reagan, the size of government, and the rationalizations for it, have only grown under ALL Administrations.

We may be seeing an end of that.  Conservative cannons have found their mark, and are firing for effect.  The indefensible cannot be defended from direct attack.  It can only thrive through aggressions against truth, honor, decency, and the defensible.

I want to be clear: we live in a sea of ignorant, unprincipled people, who will vote for people like Obama because he either gives them telephones, or assuages their guilt over racism.  But Romney, apparently, showed clearly that conservatism is defensible, and socialism is not.  This is a sea change.

This morning I went in to do my work (I work in many different places), and my contact had the sculpture of a whale on her desk, which I had never seen before.  Now, you may say that I only noticed the whale because I was thinking about whales, which is of course a common enough artifact of perception, and well documented psychologically. (Watch this video: very few people count all the passes correctly the first time for reasons explained at the end).

Yet, how many whales do you see in the normal course of a day?  I can’t remember the last time I saw one, and it was on the desk of my contact, a three dimensional sculpture.  I will be paying attention the next day or two, to see what I see.

Things like that have happened many times to me.  I will add, that even if you don’t accept the principle of non-local connection between mind and reality implied by the concept of synchronicity, it is still useful to use it to connect more fully with deeper psychological realities.

In my breathwork session, when I was vocalizing, at some point I said the word AM over and over.  I felt it had psychological significance, and it likely did, but in playing with my mouth I realized also that AAAAA  starts in the back of the mouth and moves forward to MMM, which is the frontmost sound.  I AM, if you do it carefully a couple times–say it, I mean–you will notice that the I stands like a tree in the middle of the mouth, then AM folds around it, from back to front.

Am, of course, is similar to the Sanskritic root syllable, as it is often called, Om, which is really more like OWUUUM.

A space is created, then terminated at the lips.  Add an EEEE to it, so AMEEEEEEEE.  It flows out into the world.  Is the word AM symbolic of property and place?  A sense of being related to termination?  Are there linguistic roots that caused “life, liberty and property” to arise within the English sphere?

Interesting questions.  I pondered how one might approach this scientifically, and the best I could do was to hook someone up to a brainwave monitor of some sort and have them make sounds, and see if the brain reacted differently to different sounds.   Since sounds in our language have affective elements, it might be interesting to have them say basic words in languages they couldn’t know, like Navajo, and see if the words for, say, home and mother caused reactions.

It may of course be a complete waste of time, and my speculation idiotic. It happens.  Try a lot, and failure is inevitable.  I suppose you could even measure a man’s life by the quantity and quality of his failures.

Few more: holy and wholly.  Stan Grof’s signature creation could be spelled Wholotropic.  It could be altered to Holytropic, moving towards the Holy.  Note that H is basically breath going out, that is morphed into something, and that that word ends in EEEE, a going out.  It is a going out of the breath, pneuma, prana.

Man starts in the front, moves all the way to the back, then ends up in the front again, but not completely, since N is behind M.  Man is an incomplete movement, an incomplete circle.  The complete circle is Ma’am.  Woman contains more information, more movement.  W is all the way in the front, O opens up the mouth, then it does the man circle.

One could argue that man is contained in woman because woman is larger and richer.  That seems both plausible and true.  Man should not be excised by feminists, but woman celebrated.  I will note the ratio of women to men was roughly 2 to 1 in my class.

Womb is contained in Woman.  Womb and Room are quite close, to the point that the substitution of W for R is a common speech defect.

That’s enough for now.  I am fortunate in having a job where I can sleep in and dream.  I get less outward work done when I do so, but I would submit that this qualitatative work is useful too, and less common.

Courage is what fills the gap between confidence and necessity.

Corollary: Courage is a habit; so is cowardice.

I think many people view crying as a failure.  I have long viewed it as something that makes you stronger.  I saw in my group this past weekend that this is a helpful mindset, and wanted to share.

Crying makes you stronger, if you accept it, and accept the pain, which to say that you accept that your feelings matter, and that if you are feeling sad, empowerment is feeling sad, and accepting it.

I was in a hurry and being a bit thoughtless the other day, and left my planner on the top of my truck.  When it fell off, it was picked up by somebody who then called me to come and pick it up, since I had my number in there.

