Moderates United

The prices of understanding may vary.

(This was what I wanted to title yesterdays post. Im waiting for a glacially slow breakfast and decided to indulge myself).

shame and disgust—self disgust—are related.

Almost no americans are happy to have enough to eat, a roof over their head and someone to love.

Being a leader is a skill conceptually no different than being a plumber, but your medium is dealing in uncertainty and the complexities of people and evolving situations. Those are the pipes and solder.

Reverse Scottish shower: start cold, finish warm

Dorje with breath, better than flowers

Listen to organs: splenetic, bileous. Why not specific holdings and specific intelligences for different organs?

There are three different wars: one people against another, one government against another and a government against a people, like the US government against the Indians, or the present US government against dissidents. Abstract conflict framed in “spiritual” terms often underlies this, but no true spirituality seeks conflict.

What is the alternative to war?  Play, humor, creation, love and authentic spiritual practices and rituals of all sorts. Plenty to do, and pain is plentifully available as needed.

For all intents and purposes a life based on what you dont want is a life based on hate, and vice versa. If your purpose in life is rejecting something or someone, hate is your true love.

I think perhaps shame might be defined negatively as all the boundaries/limitations of thought, feeling and behavior that we cannot perceive. We just stop somewhere, dont know why, and perhaps dont even realize we have done so.

Post on “what do you see”. Effectively this is treating the mind as a sense. And seeing the trivial is a sort of openness.

I think political Liberalism might be asserted to consist in the political application of the economic principle of scarcity. Specifically, it is the study of the optimal utilization of the scarcity of human right. After a point my rights conflict with yours. How do we balance BEST all competing claims?

All addiction is emotionally logical. This is the best starting point for discussion.

The past slithers up to the present moment like a snake. A remembrance is being bit.

Intimology: science of intimacy. Look that word up.

What would a Mozart concerto sound like at 1/100th speed? I was imaging having an attention span 100x or more better.

I think self love looks like smoothness, grace, balance and pleasure/joy. It is precusely a LACK of self consciousness. It is easy flow. I think self love is perhaps also defined negatively as the absence of INAPPROPRIATE shame.

Cycling through the SIFT might be useful. And I wonder if FEELING is best defined as a reaction to sensation, image or thought. If you say “I am happy” that is a thought. But the REACTION of happiness is a feeling. Perhaps life as a skill consists in learning to slow and diminish automatic reactions, such that both stability and “control”, of a sort, become possible.

Shame is an invisible boundary or prison. This is why rebellion and crime feel so good: those walls disappear for a time.

Manias can only be replaced by new manias. The energy driving them is deflected traumatic current. A mania gives the person a place to hide and hold all the feelings and thoughts that keep coming out and which must bectransformed to avoid becoming conscious.

An honest passion is rooted in a progressive and abiding love and interest.

Even when tempered by religious or other virtue, our society is dominated by the thirsts for wealth and power, and not the pursuit of wisdom.

No moral order not rooted in wisdom can hope to endure without violence.

In group meetings we should start my name is X and I am a little bit nuts

Conformity to a specific group is a simple way to mute shame. Bravado and arrogance might even be seen as shames inverse

I look and wonder how most people mute shame. I feel like shame pushes people into fixed ideas. Fixed ideas become UTTERLY right by necessity, because doubt triggers shame. Only relatively happy people can put the right amount of weight into their ideas.

In designing a party space where everyone got drunk it would be good to avoid hard surfaces and make everything soft, including carpet.

I think any true spiritual tracher must be a CEO who came through the mailroom and did every job in the company, which is to say, who has fallen prey to literally every vice possible, indulged it, and felt regret from the inside. Only thus can true com-passion form on an honest and spontaneous basis.

I will add, though, that “spiritual work” almost seems to be what you do to become a teacher. This is silly. Its vain. And I think quite grnerslly the moment you position yourself—and that is the word—at the top of the pack or front of the herd, you stop growing and perhaps even insensibly become their creature. The possibility of the joys of spiritual growth are given to all of us. It is our most important life gift. And we do not owe God growth—the Tao is complete. We dont even OWE ourselves that. There is no debt. But there IS pain on a regular basis until we begin opening our gift.

Put grape leaves in with greens.

I think the worst sorts of theological disputes can be usefully laid next to and analogized with both Marxist and postmodern cant. I think in all cases the goal is to vent anxiety by creating artificial worry and conflict that can be extended infinitely, since no practical end is ever in sight.

Philosophy and religion tell us how we should act. History, science and literature tell us how we DO act.

Consider the need to learn to deal with all human emotions—contempt, sadness, disgust, fear, and even joy.

