Categories
Uncategorized

Speculation

I think one of the secondary gains of being overweight is that you have less energy.  This may seem like a loss, and in many respects it is, but less energy for anxious people means less anxiety.  Running out of energy means less worry, so if you run out of energy more quickly, you worry less.

I really, truly think that every fat person you see has many layers of emotional baggage they need to lose before that weight will finally come off and stay off.  They are fat because there are benefits for them–good reasons for them–for being fat, over and above the fact that food–particularly fat and simple carbs in combination–will calm you down.  I think that combination specifically and measurably reduces cortisol levels.

So in my considered view, all clinical obesity needs some clinical psychology more than dietary advice.  They know what to do.  They just have good reasons not to do it.

And I am one of them.  As in most things, I’m stuck in the middle. I’m not fat, but I’m not skinny.  I’m not athletic, but I’m not really out of shape.  I’m always caught between competing intrapsychic factions.

I think this is where I am going to make my stand, though.  It’s measurable, and a whole lot of things have to happen right to make lasting improvements–which is to say gains in losing.

Near as I can tell, my lean body mass is about 190, so I can reasonably shoot for 225-230 as a long term maintenance goal.  I will advise when I hit it.  I lost 15 pounds and kept it off when COVID hit, and now have maintained another 15 pound loss for a couple months.  So now I’m going for the next level.

Categories
Uncategorized

Further thought on Breakfast at Tiffany’s

I think Holly Golightly definitely had sex for money.  Not nightly, not as a dedicated professional courtesan, but often enough that it was a major source of income.  The guy pounding on her door when she gets home is not a jilted date who bought her dinner, but a paying customer who failed to receive his product.  I think this is true.  Certainly, a girl forced to runaway at 14–or earlier, since it’s unclear how long she and her brother were out on the mean streets– and marry a much older man is going to be able to do things like that.

When she realizes Paul, who she keeps calling Fred, is really a gigolo, she says “I understand perfectly.”  And she does.  She also says something like “acting crazy keeps people off balance and its better that way.”  So most of what she does is calculated at some level, if only the intuitive and instinctual.

So when she falls asleep next to him, as awkward and weird as it feels in the movie, it’s something–falling asleep in bed with a strange man–she’s done many times.

So Paul/Fred is her secret equal.  He too sells sex for money.  This creates an instant affinity, in addition to him not being an obvious dick, like most of the men she services.

And this OJ guy must have been with her for a while.  He was an obvious skirt chaser, but had no interest any more in her.  They likely shared a bed for six months to a year, while he taught her not to be a yokel.  When Paul calls him for the money, he says in effect “I don’t owe her.”  Then he thinks a second and repeats “I really don’t owe her anything.”  Why?  He had paid her well.  He may have even put up the money for the apartment, which was why he objected to it being a dump; but not too strongly, since he still liked her and had good memories of her, even though she disappointed him by being “fake”, which of course she was.  She was playing games with everyone.

And when she was confiding in Paul, she was more or less thinking of him as a true equal, in a world where she was in reality different.

And I think she called him Fred not just because he reminded her of him, but also because he reminded her of her goal of saving money for the two of them.

And obviously she knew Sally Tomato was up to something.  She was through all this vastly more clever and calculating than she seemed.

Her character actually reminded me of a woman I knew in college.

But anyway these $50 “tips” for the “powder room” were wink/wink, nudge/nudge payments for going up to her room and having a few drinks and who knows.  And no doubt she fulfilled her commission many times.  She had been there a year.  She went to Tiffany’s to feel classy whenever she felt like a dirty whore, as she likely did when she rolled up at 6am or whatever in the opening scene, following a paid night out (or in).

And it’s hard to know, now, what to think of Mickey Rooney as a buck toothed Japanese man. It’s worth keeping in mind we were at war with Japan as recently as 1945, and our soldiers occupied Japan proper for many years.  We were probably still there in 1961, when the movie was made, and so many of those who saw it may well have seen action in the Pacific or been stationed in Japan.  Those wounds were likely fading by then, but not gone.

I will make this comment: it takes knowledge and imagination to even have a hope of “looking” at the past the way it would have been seen back then.  But any time you do it, you cannot but see progress on many fronts, along with regress on others.

It seems to me that the audiences back then KNEW a lot of things that they did not TALK about.  Most of them likely picked up instantly on what took me a couple hours to key in on.  If the men were seeing hookers, they didn’t talk about it.  For that matter, if women were paying men to service them, nobody talked about that either.

So you have this huge subterranean world that was KNOWN to large groups of people, but which would never show up in books, magazines or of course movies.  That stuff didn’t start until maybe the late 60’s.

I will wonder aloud, though, what sort of film OJ had in mind for Holly.  I guess there is no way to know for sure, but it likely wasn’t one calling for tremendous acting skill.

Categories
Uncategorized

Sappy American movies

I just watched Breakfast at Tiffany’s.  That last scene with the cat in the rain is great.

And there is a part of me that wants to say “life isn’t like that for most of us”, but another part wants to say, “and PARTICULARLY if that is true, that is the point.”

If no one is happy, is it not good to at least see it on film?  And if people ARE happy, then it isn’t that unrealistic.  The truth, of course, is mixed, and none of us are either fully in control of our destinies, or fully helpless.  Love does happen.  That is obvious enough.  And love with enough work can certainly last a lifetime.  I believe that.

And I think these sorts of things soften people up, make them more open.  I have recently seen this concept of emotional agility occur in several places.  Don’t movies, if you participate in them, take you through your emotional paces?  Up, down, sideways, loops, upside down, slow, fast, hot, cold?

Now, watching three movies a day blunts this.  I watch maybe 1 a week at most, probably more like 2-3 a month, and always something I’ve chosen.  And they stick with me a while.  I digest them.  I’m like a cow with however many stomachs they have.

But contrast that with, say, Mouchette.

Is the world not more like Mouchette for many than most of us would like to realize?  Yes, I think so.  Life has been brutal and hard for most of humanity for most of history, and probably worse for little girls than little boys, although there has no doubt been plenty of misery for all.

And it’s worth recollecting, since it is easy to forget on this side of the Atlantic, that famine was common in Europe during and after both the First and Second World Wars.  Audrey Hepburn endured starvation in Holland.  It caused her a lot of health problems, and I will speculate may have contributed to her relatively early death from cancer.  She also remembers seeing a boxcar full of Jews being loaded, and seeing a miserable little boy in pajamas about her age.  Many French were directly affected by the fighting and the Nazi occupation.  Au Revoir Les Enfants is in my understanding autobiographical for Louis Malle.

Spain was ruled by a dictator until the mid-1970’s.

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall (while thinking about it, I will note that Kaliningrad, while larger, might usefully be compared to West Berlin, and at the moment to West Berlin after the blockade, in an interesting historical twist), most of us have forgotten “history”.  It’s all golden now, we were told.  We can’t fuck it up now, we were told.  You can trust your leaders now, we were told.

No, until we are training our children to be mature, responsible, industrious, and informed citizens, the risk of a complete collapse into the Dark Ages–with a technocratic twist–remains between possible and likely.

So that’s my Mean Red.  I think I’m going to try and remember that.  My much nicer comment is that this sweet movie, which is what it was, was a tonic for me, today.  That’s worth something.

