Moderates United

[Note on the font: they “upgraded” the whatever.   I don’t know how to fix it–it’s not as obvious or easy as you would think–but it IS easier to read.]

I am enjoying a rare day off.  I’ve been working a lot lately.  I’m smoking and reading and drinking good coffee, as I like to do.

I am going to make two comments, neither about Memorial Day.

First: Anything that can be done better by a robot is not a properly human activity.  The two foundations of transhumanism is that machines are a way to personal immortality–which in my view science has already established is our birthright–and that machines are better than humans.

What machines do better than humans is manipulate anything that can be formatted in 0’s and 1’s.  They can do math, map out options, bring forth any written knowledge, and suchlike at vastly faster speeds than human beings.  Neo learned martial arts at an exponentially increased rate, but he did not learn emotional self regulation, an intimate understanding of the wisdom in his own body (which to be clear he did not even have in that realm), or any of the other host of valuable human teachings that come with an extended practice of self discipline and exploration.

Robots are not capable of enjoying poetry, are they?  They are not able to FEEL life around them.  They cannot take part in intuition, and spontaneous non-local spiritual connections.  They cannot attribute VALUE to anything except when a predetermined outcome is posited for them.

Oscar Wilde said about a century ago that the great promise of machines is that they could be slaves without our having lost our own dignity in forcing them into a sort of servitude, and that the time freed up would be very useful for properly human activities, like love, life and laughter.

Second: the more I ponder on it, the primary human task is learning self soothing.  All evil comes from unregulated anxiety, which we might as well call fear.  All evil comes, then, from fear, and the opposite of fear is learning to be calm when our bodies and brains tell us to be afraid.

To take the example seen on some network pretty much every night of every year, the essence of serial murder, or cruelty of any sort, is in my view a temporary release from the pain of the shame/fear/rage complex that comes from unprocessed trauma, itself obviously the result of that person being unable to calm those feelings in their own brains and selves.

I like the show the Mentalist, which I will watch reruns of in hotels sometimes.  I’m not going to binge watch it, but I got curious about this Red John character, so I read the synopsis of the series.  Very clever man, seemingly based on Moriarty, but one whose main pleasures in life came from the fragmentary moments when he could allow a release of his always latent rage by attacking some part of Human Society, from which he was detached by a sense of shame and humiliation so deep it was invisible to him.   All he would have known was how hurting other people made him feel. It made him feel giddy, no doubt.  It was a release.  It was a momentary relaxation in a life filled to overflowing with unregulated terror.

And these shows are popular because as a nation we lack the wisdom of self soothing, and thus relate easily to rage and violence.  We call people like Red John the bad guys, but I see more pictures of Jason on cars than anyone who faced him.  All the violence we see is vicariously participated in.  If you choose to watch, you are choosing to participate in the crimes and the lives of the criminals.

Many of our parents failed, for various reasons, which has I think been common forever, but our culture has also failed to provide backup, which most cultures have done until recently, including our own, through religion, through tradition, through known and knowable patterns of behavior that COULD be depended on.  July the 4th is beer and picnics.  This is knowable.  This is soothing.  This is calming.  Take that away, more panic attacks, more fear, more reflexive conformity to anyone who seems to have a plan.

And all the knowns are under attack, and the only way out of this is to join the attackers, or find yourself under siege.  There really aren’t any other good options, other than to opt out of popular culture entirely, which is also a form of self harming, really.  It’s not a good solution.

In my view, the solution is not better drugs, but a more focused and honest concern with emotional self regulation.

What I am finding is that, for my own work, I have to go even farther into solitude for my healing.  In solitude, all the old emotions come up in greater clarity.  I can see better.  The pain of loneliness is really the pain of living without soothing, without calming, without touch, without love.  But each and every one of us, with practice, can learn to ALLOW those things to arise spontaneously.  This is the effect of proper meditation, and I am beginning to feel them.

And anyone who can soothe themselves is, to use the Feldenkrais word I will never not love, reversible.  We are flexible, adaptable.  You can be happy alone, and you can be happy with others.  This is freedom, and most spiritual work is gradually building up such freedoms, which are not least the freedom from fear.  Some people fear all human contact; others, like Sartre, believe that “hell is others”.  Both of course are both true and completely wrong.

My two cents for today.  Things are going well, on balance, even if also sometimes very difficult.  I’m used to difficult by now.  I’ve had a lot of practice.