I think manipulation consists in directing free floating anxiety into fixed tension that manifests as on-going body tension, subtle or overt. Brainwashing is inducing anxiety through fear and pain that is likewise knotted into something solid. Fixity of all sorts is a “resting” place for unresolved tensions. It is rest because it is a KNOWN tension that can manifest as opposition to inevitable conflict.

People with diametrically opposed ideas held the same WAY would manifest them physiologically the same way. They are the same person neurologically and physiologically.

Only stupidity originating in fear can be called even remotely intentional. True? Not True?

You have to feel what you are feeling before you can hope to learn to channel, mute, and amplify it. To “control” it, in the way flowing water is controlled.

It is perhaps true that we renew our pain 100x a second, and could allow it to disappear at any moment.

I think to feel what one is feeling fully, without rejection or judgement, is simultaneously to enable an alternative. As long as there is rejection of experience there is division. This is the true duality of Dualism, and allowing it to cease the true point of Advaita. And allowing bad experience is like too much peanut butter without water. It hurts. It butns. But here is the thing: until allowed and thus cleared up, ITS THERE ANYWAY. This is Duhkha. This is desire, which is the wanting of this and avoiding of that.

Clouds are just a visible emergence of the water vapor that was always latent. It is a question of quantity not quality. This is not a bad metaphor for the Tao.

At its root philosophy is thinking about experience and this is only natural to do when experience is unpleasant. A perfectly happy people would have no need of philosophy. And thinking is work. Philosophy is constantly pointing and pushing. The only useful philosophy is that which enables progressive useful changes in your habitual state.

Patience is a constant, kind companion.

I think it is axiomatic that you cannot think your way into any new state. Positive (or for that matter negative) thinking can only take you to known places. Logic tells you where to look and where to go, but it cannot take you there. That is a different “system.”

Most of us spend most of our lives trying to minimize both our actual suffering and more importantly our AWARENESS of our suffering.

Actual science denying is dialogue refusing.

Ideas are description to aid in recognition, and reason a method for deciding what to look for. A description of a cat is not a cat, but having it enables you to recognize one. All spiritual work is learning state management in the directions of tranquility, joy, love and compassion.

Its more than a little insane that most of the rushing around Americans do is to get in front of a TV or computer.

Strong passions of all sorts are what people with unprocessed wounds substitute for simple and plentifully available delights. It is the fog which they call clarity, and by means of which they run continually in circles, never quiet, never at peace.

Pain tends to contribute to abstraction, and anstraction tends to be or seem to be, a resting place from pain, Ritual perhaps is a spasm of reality that enables the persistence of abstraction. Christianity, for most, is purely abstract. That is why it has been so violent.

The rejection of abstraction is also an abstraction. Postmodernism is an attempt to get the emotional benefits of abstraction without the clarity needed to be able to feel complicit in any crimes. If you say nothing at length and there is nothing to understand, no OBVIOUS evil can flow from it. But by eliminating the possibility of principle based thinking, defense from evil becomes impossible, and it is easy enough to see how those who have rendered themselves helpless would become obsessed with both trivia, and attracted to Apocalypse.

The benefits of hard work are twofold. One you unlearn (if you learned it, as many Americans do) the fear of hard work. Dealing with all fears is essential, and hard work is a resource that combats helplessness and childish dependence. Two, by pushing emotional boundaries, as with all Kum Nye, latent patterns manifest and can be inhabited, learned from, and integrated in a larger whole. Work itself is never a useful end, though, and exhaustive mediation seems unlikely to me to yield many benefits. Most of the time you are VASTLY better backing away from the edge. Anyone who has mastered hard work needs to then master leisure and moving slow.

Meaning is a felt sense. If thought cannot engender a felt of anything but certainty—which is not at all equal to meaning, belonging, or happiness, and this point should be underscored—then the service of logic is solely in determing where to look, which is somatic AND SOCIAL work, since human contact affects our capacity for state regulation directly

Having rejected reason based on the reason that reason was used to justify violence (along with instinct, greed and passion, which it metely cloaked) the modern Left is left with emotion. But their emotional range consists in yes/no operators. Conformity brings satisfaction and difference rage, with the two mixed in the middle places. Nowhere is there nuance or EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE, which should be the ideal and lingua franca of a world based on feeling.

There is no rational reason I cannot judge a book which makes no clear logical arguments based on how it makes me feel. Without reason there is subjectivity. Rational claims can be made about “better” and worse subjectivities, in terms of their correllations with what we want, what our goals are. But pure subjectivity is solipsistic and unbridgeable. But in my view “philosophy” is the act of clear thinking. It can be poetic but never poetry, much less be valued as both incompetent poetry AND philosophy.