What was funny, is that it was immediately obvious to me that the person who called me was in a good mood because he had been given an opportunity to do a good deed. My stupidity was a proximate cause of his happiness. It would not be an exaggeration to say I did him a favor.  By sheer chance, I knew this man, and had worked with him, and my experience had been that he was normally prone to being irritable.

He just called me about a project, and now we are old friends.  He asked me if I’ve lost anything lately.

Watch this world, and you will see many interesting things.

I am an individualist.  This means not that I value selfishness, but that I resolutely, absolutely refuse to allow my own experience to be run through any one else’s filter.  I see things my way.  I will listen to you, and I will learn from you, but how I choose to think, and what I choose to do, and my reasons for doing so, are and should be utterly unmediated by laziness with respect to perception. I own my life.


This is said as prologue because what follows is a bit weird.  I own that weirdness, with pride.  This post  is pieced together from three pieces.  This was the first.

I did a Holotropic Breathwork session last weekend, and it was very interesting.  Imagine a room full of people, in which half of them are in trances causing them to scream uncontrollably, cry, dance, make rhythmic movements on the ground, pound pillows, and “speak in tongues”.  Imagine a room, in other words, filled with the random, the chaotic, the repressed, the eternal.  Damnation and salvation on a stick, moving through the room like an avenging and healing angel, darting around, moving around, saving, controlling, healing, wounding, using, releasing.

OK, had to get that poetic part out.  There will likely be more.  My mouth seized up, such that my jaw would not stop moving.  The facilitator, Tav Sparks, who is a very good person, held my jaw and asked me to vocalize.  I make strange noises that my partner (the person not in trance who sits next to you to make sure you don’t hurt yourself) said sounded like speaking in tongues.  I was quite aware of them, but they came out on their own.  Later I broke down and cried freely.

It was a unique experience for me.  To call it moving is to be literal: there was so much movement of all sorts that it was infectious.

What I kept thinking, while watching as a sitter in the second session is WE NEED THIS.  Our society needs this.  We need an opposite to the mechanical nature of our lives, the programmed, the ordinary, the predictable, the banal.

If there is anyone who reads this regularly, they will have seen me often ponder our cultural state.  I wonder about the darkness, the vampires, the serial killers, the zombies, the satanic music.  I have tried often to explain sadomasochism.

What I think I am prepared to say is that much of that stems from a latent awareness that it is NOT NORMAL to always be normal.  We need ecstatic states.  We need to be released periodically from our selves, our duties, our obligations, our PLACES.  We need to do this completely and without any hesitation.  Social orders like ours that fail to do this breed meanness, parochial concerns with place and time, and defacilitate and degrade creative capacities that would otherwise manifest.

Nietzche famously opposed the Apollonian and Dionysian.  I don’t remember his exact argument, but I will say this: both are ways of perceiving, of interacting with the world, of BEING, and both are NECESSARY.

I sent out a lengthy email to the group I was with, that probably was read by few, and fully understood by no one, but I will cut and paste it here.  I am an enthusiast by nature, and am filled with optimism as to the possibilities of this system.  The relevant part is here:

I
worry regularly about the future of our civilization.  Ecological
sustainability is easy: it is a technical problem, and science is good
at solving those.  The root problem we face is what I term moral
sustainability, which is in broad stroke the preservation of a sense of
meaning.  Science wants to make all internal emotional states the
product solely of chemical processes and therefore all  humans objects. 
In a formal sense, there is no room for an “observer” anywhere in the
universe, within the current Scientistic paradigm.  This is an
enormously damaging belief system and one which is inaccurate.

I have been in a short correspondance with Ben Dyson, of Positive Money.  I am very much supportive of the educational work they are doing with respect to pointing out the inflationary–and hence redistributive–nature of fractional reserve banking.  You cannot, as one example they use often, understand housing inflation without realizing that the money to buy houses is created ex nihilo.

At the same time, I cannot support their proposed solution, which involves putting all private money in accounts at the Bank of England, and which involves setting up what amounts to an “inflation commission” dedicated to determining “scientifically” what the proposed rate of inflation should be, then passing the “money” along to Parliament.

He proposes that banks, as they receive payments for loans made, in effect pay down their own balances–which he would put in the Bank of England–such that all the money they have created gradually disappears.  They would make their money from money invested in them, and then reinvested.  I have no objection to that, of course.