And even within the movie they didn’t sugarcoat a lot of things.  “Holly” came from an abusive family she had to run away from (as did one of my grandfathers, who also ran away at 14) and married a much older man out of desperation.  Her manic antics had reasons behind them, which the writers and directors assumed people would get, just as they got that Peppard was in effect a gigolo.

Two cents, soon to be 1.75 cents.

Categories
Uncategorized

Life and the Anaconda Strategy

It seems to me that a life lived optimally feels most of the time like a smooth flowing stream.  Perhaps counter-intuitively, I think this can be the case even in difficult circumstances, but this is a very difficult skill to learn.

I feel that our first hour awake in the morning is a key indicator where we are at.  Do you wonder what interesting things will happen, what wonders you will see, who you will meet, what stories you will hear, and what you will learn?

Or are you more like “Dear God, let today be mostly like yesterday.  Yesterday wasn’t too bad.  Please let nothing awful happen today and please help me get through it without too much trouble, pain and worry?”

The task, obviously, is to get from one to the other, but this is not easy.  It is very hard.

The Anaconda Strategy, as articulated by the brilliant but prodigiously fat Winfield Scott, amounted to “to get to Richmond, which is 100 miles away, we have to first get to Vicksburg, which is 1,000 miles away.”  And he was right, of course.  Vicksburg was Grant’s first real major victory, and how he was made Generalissimo of the whole conflict for the Union. It’s an interesting site.  You should visit it.

I am always reading multiple books.  A case can be made in both directions, of course, but practically that is what I do.

One current book is “Lean and Strong.”

There is a lot of good content here.  I don’t think any of it is particularly original, other than the specific use to which he has competently put it. But it’s a good book.  I would recommend it.

What I am realizing is that Cognitive Psychology has gotten a lot better than it was in my first foray into it, back in the 90’s or so.  As you would imagine, I’ve read a LOT of self help and psychology books, but other than “Learned Optimism” few were much help to me.  They sell the books by making everything sound easy.  But it isn’t.  Not for me.  There is no easy three step process, nothing you can accomplish in three weeks; and perhaps to the point, nothing you SHOULD be able to accomplish in three weeks.  There is no Enlightenment for sale on Amazon.

The two specific schools of thought and presumably practice that seem interesting are called Self Determination Theory and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy.

And I will note that within these models “safe spaces” and the habit and following demand of being allowed to avoid any hint of unpleasantness is every bit as unhealthy as it would seem to be on the face of it.  Trying to structure a world where you always get your way or go into hyperarousal is more or less definitionally pathological.

Martin Seligman (and no doubt a few others) is what some have taken to calling Positive Psychology 1.0.  What some are calling Positive Psychology 2.0, which was certainly latent in Seligman’s work, but perhaps better articulated now (I have yet to read, for example, this book ), focuses, more or less, on embracing the suck.  On recognizing that life is just fucking hard sometimes, but that some of the BEST stuff comes from all this.  You can, to some great extent, make bad experiences good by how you deal with them.

[I will note that another book that had a significant influence on me back in the 1980’s, which anticipated this in what I will call Maturity Therapy, and which he called Moral Therapy, was “The Myth of Neurosis”.]

And what I see in my own consciousness is that latent traumas sit like giant stones in the flow of your consciousness.  They disrupt focus.  They sap energy by forcing you to learn how to keep them from conscious awareness.

And a stone is a stone, of course.  It is a big, heavy, thick object.  But we are dealing with emotion, and the reality is that big, heavy, thick things can be gradually worn away with attention.  They break into smaller stones, and smaller stones, and eventually become integrated.  That integration frees up energy for positive experience.  We no longer need work so hard to keep them from intruding–intrusion, of course, being a more or less defining feature of trauma–and that makes openness to good things much easier.

And I have spoken of Dan Siegels SIFT model.  I don’t know if he came up with it, but he is the first one I heard talk about it.  Sensation, Image, Feeling, Thought.  As I have said, I think this is the order, and the two pairs are Sensation/image, and Feeling/thought.

And this morning it seems to me you need a strategy for optimizing flow and engagement at each level.  You need a method of dealing with sensation, which for me is Kum Nye.

Images I am feeling poetry works, and perhaps visual art, and perhaps interesting and good film.  The scene in the birch trees in Tarkovky’s “Ivan’s Childhood” is a good example.  Another odd one that pops in my head sometimes is the mailman riding his bike erratically at the beginning of the Sacrifice.  The key is evocation of sensations and feelings, pushing it out in both directions.

And I suppose I perhaps ought to also pair sensation/feeling, and image/thought.  That works too.  Kum Nye certainly works with the first pair.

And Cognitive Psychology obviously works well with thought.

And biofeedback, including neurofeedback, works with all of it.

I am slowly reconnecting with my spiritual energy, slowly making contact with my real tribe, which is out there somewhere.  I cannot begin to describe how excruciatingly difficult this has been.  Without being able to say this for certain, I feel I know from personal experience what the experience of war is like, of painful loss, and sustained emotional terror and physical difficulty.

My work continues.  It is raining outside, which I have always found pleasant.  It is a soft rain, moistening the world.

 

Categories
Uncategorized

Freezing to stop global warming.

Take a look at this: https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/07/not-laughing-now-wood-burning-stoves-firewood-short-supply-germany-citizens-fear-freezing-death-due-gas-shortages/

And this: https://www.theepochtimes.com/dutch-farmers-protest-climate-mandates-that-would-cut-livestock-by-30-percent_4570267.html

“Global Warming” has been a vanity project until now. It’s been a talking point, free of cost and effort, and a good reason to denounce–that is the word–the deniers, the skeptics, the SCIENTISTS who disagreed.

But 30% of Dutch farmers are going to be bankrupted by rules around global warming. There is a run in Germany on wood burning stoves and wood. Why? To prevent the efforts to prevent–or slow down, or strike a pose against–Global Warming from causing them to FREEZE TO DEATH.

Ponder that. Take your time. You might want to swirl in the predictions that have been made every five years or so since about 1995 that the polar ice caps would be melted within 5 years.

This whole fucking thing is like a fucking joke that people forgot was a joke. EVEN IF HUMANS WERE CAUSING MAJOR CHANGE, which we clearly aren’t, the whole race would need to cooperate. People warming themselves with wood fires–as perhaps half of humanity still does at times–would need to stop. India and China would need to cut emissions too, and they are going in the opposite direction, with China particularly in my understanding investing heavily in coal.

WE WOULD ALL NEED TO BE INVESTING HEAVILY IN NUCLEAR ENERGY.

Here is the thing: the nutjobs are finally truly getting their way. All of them are RICH, and none of these measures affect them AT ALL. And they don’t give a shit who suffers. It’s “for the planet”.

But would it not make sense to revisit the science one last time? Would it not make sense to ask “what would falsify this whole project?” How would we know if they were wrong, or mostly wrong, or possibly wrong?

I have simplified my own treatment of this.

  • The Earth has been covered in ice and devoid of ice, all long before humanity. This means anything in between is natural variation.
  • The Vostok Ice cores, from which nearly all historical CO2 data comes, have a resolution of no less than about 1,000 years. That makes anyone making statements about a 50 year period ignorant or corrupt, likely both.
  • 3) The relevant climate data needs to be, and in the event can be, gathered by satellites. The hypothesis, were it to be formulated as such–which it has not been, making all this dependent entirely on a pure conjecture–is that CO2 from the combustion of fossil fuels will cause a rapid warming in the Upper Troposphere, which will gradually cause more warming below, which will create a cascade of problems, such as disrupting the flows of warmer water to the north and south.