The thirst for global government is rooted in fears of various sorts.

Why have none of the many good books on philosophy and economics enabled global freedom and prosperity? This is a question any new book needs to answer. The answer is that thought does not lead to growth. A musical book or LSD laced book would be more logical if probably also counterproductive.

The real problem with consumerism is people lack a good alternative. Stupid politics is the best they can do, and it is pathetically inadequate and highly destructive.

You can think yourself back to a state you know, both of calm and panic. You cannot think your way into anything NEW, which is why positive thinking does not work for people largely lacking positive experience.

No doubt someone has said this, but I will wonder if Utopianism is Secular Messianism for Jews.

Getting a feeling of someones ideas is often enough, if that feeling matches what is present. You cannot respond to “logic” rooted in emotion using logic. It is sufficient to recognize the emotion as originating the real argument without dealing in depth with the superficial and essentially arbitrary logic coming from it.

The shadow is really just latent capabilities and tools—like aggressive violence and hate—which we have not integrated and added consciously to our tool chest.

Shadow, another take: the gateway to spiritual growth is located in the last place you WANT to look. It is overgrown, covered, painful, and decrepit.

Word: Hurtred.

It is an odd fact that Christians consider themselves superior because, in some ways. they have the humblest and most mortified founder.

It could be argued comic books are a contemporary form of Expressionism.

Impermanence simultaneously becomes Presence.

By definition, science is what you can question. Dogma is what you cannot. All provress from science has existed in turning dogma into “things you can question.”

The question to ask about shame is whether or not it is providing accurate information.

I think all spiritual practices that are real are begun in a spirit of play and experimentation. Sacred ideas in general are training wheels, to be abandoned by those capable of intrepid exploration. People CLING to their training wheels, and never know the land is free and in any event they can only find their own path, and no one elses. I think it is fear of this exploration that turns people into orthodox teachers, and explicators of other peoples words.

Gray represents all the things you see without seeing them. It is a cloak of invisibility. Much of our world is thus being rendered invisible by paint.

Its much easier for sinners to forgive sinners. I suppose this is one reason hypocrisy is worse than sin: it is two sins, one of which should have manifested as the virtue of forgiveness.

When you see someone struggling with an obvious delusion, its easy to assume you are different. But it may well be varying shades of delusion all the way down. We cannot posit solid ground anywhere. Perhaps that is the hidden meaning of processing Kun Zhi, which I always took to be fixed emotions.

What if our body size expanded and contracted with our capacity for attention? Would women be larger than men most of the time?

The pleasure of the freedom from worry is in general worth 100x whatever it is I might be fearing I might lose.

Shame from mistakes—or even excessive anxiety from fear of mistakes—is a sort of training wheel. It is a behavioral safety loop that keeps us from getting too far off track, ideally. But for the aware mistakes can also be fascinating and even pleasurable sources of learning. You get to see another side of things, and interact directly with heretofor unseen aspects of yourself and others. EVERYTHING is food for the soul, everything enlightening, everything useful and worth welcoming. Its of course a much bigger Life basket too. The more you can welcome, the less you have to fear.

 

Edited for spelling but otherwise left to fend for themselves.  This comes from a sense that they do me no good hidden. This does not come from a “squeeze”, although all of them DID. Life is filled with instructive and comical realities.

Anxiety is undifferentiated arousal. It is fear, anger and shame at the same time.

Sadness feels like a threat and leads to anxiety

We are not stardust: we are starlight

We all want to die. That itself feels like a threat.

At its root anxiety is wanting to escape, wanting to dominate or wanting to be submerged in conformity.

The first spiritual task is to return to sadness from fear.

9 versus ten. leaving space.

9 versus 11

The fear of missing out makes actually missing out nearly inevitable. Collecting “experiences” is not even remotely the same as living.

FOMO STARTS with Fear

You see and hear more when you have renounced the desire to add to or change reality

The long term goal of education is to raise the level of “average”. In all respects a TRULY smarter society—intellectually, emotionally and practically—will always be a better society.

Emotional balance depends on a steady flow of feeling. Most of us feel spasmodicslly and erratically, and lurch from here to there.

Toughness is a desirable virtue but nearly everything worth protecting arises from tenderness and vulnerability

When you look at an average small town, and see the shuttered buildings and remnants of past prosperity, what you should see is the aftermath of a plague of invisible theft via money creation.

Very few people need ideas—advice— what they need is Presence. The task of the healer is to reintroduce people to themselves. And it is very rare it is even POSSIBLE to tell people anything they do not already know.