And I’m losing weight.  That has long been my bellweather, since I have long used both food and alcohol for self soothing.  Something seems to be clicking finally.

I’ll post another update at some point, but it will be a minute.  I may do another upload in a few weeks.  I always have a list of ideas working.

What if all or most schools put in lockboxes with guns, programmed with the biometric data of all staff, and provided training in their use for all interested personnel?

This is an intermediate position between armed teachers, and both unarmed teachers on one line, amd security guards on the other.  99% of schools do not need security guards most of the time, and I would wonder about anyone willing to do that work, both as to their capacity to resist an armed intruder and as far as the likely inevitability it would attract pedophiles.

To my mind guns and adulthood, guns and mature responsibility, go together. It is childish to be afraid of guns, and it is childish and foolish to think that the right to keep and bear arms is doing anything but make us safer. Guns deter crimes at much higher rates than they are used to commit them, and I think for women particularly they are a powerful equalizer and tool for empowerment.

Oh, the usual dismal people are saying the usual dismal things. I am called a criminal for a crime someone else committed.  I am being told, again, that the only “solution” is to give up some of my power to crooked people who hate me and who don’t know anything about anything, but still very much want to rule all of us.  And, you know, if it doesnt work out, they are STILL in charge, and fuck you traitor.

Very strange times we live in.

Literally Hitler always wants your guns.

Feelings are what we are conditioned to allow to be evoked by circumstances

Allowing for less compulsive, more nuanced, more inclusive feelings of acceptance and joy is the purpose of spiritual work.

A common culture is a shared sacred. No sacred: no culture.

Changing diet is changing a pattern is challenging energetic structures. Fasting and dieting are Kum Nye.

The ego is what exists in the past. the future and in daydreams. We have a body that needs sleep and food and shelter. We have emotions, and we want the “good” ones and avoid the “bad” ones. All this requires thought and planning.

A life lived in fear is someone elses life.

I think we have a set point for most aspects of our life. For example, we have an anxiety range. We keep it at least at a certain level but no more than another. Weight is very much in the mind.

I think the feeling of emotional and mental strength is very close to the feeling of happiness. Feeling strong is feeling confident is feeling unafraid, open and engaged. Much spiritual work, arguably, is designed to increase emotional strength.

At root Capitalism is about the transition of ideas into realities. Communism is about the translation of ideas into lies.

Rage feels better than fear. This is why fearful people are often angry people.

Chronic fear erodes the capacity for nuance, balance and proportionality. And many Americans are chronically fearful.

Question: dost thou still keep the ancient faith?

I carry horrors within me God never asked me to carry.

Seeing with the mind in general is seeing the absent, both what should be there and is not, and what is implied by what is there. Blinding yourself with the mind is assuming that what your mind posits to be there is in fact there, rather than trusting the evidence of the senses.

Acceptance is our true wealth.

Humans, in an infinite ocean, can make each other large enough to matter.

“When in doubt, eat” has got to have survival value evolutionarily. Obesity then would depend on WHAT is eaten, how active someone is, and how much DOUBT there is.

Nausea and disgust are more or less equal to the feeling of rejection and aversion.

I think the inability to self sooth brought on by helicopter/immature/enmeshed parents plays a major role in peoples eagerness to get attention and pity by playing the victim. Self evidently the political uses of this dynamic have not gone unnoticed.  I think it plays into this incapacity for nuance also, such that millimeter becomes a mile. The emotions run wild and dont stop.

Freedom is not in resisting or allowing the continual swirl of desire and aversion. It consists in shrinking the reactive surface so they are monsters who can no longer see or find you.

A good prayer/salute to a spiritual master might be “I salute in you a beauty my future self is capable of but BETTER.”

I like this.

Namarupa is really what changes and we cannot help. For me, losing chronic fear is a tangible change. it feels strange, unfamiliar. This sort of change is best when we are not particularly paying attention to it. Every time we take a “snapshot” it stops. It “becomes” or congeals into an IS, and stops being a flow. So addiction to Namarupa is an addiction to stasis, not flow. We are feeling, sensing creatures. Even thoughts flow from feelings. I thinkfeel even logic flows from a feeling, that of fit and appropriateness.

I wonder if decadence might usefully be equated with radical non-acceptance.

I think it can be stipulated that any human activity that can be done better by a robot is not and cannot be a core purpose of human life.