This hypothesis REQUIRES, in my understanding, differential warming at that altitude.  It should be warming 2-3x faster than the areas above and below it, not warming–and cooling–at the same rate as the rest of the atmosphere, which is what it has been doing. If that warming is not present, then the hypothesis–remember it is not technically an hypothesis yet, since it cannot be falsified by any means–is wrong.

Now, knowing this, you may ask why NASA and the NOAA insist on using surface based measurements. There are all sorts of technical problems with such measurements, and all sorts of confounding factors. Well, yes. Precisely. They can fudge the data this way much more easily, and use their own models to create the data which they are supposedly measuring, but really creating with statistical algorithms. It’s a con game.

So this whole thing is complete bullshit. It is low fat diets, and COVID, but sandwiched somewhere in the middle. And PEOPLE WILL DIE because of all of this. They will be impoverished. Standards of living will drop precipitously FOR NO REASON, all while we hand power over to people who used DECEPTION to get it. That’s not a good start, is it?  We are starting with crooks, and crooks who should never have been able to get away with such a patent and destructive farce.

Categories
Uncategorized

The Fire Sermon and Nirvana

I am doing a close reading of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.  I’m really enjoying it.  It is good poetry, which for me is words which induce in me deep feelings that are interesting and new to me.

One stanza is titled “The Fire Sermon”, which I had not heard of, so I looked it up.  Here is Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%80dittapariy%C4%81ya_Sutta

I had an insight yesterday that the emotional connections I get in bars, which is where I do most of my socializing outside of work, are similar in tone to that of my family.  Superficial, characterized often by role playing, and transitory.  It’s what I’m used to.  It has always felt natural to me.

And it occurred to me that this way of being is not really healthy for me.  I can do much better.  I can actually be much happier in my own company.

And yesterday I got the briefest flicker of a connection with my authentic self.  It has been buried so long under so much garbage that I lost it.  And it felt good.

And then I thought of the Fire Sermon.  All the senses are “on fire”.

Here is what I would suggest: what we take to be real is a lit candle, which we take to be the source of all light.  But we actually live in an ocean of light, and focusing on that candle prevents us from seeing it.  We take that candle to be all there is.  We take our lives as they are–our homes, our relations, our pleasures, our pains–to be all there is.  We cling to them.  We focus obsessively on this small candle, which blinds us to what is possible.

Tarthang Tulku, in his book The Joy of Being, discusses how to loosen up and liberate each of the senses, which in the Buddhist canon includes the mind, which makes sense.  We do perceive with our minds.  I am looking with my mind right now, and so are you.

And I think most people misread what the Buddha was trying to say.  He was not saying to eliminate everything which we are.  He is not saying to be blind, deaf, without a sense of smell or taste, and insensible to the outside world, and devoid of thought.  What an austere and awful thing that is, to dedicate your life to your own death.  I would put this confusion on a par with the Christian idea that God had to sacrifice his own son in order to be able to forgive people for being human.

What he was saying is that there is light in our eyes which we do not feel, that every sense organ has the capacity to allow us to feel and register and participate in God, or Buddha nature.  What he is saying is that looking at the wrong thing–which is the outer appearance of things–blinds us to what lies behind them.  What he is saying is that joy is our natural mode of perception and being, but that our focal point is completely wrong.

He is not saying to contract ourselves into nothing, but to expand into everything, into Oneness and connection.

And Nirvana, of course, means extinction.  It is snuffing the candle out.  But this not extinction of the self, of what is left after we remember who we really are.  Rather, it is an expansion of the self into something vastly better, vastly more satisfying, and vastly more reliable.

It seems to me that all Buddhas are also Bodhisattva’s.  Nirvana is equal to Samsara.  It is the same reality, but seen rightly.  You simply gain the ability to move freely, to go wherever you like, consciously.

God, or Buddha Nature, is in light and darkness, dampness and dryness, pain and joy.  We have simply been choosing this, rather than that.  That blindness is the fire he speaks of.

Categories
Uncategorized

Thought on masks

I was talking with a nurse the other day.  In her clinic–and indeed every medical environment I have personally visited in the past few months–masks are still required.  I asked her if they might be permanent, and she said “I’m afraid they may be.”

Thomas Sowell famously said:

“The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.”

Here is the thing: this nurse has had four upper sinus infections this year already, something she said was “absolutely” because of the masks.

Here is my point: mask wearing is not only pointless–we know from multiple studies they make no difference not just for COVID but for any airborne respiratory viruses–but also HAS COSTS OF ITS OWN.

Increased rates of respiratory and sinus infections are just one cost.  Another is that many of these healthcare workers are going to get emotionally sick of wearing these ridiculous mouth diapers and simply quit and do something else, at a time when we are already short of workers in many places.  Those who don’t will be at increased risk of depression.  We all need to see faces.  It’s hardwired.

And we KNOW that masks are kids are bad for many reasons.  They are causing all sorts of developmental delays and traumas, some of which may not be correctable.  Kids need to see mouths to learn to speak and read, and they need to see faces to learn basic emotional cues and for most intents and purposes how to be social humans.

Etc.  Sweden never imposed masks, most Swedes did not wear them, and they finished with COVID a good six months before us, with a lower death rate than all but about 5 States, and certainly lower than California, New York, and other similarly ridiculous places.

But the fix is in, right?  The cronies and authoritarians WANT mass compliance, because masks amount to badges of supine compliance to irrational authority, and act as security blankets to people no longer able to suck their thumbs in public.

Here is my proposal: unionization and class action lawsuits.  I don’t know how many healthcare workers are unionized, but this is a case where they categorically need collective bargaining.

And here is the thing: masks are OSHA regulated.  They are a form of PPE, and as such come with a raft of regulations.  During the “pandemic” (I’m not even sure there was ever anything serious going on after the first real wave) masks were reclassified, I think by the CDC, as “Community Protective Equipment”.  This was always obvious bullshit, but now that even the pretense of an emergency is over, that classification needs to be litigated and relegated to a trash heap.  If you are asking people working for you to wear the fucking things, then you need to follow the fucking rules.  You need to justify the need for them, and that simply cannot be done.

So I think groups of nurses and doctors and administrative folks need to get together and file a class action lawsuit against the CDC, NIH, their hospital administrators and others for REAL DAMAGES.

This nurse should be able to sue for all her sinus infections.  Parents of children with developmental delays should be able to sue the idiots who mandated masks for their kids.  And everyone harmed by a mandated vaccination should be able to sue the people who made them take it.  Vaccine injury is very certainly a workplace injury and very much OSHA reportable (even though, like all our other corrupted agencies, OSHA is not collecting data on these injuries, obviously to protect the guilty).

And even Pfizer and Moderna and others are most likely liable for vaccine injuries because THEY FAKED MUCH OF THE DATA, or at least that is what appears to be the case.  They lose their liability immunity if they engaged in fraud.  The FDA, which approved these things, also needs to be sued.

In all of this is enough work to keep an army of lawyers busy for years.

There is every reason to think all of this will be successful.  The fucking bullshit needs to stop, and the veil needs to be torn off, to reveal the rot underlying it all.  The stink is obvious.  Let’s start looking at the sources.