The gradualistic idea has some merit, as all gradualistic ideas tend to, but as I state below, I don’t feel we will do much of ANYTHING substantive until are backs are to the wall, which is where my proposal comes in.

Ben,

I’ve read your proposal, and unfortunately I still believe that your proposal will act to consolidate governmental power, without corresponding benefits to ordinary citizens which could not be achieved in another way.

Regardless of other specifics, I think it MUST be understood that ALL money creation, aka monetary inflation, is redistributive. I tend to call it theft, but since you are in effect making it a tax, I will simply point out that such taxes have both winners and losers.

You posit that there is a “normal” or acceptable, or economically justifiable amount of inflation, which can be assessed by a group of apolitical experts. Yet, how can this be? Logically, if we are becoming more efficient technologically, we should be working less, and the value of our labor as expressed in monetary units should be increasing. Not only, in other words, is inflation not normal, it is the OPPOSITE of what should be happening, which is a steady increase in the value of our currency. You should literally see returns on money buried in your back yard, given Capitalist-driven increases in efficiency.

We have not seen that since, as you point out, banks have stolen large sections of the wealth of our respective nations through the fractional reserve banking system. However, allowing the government to continue this function to any extent merely means that those who receive the money win, and those who do not lose. Yes, you can pay down the debt with this money, or hand it out to the “people”, but in so doing you are simultaneously devaluing the currency, such that those who have savings, or fixed investments, see net declines in their wealth. More importantly, this interrupts the natural process of wealth accumulation that would attend constant innovation and sound money.

I do not disagree that checking accounts should be separated from investment accounts, but I would suggest that the individua’ banks could do so themselves, without the need to place ALL private liquid wealth in the hands of an organization that is already either nationalized or which could easily be nationalized. The direct control of money is and long has been a core Fascist aim, and I use that word carefully, and in the sense that Mussolini praised Keynes calls for this outcome.

There is no inherent benefit to centralizing the repository function, and large potential risks to liberty. All that needs to happen is that the banks separate these functions internally, by charging fees for checking and savings functions, and paying out for investment accounts, which is exactly how Certificates of Deposit work currently in the United States.

As far as how we get the debt out of the system, this is more ambiguous. Your proposal that banks more or less be required to “pay back” money they created is perhaps the right one, but one that could be done within their own ledgers. It is gradualistic.

At the same time, I fully anticipate financial disasters which will arise in the next ten years as a result of the graft, incompetence, stupidity, cupidity and unprincipled behavior of our politicians–both in the UK and here. Gradualism will not work then, and at that point I think something like what I have proposed will be needed.

I will note in that regard that defaults have been common throughout history. Greece has defaulted a number of times, as have many of the nations of Latin America. China defaulted, if memory serves, back in the 1920’s.

Money is not real, not even gold money. It is a symbol, and a pact we make with one another. It can be made and it can vanish. My proposal fixes everything, and in a way which no one has ever attempted. When nations default, they normally default as governments. The default is normally the result of the public sector buying too much, spending too much– often in the service of war, or unsustainable handouts to the people in order to win votes, and secure power.

No nation has tried to eliminate its private sector debt. I say “why not”? The answer, of course, is that most people do not understand how money works. In some respects, it does grow on trees, if you are a licensed “gardener”.

You objected to giving the millionaires their homes with mortgages. I thought about this, and came to this conclusion: there are only three groups which could get the home–the government, the bank, and the tenant; given that the goal is wealth generalization and redistribution, there is only one group which would not centralize wealth in getting the proceeds, which of course is the tenants, or mortgagees.

Logically, there is no reason that ALL property held by EITHER the government or the banks could not be passed over to the tenants. All public housing could be converted to condominiums. Most Federal agencies devoted to one social program or another could be abolished, and their offices donated to local or State governments, who if they chose could then reinstate the programs.

We are going to have economic chaos. It is in my view inevitable. We have debts skyrocketing, and at a time when the Basel 2 accords call for deflationary banking policy. We will see calls for tyranny, and rioting in the streets. What I have proposed is far less radical than the sorts of things which have already been tried, like Fascism and Communism, and has the salient advantage that I understand basic economics.

I would be curious as to any thoughts you may have on this. I made detailed notes on your proposal, and am only responding in general fashion, which I hope addresses most of the important points.