The unfortunate reality is that worry is adaptive. Things that can go wrong often do. But I think it would be an EXCELLENT practice to dedicate one day a week to completely forgetting all worries. Over time this would make worry more reversible and thus tending to a greater degree of appropriateness and proportion.

I wonder if gray is so popular because people see too much color on the screens they are addicted to. And is dullness not a nearly invariant outcome of continual overindulgence, and thus gray an accurate outer reflection of an inner state?

Dissociation is cauterizing an emotional wound to prevent further bleeding.

Orderliness and the disgust associated with it correlate well with Freud “anality.”. And to be sure, shit is a vector for many diseases so it should be viewed with disgust. This is healthy within limits.

Our whole culture is structured to create a bridge over troubled waters. Chronic stress and anxiety and distraction cause us not to feel. Then feelings are provided by our media, by actors, and consumed second hand. Everything exists to make spontaneous authenticity almost impossible for most, so we live hectic lives filled both with other peoples thoughts and feelings. Latent awareness of this creates more frustration, which it is very tempting to blame on someone else. This is one element in the truly manic and pathological political and social divisions we are seeing.

Our body is a monster that keeps us from sliding into hell, particularly. It is the only true safeguard for the evil, but of course even a much more durable body cannot avoid dissolution indefinitely.  All rays must in the end turn to the light, and the greater the distance the greater the pain.

Breathing calmly consists in perfect allowing. It is a great example of allowing things to take their course. Fear is perhaps the ultimate DISallowing, which makes calm breath an antidote to fear.

Russia is EastAsia and Trump Goldberg

I had the thought “I am finally in the mailroom.”

Faith and allowing are the same thing. And allowing is the only sustainable path to personal growth. We are stones in a river. If we simply wait through all the turbulence we become smooth in time.This is why breathing consciously—aware but allowing—is so important. I may want to hang “Mustard Seeding” on my wall somewhere.

I think functionally maturity equals acceptance. Where life plus openness plus acceptance happens, wisdom and maturity happen.

Book: Growing Up

I think crime dramas focus and heighten a latent sense of shame and guilt in people, so that they are always relieved to find they are not the killer. It might be interesting incorporating the viewer by breaking the 4th wall and interviewing them as suspects.

PMo: power/potential equals motivation times opportunity.

I think most of the most childish Left think of ordinary Americans as orcs. Its like when you become a zombie all non-zombies become loathsome enemies, as in the cartoon in I am Legend.

I think our rich find themselves asking “is that all there is”?  They are on a line defined in part by culture and in part biology. The ethos is “if it feels good, do it if you can afford it.” It is a line ending in despair, and survival means managing this and finding alternatives, like work, to provide distractions and thus relative solace. BUT OTHER LINES ARE ALWAYS POSSIBLE, but not when living in the snapshot of Namarupa. You are stuck then. So changing to a line where more is indefinitely better—and spirituality might be defined as the only line where this is true—requires letting go of the snapshot, the known relations, the habitual patterns. Of stupidity.

And I think when we die we willbe struck by the stupidity of others, but also of ourselves, and perhaps most strikingly in seeing all the opportunities we were given and too stupid to see and accept.

Self calming equals acceptance equals maturity equals wisdom over time.

No matter how much time you’ve wasted, crying over it now wastes more.

The wealthy want to “do” spirituality within the namarupa of wealth. This is impossible. You have to renounce to learn acceptance. You cannot protect and leave at the same time.

Is a complex a conditioned complex response?

Meaning of life really works out to “what is the value of X, where X equals Life?”. Its a stupid question.  There is no mathematical value to insert. This is what Adams satirized with 42. Its latent in the question.

I feel the point of life is learning to calm oneself. This creates acceptance maturity and wisdom. And the best METHOD for doing this is learning to connect with the Life within ourselves, which is God. Every religion, in some sense, teaches peace and place, ultimately, by connection with Life as embodied in a God or Gods, Goddess or goddesses, or spirit or pantheon.

Heres a word: Antidepersonalizationism

All of us have the power to learn to enjoy or at least value, some forms of pain.

I wonder if we remember all our dreams too in the life review.

I feel like in our culture if you seem busy you are assumed to be important. So looking busy—running around everywhere—is a simple way to raise your apparent social status.

In America the Left and Right share a political language and political ideals, but use the words and envision the ideals radically differently.