Categories
Uncategorized

Interesting thought on anxiety

Anxiety is really an instinctual urge to run or hide.  It can manifest for many reasons, but given that life can be dangerous and troubles do come down regularly, some degree of anxiety is absolutely unavoidable.

The problem, of course, is chronic and ambient anxiety.  This is I think always a mismatch between perceived troubles and perceived capacity.  As one example, some people feel no fear jumping out of airplanes, and others are paralyzed by the thought of driving a car, or being in a crowd, or even being outside.

Perception thus easily becomes reality, and if that reality is one that is unpleasant, then the task is to alter perception.  As I wrote a few days ago in my notes (not published here yet), it is possible to feel trapped while free, and possible–paradoxically and in large measure theoretically, from a practical perspective–to feel free while objectively trapped.  This sort of freedom is something many ascetics have sought, such as the monks and nuns who wall themselves into small rooms for years.

And there are two levels of anxiety: pure fear, and the fear of fear, or what I have decided to call for now meta-anxiety.  I don’t know if that is a good term, but it will do for now as the fear of fear, which is really the fear of hyperarousal, itself the result of traumatic helplessness.   This would be something like a panic attack.  If you have ever had one–and I have–you learn to fear them.  I think most normal people would and do go to great lengths to avoid repeating them.

[if you do have panic attacks, by the way, and have not yet mastered them, this is a really great resource: www.panicaway.com

What is great about this system is that it cures you.  It really works.  I have not had a panic attack in 15 years or more.]

And actually the term I came up with the other day was metaemotion, which is a feeling about feelings.  You can feel fear of shame, before you feel the shame.  Fear of shame is one of the glues that keeps human societies together.

And it occurred to me the other day there are two levels to learned helplessness.  The original studies were done on dogs, so I think this distinction was missed.

Learned helplessness, purely, is behavioral.  The dogs were “taught” to stay on electrified plates even when they could escape.  A painful stimulus was induced, and they did nothing.

But in humans there is an emotional aspect: you can be trained into feeling YOU HAVE NO CONTROL OVER YOUR EMOTIONS, that waves of something bad can sweep over you, and there is nothing you can do about it.

And in humans, this is by far the more important aspect.  The helplessness is relative to STATE MANAGEMENT.

And here is the point I logged on to make: there are three ways of dealing with anxiety.

  1. By developing the emotional skill of State Management, such that painful feelings can be endured long enough to develop confidence and relative control.  Tom Cruise, in the movie and I think in reality, taught himself to feel GOOD in a tightly confined cockpit, operating at high speeds, and under considerable physical duress.  Anxiety can both be managed, and eventually transformed into ENGAGEMENT, or a sense of adventure, a thrill, excitement.  This is what animates rock climbers, and sky divers and other thrill seekers.
  2. By intoxication.  Drugs, booze.  You achieve “state management”, and at that RELIABLE state management, by physically altering your reality.  Me, I still like to get drunk sometimes, but I don’t think I ever put it to myself quite like this.
  3. By OBSESSION.  This is the one that really surprised me.  It just popped in my head, but it is true.  I am obsessive.  I always have been, and this is why.  What Obsession does is insert itself into the place of anxiety, such that every waking thought crowds out the fear and dismantles any perception of it.

Logically, an immature society–as ours in large measure is, not least because of the lack of genuine challenges, and the lack of a need to develop the maturity to manage them–is going to have enormous problems with anxiety.  We deal with it through distraction, frivolity, by flitting from one thing to another, which amounts to an obsession with stimuli.

We also deal with it, of course, with drugs and alcohol.

But, and here is the second point I wanted to make, in many respects our polarization amounts to an outcome of political obsessiveness, itself the outcome of ambient anxiety.   People are fixated on the latest grievance, the latest outrage, and there is enough out there for anyone to get their fix daily.

What is lost, obviously, is nuance.  Nuance is a mature emotion.  It implies balance, time, consideration, and even a certain generosity.  It implies a willingness to listen carefully, to allow facts and feelings to multiply and grow and eventually reach some kind of synthesis.

And putting it this way, Black and White thinking is, I think, almost necessarily and invariably an outcome of fear.  So when you see it, you are seeing anxious people dealing in an immature way with a world which frightens them.

It’s astonishing to me how much progress we have made in the physical sciences, without having learned how to generalize the learnable and trainable skill of State Management.  Every child should be taught this.  Nothing but good could come from this, if it were done intelligently by sincere and competent people.

And specifically, I am talking things like Biofeedback–of which Neurofeedback is a distinct subcategory–competent meditation, somatic psychotherapy, training in the basics of cognitive psychology and the like.

And I think I have mentioned this, but Milan Kundera talks about how what he REALLY wanted from Communism was dancing circles.  It was in a book of fiction, but that was likely true.  We need communal events, where all are included, that include play and celebration.  Look around you: do you see any?  Sports, maybe a little.  Church, to some extent, but you have to believe what they are teaching, and many of us just can’t, and in any event my personal experience is that it is fucking serious and a lot of those people are just not sincere.

My work continues.  I am making progress.  I feel that.  My basic objective remains the same, to form some sort of group that reliably meets these needs.

But I still have many miles to go.  I still have, deep down, an occasional cruelty that is simply the mark that was left on me by the cruelty of others.  But it does not belong in a place where I am asking for trust.  I don’t trust me, and won’t ask anyone else to until my work is done.

I was contemplating a podcast the other day, and some little voice said “not yet”.  And I asked “when”?  And on impulse I looked to my left and saw a crane landing in a pond.  I have never seen a crane before outside a zoo, that I can recall, so I took that as a sign that at the new year it may be time.  Cranes and babies.  Then I was like (trust me, you would not want to be the one trying to operate my little brain), no it’s storks.  That was nothing.

Then just now, I looked it up, and found this: https://www.livescience.com/62807-why-storks-baby-myth.html

Apparently in the original myth it may have been cranes.  Interesting.

On a related note, I was pondering the other day “what do I do with this anxiety?”, and something made me look to the left, and there was a car with “Adventure” written on the license plate.  That would be much easier to chalk up to an unconscious perception, but I liked it anyway.

So I guess with fear the task is transformation.  Fear can be used to live a better life, by turning it into an interesting challenge, and emotional stimulation.

For now I am going to continue to work on calming down, on building a work/life balance that I have really never had, on relaxing more without my reliable state management system, and on being less obsessive generally.

It’s slow, very slow.  But it’s movement in the right direction.  That’s the best I can manage for now.  It’s something, and something good.

Categories
Uncategorized

Musings June 29, 2022

Stuff on my phone. My brain won’t stop sometimes. I’m over sharing again—I’ve left the diary entries in—but will say I dreamed of heaven again last night, for the first time in a while, and you cannot lie there. And mostly what I describe are wounds, some existential. Is admitting I am a scarred and often scared human being shameful?  No, if anything I think it is brave. It gives permission to others to admit to THEMSELVES that they know exactly what I am talking about, and have always known, but could not ADMIT they knew, because it hurt too much.

I’m going to skip most of the editing. Im never going to be good with these little keypads with these large hands.

 

Notes 3

Be sure and comment on the importance of role playing in authitarian systems.

One could argue that the roles of history—say caste roles in India—made people more stoic and stronger and more accepting. This is likely somewhat true. But such coerced social roles also no doubt engendered the subterranean hate and anger which fueled the wars and atrocities of history; in India wars against women, the Dalits, and eventually Muslims.