Your educational work on the predatory nature of the fractional reserve banking system is very useful, but I want to do what I can to support movement towards solutions which will work to support liberty, and on-going increases in prosperity.
 
P.S. As far as money, I thought about this too, and decided that physical money is the best solution. It occurred to me we would put gold threads in it, and perhaps radioactive identifications. Banks would warehouse the money, which would more or less be treated like gold in the past, wherein ownership of specific notes could be passed around electronically, but where the “owner” of specific currency could always pick it up at the bank and carry it around.

As I stated in the piece, I see no value in ANY fluctuation in the quantity of money, as it is inherently and ineluctably redistributive in invisible and thus dangerous ways. I would see the creation of a currency, once, and no change EVER thereafter.

More people choose to end their lives in this country than die in car crashes: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2207089/56-million-suicide-prevention-programme-launched-study-reveals-Americans-lives-die-car-crashes.html

I don’t often simply repeat stories, but I thought this data point worth sharing here, as it touches on much of what I write about.  Suicide is a failure of a meaning system.  Conversely, a meaning system is an answer to the question of why to live.

What I feel is happening is that we are increasingly surrounded by darkness in our media, of violence, and the hopelessness that violence leads to.  We are also suffering from the high suicide rates among combat veterans.

Here is a list of suicide rates among countries.  Greece is the lowest and South Korea is the highest.  Low stress (at least until recently) and high stress. Hungary and Japan are way up there too.

I don’t have time to ponder this more fully.  There are many reasons meaning systems fail, but one of them is that in shame-based cultures, the meaning of life is in meeting certain standards.  Failing to meet those standards means that life is meaningless.

There is a lot of room for thought here, but I need to go.

I think the word “understanding” better gets at my sense of what true love is than the word love itself.  To love someone, you must SEE them as they are, and wish them well.

To the point here, you cannot love in the abstract.  When you see “love is all you need” it is an attractive sentiment, but I think what such people are loving is the self image they form of themselves as loving people.

True love does not have ego involvement.  It does not involve me looking at myself looking at you.  You are the whole picture, one that is separate from me, and one which has its own direction and purpose which must be seen prior to any effort at me helping.  Many people don’t need help, even if they want it; and many are hurt by it, even though they think they need it.

Sometimes the path of decency is watching a ship drift by in the night, without saying or doing anything.

There is this compulsion among many I see to feed their anxiety, to satiate it, by finding someone or something to help.  This is the root dynamic of the “Daily Cause” movement, and the reason silly ideas like Global Warming have such staying power.

But the people being helped–and I have said this many times–are the people more or less forcing themselves on others, who might well have done better unmolested.

Take food stamps.  It is not actually an act of charity to spend taxpayer money on advertisements intended to increase their use.  Handouts damage self respect, which damages independence, which leads over time to greatly increased risks of depression, and overall societal dysfunction.

Even when my children were little, when they were confronted with some challenge the rule was they had to struggle with it for a while.  More often than not, they were more able than they thought.  Occasionally they would come to me and say “I struggled for five minutes with X, and I still need help”.  Then they would get help.  In my view, this basic dynamic needs to be the social dynamic in any emotionally healthy culture.  It is not presently the dynamic in the United States, and we are paying the cost, literally and figuratively.

Posted on the HuffPo, in response to this article: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/22/voter-id-laws-gop-college-student_n_1791568.html

How’s this: if you are too ignorant to understand that you need to bring your ID to the polls, you are too ignorant to cast an informed vote.  People do not get smarter in masses, if every person in that mass is ill informed.  The Democrat model is herding people into cattle cars and telling them who to vote for.  The Republican model is to assume that the informed and responsible will vote Republican, and generally they are correct.

Leftists may not want to admit this, but most Americans GET that preventing voter fraud is a pretty basic element in any democracy.

And as far as the good Democrats do, show me one city in America that is running off the rails–Toledo, Detroit, Chicago–that has not been run by Democrats for 40 years or more. 

Show me where the Senate Democrats have performed their Constitutional duty and passed a budget under Obama.  Show me where Bush’s spending was somehow bad, but Obama’s is fine.  BOTH WERE HORRIBLE. 

What we need are REAL conservatives.  If implemented their policies will work nearly instantly and those of you who depend on the Leftist religion for your sense of purpose will have to go on a long hike in the mountains to find a new meaning for what have thus far been wasted lives.