I call myself a Liberal, and mean it sincerely, in that I oppose equally monarchy and theocracy on the one side, and Authoritarianism using religious rhetoric disguised in secular scientific garb on the other.

There is no city on the hill worth a pile of spit or shit that was not built by free men and women because they chose to, and which they built to last.

This normally would have gone in my notes, but hell Im logged on.

What would give you more pleasure or cause you more dis-ease—your choice: a room full of clocks calibrated identically down to a tenth of a second, or a room full of clocks (I’m picturing wall clocks, some of them cuckoo clocks) which all differ, in increments up to 5 minutes?

Why?  Pause for five minutes and feel the answer.

I think the first purpose of life is learning self calming, in learning to do for ourselves what good mothers do fir infants.

This is equanimity, Acceptance, peace.

And I think this is the ultimate purpose of all religions, which at their best teach a connection to Life, or the Tao, or God as a present reality (not abstraction); and failing this, they teach calming thoughts, like this is the way it is meant to be; you have a place in all this;  and life is simple—you just have to do x,y, and z and all will be fine.

Anxiety and confusion are really our first realities out of the womb, are they not?  And can we perhaps not have multiple “wombs”—like the Namarupa of the Hindus I have been thinking about lately?

A clear story is calming. A non-negotiable morality is calming.

But ultimately, although thoughts provide support, this is a neurophysiological and spiritual task, the former in calming our muscles and nerves, and the latter in learning to touch Life itself experientially.

As I keep saying, though, service to others is kind of a stupid purpose of life. Good people—which here is calm, open people—will help ease the distress of others naturally, but uncalm people, when they can’t find anyone to help, will invent or create problems. This is the root dynamic of codrpendence. As I keep saying, in the US the Left has done this with the black community, which it WANTS to remain retrograde in some ways, particularly in educational performance.

But calm leads naturally to happiness. The great happiness of a great vacation consists in dropping your cares. And dropping your cares is a SKILL that can and should be cultivated by all of us. Even if you work a tad slower, most of us can work longer, with energy released from worry and stress.

And of course a sense of well being leads naturally to love and compassion, which are the two remaining Greats.

I would suggest the whole of your electronics represent an Alternative Time and Alternative Space. You can feel rushed or leisurely in this Other Time, can’t you?  And confined or spacious, up high or down low, in a tree or cave or skyscraper?

This is ALL your media: your tv, computer, phone, radio, record player if you have one. Everything that emits sound and light that does not exist in your Present Present.

We get stuck in the habit of looking to this Other Than Here And Now for distraction, which functionally equals comfort, as a deflection from uncomfortable Here And Now emotions, images, thoughts and sensations.

Watch yourself for a day. How often do you leave and come back thinking about where you went? How many stare at screens all day every day?

Media is timeless. It can in principle be preserved perfectly as long as computers exist. The Dick van Dyke show will be identical in 1,000 years. 10,000.

There is something unnatural about timelessness at this level of reality, which is about birth, growth, reproduction, decay and death.

The form of media has content. What affect does all this have on us? Scientifically, I’m not sure we have made even a proper beginning in answering this question.

Watch yourself. This is a very basic Mindfulness exercise.

 

 

Modernity, connected as it was with the scientific method and non-ironic and sincere notions of progress, was a system of practice and thought which accepted reality, but thought that it should be changed.  The hungry should be fed, the hurting comforted, the powerless empowered.  Rationality and science were the means to this end.

Modernity differed from the varying Pre-Modernities found around the world, not least in the Catholic Church, in that its predecessors by and large thought reality was what it was, and not to be fixed or tampered with.  This would apply to all cultures of which I am aware, from Native Americans, to Australian Aboriginals, to the Chinese and Japanese, Africans, etc.  It is not that change did not happen, but that it was gradual, and usually imposed by some new circumstance–sometimes the ideas of an individual–rather than as a matter of continual intention.  There was no need for patent offices in most of the world, for most of human history.

[If you think about it, it is a bit ironic that Einstein worked in a Patent office while leading up to his Annum Mirabilis: he sort of patented new models of reality, didn’t he?]

Post-modernism is a habit of accepting none of the responsibilities of changing the world in any concrete way at all.  It is a self indulgence which finds the task of HONEST work daunting and personally disempowering, so it substitutes instead new LANGUAGE about how we speak about the world, in lieu of concrete ideas about either how the world is, or what we should do about it.