Whatever its true source or more likely sources, Q took off because we all KNOW we are being lied to, and that big decisions are being made in the darkness. And hope depends in no small measure in having SOMEONE in the system who still cares about freedom, truth and dignity.

I think a key spiritual task is getting comfortable with discomfort. It is vastly safer and vastly more productive of happiness.

Sufficient unto the world is the violence we find. Ahimsa is perhaps most usefully not adding unnecessarily to it; and it is perhaps the most interesting insight of Ishmael that agriculture is unnecessarily violent, and more violent than hunting and gathering.

The value of psychological maturity is that it both frees you FROM unmanageable anger and shame and anxiety and frees you TO pursue worthwhile goals that build stable happiness and self respect. Maturity is the ONLY path to a happiness over which the individual has any control.

A hypocrite is really a traitor to virtue.

Its interesting that mid20th intellectuals lacked Attachment Theory, or any theory of trauma.

I would stipulate something I wil call the Law of Emotional Continuity, which states that when ideas change radically they tend to retain the same emotional tinge. De facto worship of the Tsar became worship of Communism. The Frenck killed a king but maintained a thirst for legal Absolutism.

In a culture worthy the name it is not laws that keep people from killing each other, but mutual regard and mature restraint. Laws only become needed when civility is breaking down.

You can’t win every fight but you can fight every fight to the end, if the cause is worth it.

Himan history is one of Collectivism. The different have always been punished when they transgressed the sacred, although few likely did so, since they needed the others to survive. What is new about Orwellian Collectivism is its scale, its retention of the pretension of scientific rationality, and its utter and complete repudiation in reality of all rationality, all reality testing, and even the flimsiest shard of an effort at consistency. Modern Collectivism is nothing more or less than a segment of humanity refusing to grow up.

I think it is useful to stipulate that psychology parallels but precedes spirituality.

A sense of shame and disgustingness can and often does lead to a high level of performance, but the only real satisfaction achieved is relief in avoiding failure. There is no self there where positive feelings could reside.

A shame based life is lived not to fail. It is lived to reduce negative experience, never to experience positive ones, even if positive experiences do accidentally happen from time to time. It is findamentally unfulfilling and I think particularly most mid-life suicides come from people simply tired of living with a continual critical gaze on them, and who lose, or feel themselves losing, the energy to fight for an impossible perfection.

Warriors live not to fail. Their only real positive is public recognition. Permanent warriorship is innatural, and it is worth noting the citizen soldiers of Athens were the equals of the Spartans. It is reasonable to don the mantle of “fight not to fail”, and then take it off and become a warrior in potential only, just as one is artist or jurist potentially.

Comment also on the black community being treated like supprresed children.

The sun shines on good and evil alike; on the living and the dead; on decaying life, on barren sand, and ice it will never melt, at least in any of our lives. But if it chose not to shine on death, decay and evil all life, and all possible goodness, would die too. An open life cannot really choose who receives the benefits, nor should it, as new life is often hidden in old death.

With the Boomers you have an entire generation that refused to grow up, and refused to learn to face the world in an honest and mature way, and they raised immature kids. The goal of their political engagement is creating narcissistic supply through the sacrifices of others. “You can’t afford a Tesla. Well I can. That makes me better.”

In the actual jungle the strongest predators need fear the least. In the human jungle this is true too, but strength often looks like ruthless sociopathy.

Ponder importance of celebrity and social media recognition in a world starved of attention and authentic relating.

The narcissism on the Left is not in caring for the poor and unlucky: it is not caring about actually doing something sustainable and good about their situations. It is confusing gesture for action, and verbal intention for careful thought and responsible attention.

Why do human problems go unsolved? Immaturity, of which both dishonesty and sloth are examples.

Hallucnigens would be vastly more effetive if done within an emotionally intimate and supportive community.

Totalitarianism is structural enmeshment. Authoritarianism is the strict parent—perhaps an irrational and even psychotic parent, but one who only wants your body, not your mind and soul.

I kept dreaming about being able to lay back on both my knees so Im ordering that book. OR, maybe just adding pilates leg thing to routine.

It is very hard to react appropriately to emotionally numb, humorless, uncontactable parents, because you are not reacting to what is emotionally there, but to what is absent. This morning I felt rage and the urge to strangle my mother. And I myself lapse easily into numbness out of habit, particularly in calibrating with her, as that is the only emotionsl response she can understand and which does not make her anxious, which of course I pick up on. Craziness.

This is the kind of weather for which ice WATER was intended. As I’ve noted, most soda cannot be drunk in quantity any other way.

Rejecting self pity really should be framed as acceptance, as in “accept what I cant or should not change”; and all virtues both positively and negatively: accept your lot without complaining in general/ reject self pity; don’t quit/ persevere; dont shut down emotionally/remain curious.

Persistence is not a virtue until you think about quitting. Acceptance—although on a continuum—only really comes consciously in play when you start rejecting.

All my life I think I have balanced the fear of failing if I do act with the fear of failing if I don’t. I think a more positive, proactive, mistake and forgiveness friendly mindset woukd be an improvement.

Ots an idd fact that one can be anxious about being made more anxious. It actually is common to fear fear.
p
For my diet it might be worth planning a major fuckup so I can practice getting back on track.

It is not so much that the world has lost its mind so much as those who control the lens through which we see the world have.

Courage and work capacity are related.

The real problem with Authoritarian Enmeshment (are there other kinds?) is that all emotional growth first depends on consciously feeling what you are feeling, and that is imposdible when everyone is getting their feelings jumbled up with one anothet. It would seem a sense of confinement and following rage and panic would be the result. Emotionally it is asses and elbows with no end in sight, or possibility of planning an escape but through individuation.

For me, I need to let depression, despair, anger and fear alone, and just live within them until they diminish or, better yet, I learn to manage them. And managing happens at that level. If I have to invoke philosophy or psychology then I’ve already “escalated.”

Another way of putting it: I do want to live in a world where the dude in a skirt, or the men or women holding hands, do not feel fear of emotional or physical violence, but I also want to live in a world where they do not feel empowered to direct emotional or physical violence AT ME. You do your thing in peace. It stops there. This allows me to do my thing in peace also. The demand that I share your worldview amounts to an imposition of secular religion, which the first Amendment was specifically intended to prohibit. I would actually go so far as to say that, within the principled framework of the Constitution, discrimination based on political views amounts to a secular religious test, and a clear violation of the Equal Protection Clause.

Put another way, Political Correctness as a uniform and coercive creed, amounts to an Establishment of religion, where religion is defined as a set of practice and belief organizing and orienting the lives of a mass of people.

I need to focus on what is possible for me. Competent work is neither hasty nor desultory, and that would be a good place to start. I think I need to go through a period of conscious arrogance in order to expand my felt sense of what is possible for me. I would guess sustained confinement can generate grandiosity. I need to let this be. In any event it was almost certainly already there. I just suppressed my awareness of it. What us there, I need to see.

Listening to White Rabbit I kind of feel a chill and latent cruelty in it. And I think the mobs of the 60’s could easily and perhaps accurately be thought of as lynch mobs out for blood, based on bad information, and utterly unconcerned with the truth. Then or now.

I don’t think there is any point—and likely harm—in trying to get rid of any emotions, like jealousy, gluttony, lust, sloth, anger or whatever the others are. You CAN’T get rid of them: you either deny them, and in so doing give them the power invisible powers have over you; or you own them recognize them, process them, and leave them without hate or revulsion in a tool box, ready to serve you if they are needed, as in modified forms they sometimes are. Lust, for example, is not bad: obsessive and self indulgent lust is. All the sins are simply virtues—or at least natural feelings— taken too far.

Historically, Communism has been the act of imposing an aristocracy in the name of equality. I will note too that the pleasures—for those who feel them—of privilege are enhanced if you first immisserate the mass of people.

One of the things movies and TV do is allow you to live vicarious lives, sharing dangers and ncertainties with no real danger or end meaning to the uncertainty.

I think all times in human history contained both difficulties and opportunities (obviously in varying proportions). I think an intelligent approach is to identify the problems of our time, accept their presence and inevitability, then work patiently to do what is possible to ameliorate them—while recognizing no problems and excessive ease and easy sloth ARE ALSO problems. This, and personal growth are, I think, the two best aims of human life.

Logical reasoning is not usually that complicated. It is accepting the RESULTS of good reasoning where many people have trouble.

I think true meditation begins when we give p all hope of directing our experience and simply allow it.

Often our “chains” consist in something we are pulling or pushing.

I think I use the news as a sort of thermostat to turn my emotional temperature down.

I think children stop growing emotionally when they encounter premature sexual energy. Innocence enables later flourishing.

The Lefts true strategy is to go low then protest in the most strenuous terms when their targets do anything but go high. They then call their own road the high road and proclaim themselves morally superior. This is more or less the literal truth. Trumps undeniable virtue is that he understands this game. Nothing he did or said would have been exceptional or noteworthy in any way coming from the Cult. Just to take example from countless cases the CHILDREN of Supreme Court justices are being threatened and Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer are tacitly not just condoning this but ENCOURAGING this. How much lower can you get?

I think much pleasure in life comes from contrast. A cool day after many hot ones feels good. Likewise a warm one after many cold days. Rest after work, but also work after too much rest. And the enjoyment of privilege sought by elites is heightened by knowing most people are miserable. Non-duality is learning to grow beyond these responses, which are largely biological and conditioned.

Social media, for many, is a sort of mirror. You take selfie after selfie, trying to get it just right, just “casual” and unaffected enough, while of course feeling the opposite of casual. The Victorians likely actually were more casual. But was in not precisely a mirror which trapped Narcissus himself?

I think for many engineering an apolcalypse makes more sense than waiting for Godot. It promises an end to thrir anxiety and confusion.

The philosophical importance of psychology is that it posits there is a unitary human species, in which all humans share the same drives and same needs, and following similar moralities and claims to moral virtue. Psychology is inherently anti-exclusionary. There is only Us.

Logically, anyone who wants to avoid growing up—which amounts to an aversion to change, which can present challenges to the childish temperament—needs an intellectualized and ritualized “place” to live. Ideology fits this need perfectly, since all you have to do is conform, not think and grow; and you are surrounded by like minded and equally weak-spirited people with whom you perform ritual behaviors, like marches and protests. The whole thing acts like an insulating cocoon. If someone tells you to grow up, your “friends” (in quotes since all must obey the same master and getting out of synch will result in the ejection of anyone, so personal loyalty CANNOT be a value in this world) are yelling back in unison with you, and that feels good. It actually makes you relish that sort of conflict.

I think understanding someone who has never felt understood is close to rescuing them.

Electronic vehicles are easier to control. Its hard to stockpile batteries andcI suspect they are easier to turn off remotely.

Regarding “whiteness”, simple question: is it better to be born black in this country or any majority black country in Africa you want to choose? Any of them. Is the answer not obvious, that even though this nation was founded BY white people and FOR white people that the principles of science and political Liberality and Liberalism have worked to make all lives better? There is no mass exodus to Africa. In fact a great many of thrm want to come HERE for better lives. CRT is just a resurrected reverse racism, created by frustrated ideologues for whom emancipated and thriving blacks are just as frustrating as the bourgeoisie was for classic Marxists, and for the same reason: people who do not need them make them feel less important, as indeed they should. A life lived for conflict and scarcity cannot but feel the loss in peace and plenty. It ill suits their destructive rage and deep vanity and narcissism.

I think as a child I was too frightened to admit I was frightened. This has persisted into adulthood. Keeping that energy out of conscious awareness has been very tiring

Fear ebbs and flows. The fear of fear does not. That is why it is better to admit fear frankly. Sometimes it will disappear entirely.

The fear of fear is really a fear of triggering traumatic helplessness. I think playing with fear, edging into it, helps alleviate this fear, every time you allow yourself to feel and admit fear, but that complex does not activate.

It was in Elementary School where I really learned to lie about my fear. I read many books with heroes and buried myself in other worlds. That habit continued until today, perhaps. Its odd that even in D&D I never wanted to be a brave fighter. I always wanted to stand in the shadows or at a distance.

This whole COVID thing feels like Corporations have taken over the world. And the Left is fine with it. Supportive. Enthusiastic even. Turns out they dont oppose illicit profits but people who DIFFER. Left wing greedy corporations are not a problem at all. It is like the CDC has become the PR agency for Big Pharma and most TV a sort of intracorporate rolling ad campaign to keep people groomed and on the inside.

There is a strong connection between role playing and sentimentality, to the point that the entirety of their moral sentiment is better viewed as unconscious affectation.

Its likely my mother saw me shake in fear.

Diary: I saw a dance studio and had positive thoughts. Then it hit me I like the IDEA of dancing but not the work. Never the work. And my whole life is like that. I like cookbooks but not cooking; buying books but not reading. I am good at thinking but not doing. Some of this I guess is common enough, but I woukd like to learn to do better.

The preeminent act of freedom, both personal and political, is self assertion. And the core outcome of the transgender agenda is to engender a muted and confused sense of self, and one tied up in knots of triviality. This conscious and organized assault on the psyches of our children, in other words, is rxplicitly intended to make them politically, socially, and psychologically malleable. If you can be convinced to give up your birth gender—one of the most basic and primal units of identity—what then is not possible with thw slightest push? Hitler and others said “get them young”. Well they are getting them young.

There does not need to be a Satan for there to be Satsnism.

I think “being in the moment” is nothing more or less than living without fear, which translates nearly instantly, and certainlg easily, to a spirit of play.

AA line: choose your tomorrow but start today.

Politics—which is say the manipulation of perception and conscious alliance building—is only necessary in a reactive system. If elections are corrupted our politicians do not need to play politica with the elrctorate. Their only truly political considerations concern their standing with the Power Elite, which in this country is SUPPOSED to be the people, but which cannot be if their influence is eliminated by fixed elections. And this fact appllies to all. If Democrats are happy with the claimed direction of our country, by the time they want to raise objections, it will be much too late. The Beast will not bare its fangs fully until the cage is shut. And at that point “meaning well” is no better than greed or larceny, both of which it enabled.

I wonder if drinking baking soda before taking probiotics would help them get through the stomach. It seems likely.

There is a close connrction between the feelings of emotional confinement and that of being lost. When you lose your inside the outside world becomes incomprehensibly chaotic.