Postmodernism rejects the need to look out the window, and as someone who himself felt zero need to look out his own window, shares much in common with the profoundly lazy and self indulgent Karl Marx, whose work output was more about his need to talk–and specifically to whine and complain–than any human desire to help any human creature, his own family very certainly included.

So I think it is reasonable to directly equate postmodernism with Decadence itself.  It is a house that is falling down, and papered over entirely with the habit of delusions willingly and even eagerly shared among all participants in this ugly ritual abandonment of all human responsibilities.

I might even say it is a Community created in the rejection of Community. It is a Gesellschaft of like minded fuck ups, who feel no responsibility even for each other, other than in strictly enforcing habits of speech.

And so, in a world without values transmitted father to son, mother to daughter, why would people NOT reject all demands on their time and attention that do not directly amuse them?

I don’t know how to fix this.  My plan is to continue fixing myself, then see how and if the view changes.

One of the most immediately simple spiritual things you can do is accept the work you do for money completely.  Relax into it, figure out how to do it competently, and attentively but not compulsively.  No matter what it is.  It might even be better if you have a dull and tedious, or stressful and thankless job.  That increases both the challenge and the reward.

The background of this thought was me having what, for a Late Decadence (I like that vastly better than the Late Capitalist I see everywhere, which is an absurdity only written by imbeciles) individual, was a hard day.  I do physical labor for a living, and sometimes find myself sweating profusely and sore essentially everywhere.  Certainly my legs, back, shoulders and arms.

I was having a longish day, one of a long series, and thought to myself: I can just nut up and accept this, and it will hurt vastly less emotionally than the self pity I’m allowing to fill myself right now.  And that night, which was I think two nights ago, I actually had some somewhat pleasant dreams for a change.  It’s usually darkness, some pain, and not infrequently me fighting something, like a demon.  I’m used to it, but that’s of course not ideal, to put it mildly.  It’s given me a certain something, but I will be glad to be rid of it.

And it hit me yesterday why so many people are leaving the workforce: anxiety.  They approach their jobs with loathing and anxiety, and even though COVID is done (and was never that dangerous for most, I will keep pointing out, and easily managed with Vitamin D, Quercetin, Zinc, and Vitamin C, for most), the prolonged absences from work increased the sense of what I will call approach avoidance for so many people that in the midst of relatively high unemployment (come to think of it, I haven’t seen unemployment numbers recently, which must mean they are detrimental to the Bidenistas), I am seeing places close for lack of workers.

This is, to me, an interesting insight.  If someone hates, say, a job as a manager at Wendy’s, because that is all they can get, despite graduating magna cum laude in Gender Confusion studies from a reputable university, then would they prefer planting rice in a rice paddy for subsistence?  Building their own log cabin from trees they cut down?  That would be nobler and more dignified and more socially connected?  Well, would you like to try it for a week?  I think you will find yourself coming back to Wendy’s quickly.

I think a great many of us grow up functionally lazy, with the tacit assumption that on some level, none of us should NEED to work.  That life is supposed to be devoid of things we don’t like to do, which is all those things that are not eating, playing video games, watching TV/internet things, and sleeping.   Anything but that is to be resented, and if it actually makes DEMANDS on us, in energy, anxiety and time, then the WORLD IS UNFAIR.  So obviously, you know, we need Socialism and a guaranteed national income.  This is fat, soft people thinking this, and there are a lot of them, and all of them are Leftists, by and large.

So I write, for those of you tired of being nuts, accept your job.  Learn how to bring the right energy to it so you are neither overwhelmed or bored or resentful.  It literally does not matter what it is.  You can use it as a daily meditation, and be happier for it.

I think there would be powerful spiritual value in this for a great many Americans right now.  I am very sincere in this.  I am going to try and do the same for myself.  I ache nearly all the time, but you know what?  It’s not that bad.  And I am getting enough sleep, even if I do wish I fell asleep easily, stayed asleep, and had pleasant dreams.  That may happen someday, but I will need to earn it.  Is this good or bad?  I don’t know: but that is how it is.

One other thing: I really think one day off a week is enough, if you do it right.  Here is another challenge for you: get so GOOD at resting, at forgetting, at letting go, that taking off one day a week is sufficient for you.  Work your five days at your day job, then do something requiring focus and effort on the 6th.