I think what narcissists—wmotionally immature and incomplete people—do is fail to respond on many channels. You feel something, express it, then get nothing. It is invisible to that person. It doesnt exist. Some part of YOU doesnt exist, and this creates existential doubt, emotional pain, incompleteness, and feels in some respects like a prison, because your emotional range of motion—your emotional freedom—has been curtailed. And often some part of us feels shame and self loathing for failing to get the love and understanding we needed. It blames itself. “YOU HAD SUCH A SIMPLE TASK. JUST GETTING YOUR OWN MOTHER TO LOVE YOU.”

I think there is a Principle of Traumatic Decay—and my comparison here is with particle “decay” of Particle Physic-/which I would state that as a long standing traumatic spasms loosen, one trauma will decay into 5 or more smaller imaginary traumas. You still have unpleasant, bad dreams, but nonetheless manageable ones, versus ones where you just shake, or awaken screaming with no memory of the dream.

I’ve long had an inner voice saying NO ONE LOVES YOU. I got the addendum today: AND I WILL MAKE SURE NO ONE EVER DOES.

In some resects atheism is a medicine intended to heal some types of wounds created by some forms of religion. This is the claim made by proselytising atheists in paticular. But it is a medicine given out indifferently to everyone thst creates a different sort of illness, and arguably a worse one. As individuals, atheists are about as likely to be good—healthy emotionally—people as the religious. The difference is that religion provides powerful contextual support to doing socially good, self sacrificing things, and the doctrine of eternal oblivion does not. Dogmatic atheism also causes its adherents in the end to reject SCIENCE if it fails to conform to their orienting assumptions, just as happens with the religious. In important respects, it is the identical disease.

If Everywhere is Here, and Everytime (a word we need) is Now, then you can never BE lost; you just FEEL lost, and you feel lost whdn you lose the emotional agility to br here and now because of fear and shame. You can fear fear, fear shame, be ashamed of fear and even ashamed of feeling ashamed. These are all traps that fisconnect us and make us FEEL lost.

I think two forms of human connection are possible are abstract and. ceremonial, with traditional culturres in important respects lresembling enmeshed families; and mature, Liberal individuated personal and specific connection. Violence is inherent to the first. Sacrifice, as actual animal and himan sacrifice, war, and emotional repressiveness, becomes needed to mediate undifferentiated people. And in this sense the “gods” of that group may usefully be seen as shared hallucinatory and socially mediated delusions, as Durkheim, ia, argued. There is only one real God, the source of everything.

I think to say we are wired to be tribal is pdifferent than wired for connection. Tribal, maybe, is wired NOT to individuate. It could be argued most human beings for most of human life have been enmeshed in some ways; and I think we cannot begin to fully inderstand the cruelties this has enabled.

I think the idea of meta-emotion is useful. This would be the fear of fear, shame of shame, guilt of guilt, etc., and perhaps any of them mixed. The method and aim of learning emotional digestion, which I would argue is the BEGINNING of honest spirituality, is getting back to primaries, and allowing all of them to flow as the dynamic information for which they are intended and as which they are most useful.

It may be that gentleness is strength, but it may not always be best to be strong.

Trauma works like this: your capacity to process emotions is like your RAM. If it is exceeded, that slice of experience is removed and stored for later pricessing. It continues to make subtle and not so subtle demands on attention. This reduced openness makes future overloads more likely and at some point numbness results. This is a loss of the capacity fir emotional processing and amounts to a loss of the felt sense of life. The likelihood of overwhelm, of overvoltage is of course tied on one side to what actually happens, and on the other to what may best be termed confidence, which I will define as anxiety less ability to self calm. High anxiety with no capacity to self calm is helplessness, which makes overwhelm almost mathematically inevitable. Some aituations are objectively helpless, like an artilleey barage, or prison. But feeling lucky or blessed—or feeling the presence of God—amount to self calming strategies, increasing perceived power and confidence.

Dealing with immature people, you can grant their behavior stems from their own homes, their genetica, and the like, but SOME PART of their behavior, of the percetions they allow themsrlves to see and ackniwledge, IS CONSCIOUS DECISION.

There is an adult equivalent to that baby experiment where the mother looks away. I tried and tried to get my mother in particular to feel me, to empathize with me, to connect with me, but like that mother in the video she refused. She continues to refuse. That is why it still hurts to talk with her. As an extremely precocious and sensitive child I was often very upset, and she never chose to understand. Some part of this is conscious, and I think rationalized by her Biblically based conceit that in effect I am her slave and owe her allegiance. She chooses not to see because she seea no ethical reason to do so, and is not authentically generous in any way. I went into hyperarousal, as a baby, infant, toddler, youth, and young man repeatedly. She never showed me any meaningful mercy. She no doubt threw me a few small crumbs I clung to, but carelessly, thoughtlessly, and never consistently. What has taken me SO LONG to realize is that I do have enormous unmet emotional needs. I knew this, but have been unable to stay present long enough to begin integrating them.

The Unconscious is that place where words are not the medium of movement.

As the individual psyche progresses in complexity, the need for complex mirroring increases too. Where a hug may have sufficed, and a look of familial reognition, more complex beings need more compmex “touch”. They need to talk about feelings, which cavemen likely never did.

The sactificial cult arises from a social order that is in principle static, and which assigns a role externally to all members. The Hindu caste system might in some ways be seen as a subcontinental tribe. The sacrifice arises from unspent, pent up energy that cannot be dispeled by individuated connection.

I dont know why but it is a strange thought to me that I may have known a book or poem in another life. With poetry especially, perhaps other feelings bleed through, as they would with anything truly mythic and deep.m

There is, I think, a tipping point with evil, where all paths forwardp contain pain, but where the comforts of cruelty come to be seen as offering more immediate and reliable relief.

Softening of the pain of betrayal or sin is perhaps equal to forgiveness. When the pangs of regret or rage diminish, the crime has lost its hold on your present consciousness. The knot is undone. That is about all any of us can ask.

Sadness is a dilution and dissipation of energy. It is grounding. It is energy melting down and out, perhaps like a cold candle. It can be a sustained calm emotional movement, and sometimes, perhaps always, one of emotional reorganization and reintegration. Perhaps sadness could be defined as the energy manifested in conscious but resisted change. Anger fear and shame all tend to concentrate and expand. This makes sadness in some respects their balancing counterpart. Humor also dissipates energy, and in most is probably connected in sime way to sadness.

Behind every enduring hardness within us is an unresolved softness, usually a sadness, one of loss, or a related and seemingly interminable regret or guilt.

Empaths with narcisstic parents I think get confused on a deep level as to which feelings are theirs and which their parents. They mirror their parents but their parents do not mirror and acknowledge as real and valid the feelings of children who have no experience in all this and no easy path to learning this distinction. This is me. I am literally finally learning, at my Age, which feelings are mine and which a sort of self sustaining residue of ambient strong currents from my early childhood. I find myself often physically disgusted at what was done to me emotionally, but feeling THAT is I think healthy.

Communion, as an interpersonal wave function, is not meant to be continuous. It is part of a rhthym between particle and wave. Both are needed for health. Mass Formation, or enmeshment, or being a headless one, is a sort of unnatural spasm.

I think I finally figured out my rescue fantasy: when I fail, my mother is eager to rescue me. She always tacitly encouraged me to fail—such as by obsessively saying “don’t work too hard”, and inducing anxiety in me whenwver sqhe could—and my father of course loved it, because he could both mock me and not have to fear me. So some part of me has LONGED for failure and FEARED SUCCESS, because on an unconscious level it meant I would never be loved, and not unreasonably I never wanted to give up that hope. Well, that dream was never possible, outside of me willingly becoming a pliable child again, and in any event my mother does not have long to live. It was always sick, always wrong, but i have needed something—a sense of safety? A challenge? Time and space?—to bring this deep latent splinter out.

So this ache and this resiatence and pain comes to this: every time I start something some part of me says “if you succeed you will never be loved”, and I can feel my mother looking on at my paralysis, confusion and pain with approval. Then another voice says “if you dont get this done you will feel shame.”. And I fight it out, always using vastly more emotional wnergy than this essentialky simple work requires. It is the same with mental work, but the advantage of physical work is it is easier to use will to force a body to move. That is why I gravitated to physical work. And my intellectual work is really my effort, ironically, to STOP feeling drunk, disoriented and confused. It is my effort to impose order on a spinning world.

This is all close to healing insight. Im close to some form of freedom, but I need to continye relaxing into my work, and not drinking, and trying to achieve comfort in behavioral consistency.

I think my mothers almost conscious plan was to keep peomising me love if I failed and if I diminished myself, but never giving it. I was either going to break down and die, in which case she wookd have been glad because she hated me; or shrunk to almoat nothing, moved in next to her as she specificallt told me she fantasiEd about, and allowed her to use me vampiriaclly as narcissistic supply the rest of her life. In neither case was I ever loved or understood. Some part of me felt this intuitively but I was so lonely, and in ao much emotional pain, that my orienting feelings were alien to me. I knew she hurt me but I did not knkw why.

These abortion protesta are making it obvious there are a lot of women out there who hate children. We like to assume all mothers love their children, but this is clearly not true. Hate is not uncommon, and I suspect bouts of resentment are nearly universal.

There are so many problems with the Uvalde response that, combined with a propped door I still do not get, I will wonder aloud if this TOO was a set up, designed for the use to which it was in the event put.

The Pro-Choice movement, or faction, is pro-abortion, obviously. This makes them effectively an Anti-Birth Movement, and its not hard to tie that back to an Anti-Life Movement by a pathway other than reversing Pro-Life. It is reasonable for women to assert the right to only give birth when they choose, but all this goes far beyond that; again, via a different pathway than anti-human radical environmentalism, it returns to a fundamental self loathing and following Misanthropy.

In dealing with money its all gain and loss. More is good less is bad. But in LIFE its all about buoyancy. What mskes you lighter (in both senses) and what heavier and darker? There is no real connection between the two processes. They are disconnrcted lines, OTHER than that struggling to hold on to wealth and achieve PERFECT security makes you heavier and darker, always. You can have money and be spiritual, but not CLING—the Bible says love—to money and be spiritual. Money is a pass through means, that is all. All useful work is latently work on yourself, which is to say building lightness. It would be worth working for no money, if gains are reliably achieved, and no amount of money can compensate destroying your soul, which is to say, your remembrance of what really matters.

Kum Nye is really creating acmild stress—an indrntation on your forearm by your thumb, sustained attention to your belly, a fast or vigil or hard work—that cause the underlying, latent system—which we call energy patterns—to react in a homeostatic effort to reassert themselves. This propcess, with attention, thus reveals them, and awareness ofvthem permits flow and self (re)organization.

The “bourgeois” type was hated by the Left—the new words are White supremacists, but it means the same thing, which is “non-communist” and nonparticipating member of the elite—because it was for them just that: a type. It was a role which felt to them banal, unreflective, uninspiring: in a word, boring, tedious, and through sheer torpor and mental and behavioral inertia inimical to the REALLY COOL STUFF THEY WANTED TO DO. But of course the Communist type is a type too, nest pas? And it a type that because it REQUIRES all members to view the world through the same narrow and distorting prism, is actually more tedious than the bourgeoisie. And on some level, no truth can be fully ellided, so they substitute rage fir passion, and willfully confuse destruction with creation. Both do, after all, alter the status quo. And because most of these people hate themselves and their lives, WHY NOT blame wveryone else and pretend that ALL THEUR LIVES NEED is the final victory of, well, whatever, as long as it isn’t bourgeois white supremacy. WE DON’T KNOW WHAT WE WANT, OK? BUT YOU ARE THE ENEMY. THAT IS ENOUGH FOR NOW.

All work is meditation, so do it with reverence an competence, but without greed or aversion.

Desire drives a crooked road.

Heaven is a place where David Byrne can spend the next thousand years listening to all the music ever created in human history, in the company of the people who created it, and have CONTINUED creating it.

You cannot lie to all of yourself. All you can do is allow cowardice to partition your conscious awareness.

A good aim is to make all work—ALL work—magical and entertaining. How do you do this? Cultivate a sense of the magical then slowly generalize it.

Adventure is really misery and uncertainty embraced, often after the fact, sometime long after the fact. But it is best embraced as vivid experience while it is happening, which is a skill requiring a lot of confidence. As such it is a sort of Hard Kum Nye, in that it makes STRONG indentaions on your patterns and not infrequently destroys them, both for good and worse. This time we are living through is an adventure. Its scary. None of us know how it will end. So be it. Amen not to what I want or what might be, but to what is, just as it is in this moment. One day your grandkids may be asking you: DID YOU REALLY LIVE THROUGH ALL THAT?

If I ever do a podcast the topic will not mainly be what is right, but how we return to the capacity to discuss our feelings snd views about what is right in peaceful, reverential and resprctful, thoughtful and productive ways. How do we grow up as a society and civilization, in other words? If I might amend slightly a great Thomas Sowell quote, the most important question is not what is right, but how we talk about what is right.

Categories
Uncategorized

Worth the watch

Mattias Desmet in a condensed talk on Mass Formation.

https://plandemicseries.com/massformation/

In my view, there were many mass formations in the 60’s and 70’s. As Mass Formations they faded away—the numbers and day to day cohesion dwindled— but many tens of thousands of people who found in that mass enmeshment and surrender of ANY effort at mature individuation a RELIEF and even joy that gave their lives a sense of (trivial) meaning continued. They took over our universities, and have been hypnotizing our kids into their cult ever since.

Our current Mass Formation, in my view, sprouted in 2012, when the True Believers were forced to choose between the, to me, obvious reality Obama was a failed Messiah (and patent mediocrity), and the comforting lie that his victory was all that mattered. They of course chose the latter. These are Headless Ones I wrote about back then, who allowed themselves to be ritually murdered for the Collective.

Trump, of course—as an honest, competent, and blunt man willing to return fire at the same level they were dishing it out—caused this core group to expand greatly.

COVID then simply layered on to this existing group psychosis. The numbers swelled quickly because the base was already large. Mask wearing was tantamount to hating Trump, as all the hypnotized were required to do.

And even though Trump himself deserves both the credit—and in the event the blame—for the rapid “vaccine” development, the Left quickly coopted them as a sort of self sacrificing, self flagellatory act of ritual obedience to the Collective. Taking the shot proudly says “I am willing to die rather than stand out in any way, or risk the displeasure of the enmeshed, undifferentiated, violent Mob.”

These are deep seated problems. COVID is just the latest chapter in a long novel.

And actually, the whole Roe v Wade hysteria is clearly another Mass Formation. They can layer on one another, with varying templates and slightly varying human real estate, but suggestibility is obviously the common factor, and that in turn is clearly inversely correlated with psychological individuation and following capacity for rational and dispassionate thought.