You cannot shovel away the avalanche of cold snow. You can merely melt it slowly with the warmth of patient attention.

We tend to live with our Oughts and our wants, not our lives.

The narrative of Diversity has worked for ideological homogenization and following division and polarization.

Self pity amounts to the rejection of experience.

All experiences can be entered and slowly integrated. Even those of lack—lacking touch, lacking love.

Clinging to ideas is like clinging to ice floats in a melting sea. Your destiny will always be to drown and be reborn better.

Perhaps the most important driver of division and polarization is the lack of BASIC emotional maturity of a large swathe of our population. They cling to congenial lies because the reality and confusion of the world are too scary for them to contemplate. It is an emotional devolution that seems to be getting worse.

True openness looks like play and feels vaguely anarchical.

When nuance is lost almost all crimes can be concealed in the violence of noise.

Tantra concsuously evokes horror and aversion—gut energy—to process them.

Leftism mainly consists in ignoring the lessons of history while highlighting a curated list of crimes. Conservatism remembers the lessons of history and points out that by and large the crimes of history equal the lessons of history, and that the crimes of the Left are the most important contemporary lesson.

Aversion is “I hate”

Desire is “I want”

And ignorance is “I can’t”.

There is speaking truth to power, and speaking power to truth.

One could just as easily argue asking for ID at nightclubs is racist.

We have both the right to vote and the right to expect cheating will be prevented.

Resposibility means the right both to succeed and fail. Should we make failure impossiblity simply because it sometimes happens? We also eliminate the elation of success after risk. Do we want wild humans or cattle?

Being brilliant is not necessarily enough to be smart.

Owning will always be inferior to participating. You can only own so much but you can participate in Everything.

Prayer: may you have trouble in the right amounts and at the right times

Consistency is both a beginning and an end.

Advaita means, I think, that we exist as nodes in a network. We are not the network, but we cannot exist fully without consciousness of the network. Non-separation might be another idea.

And did any if us choose our personality? If so, what did the choosing?

Emotions are not heavy or strong, but viscous or smooth. And water holds nearly infinte information.

I think a core problem with our society is that a relatively high baseline of neuroticism is adaptive.

Diversity is a code word for exclusion. This is masked with outward diversity.

Every disappoinmtment is a learning opportunity. So is every humiliation.

Lgb asks us to change what we view as acceptable. T asks us to radically alter our reality.

Drunkenness, or getting blitzed, however you do it, amounts to simultaneously running until you stop, indulging fully in shame and self loathing, and attacking yourself. Elvis called his pill cocktails “attacks”.

The goal is to blossom in trouble.

If you take a problem from someone it will need to be replaced. The goal is to ensure a path to solution—freedom to try, to fail, and to try again—to offer conceptual small wheels, and where possible to offer emotional and physical comfort.

Most kids in this country have never had any real problems, and that was a BIG factor in their embrace of COVID restrictions. It felt like needed and morally useful pain.

Male neuroticism looks like withdrawal, female like volatility.

Anyone wanting to inderstand the mobs in Little Rock just needs to look at BLM and Antifa mobs. Same people. Same frothy mouths. Same dehumainization and hate.

If women have a higher pain tolerance or even madochism, its not like men are not masochistic in their own ways too. But evolutionarily this capacity maybe to protect children. Male masochism is likely the same.

BDSM may be an answer to withdrawal.

Humor could be seen as a form of defensive aggression and thus tied to neuroticism.

All ethical demands and imperatives which are like standing waves EXIST to disrupt complacency and thus ALSO constitute organismic attacks or aggressions in a way. They are inconsistent with deep calm.

Taoism is really Now This then Now That.

Included within everything that is, is everything thats possible.

Covid as system for inducing disgust in the Left

Connection of pestilence and authoritarianism. Camus

Hitler bathed 4x a day.  Zyklon A was used to kill bugs; And B declared undesirables.

I have a passion for orderly thought.

Logically, if exterminating pests is conservative then most left wing regimes are EFFECTIVELY rightist. Like Cuba. Contagion is banned and borders are closed.

LGB asks for acceptance of personal choices. T asks us to change our understanding of reality.

The thing about sainthood is that it blinds you. It is pure conscientiousness—which is perhaps shame driven—without openness. Forcing yourself to feel and do things is a violence to perception. It is not really possible to control your inner emotional landscape. It is merely possible to suppress awareness of the parts that dont fit the pattern you are imposing.

I think often what prolongs negative states is the effort to avoid them, both from natural aversion and perhaps more importantly from shame. I often feel guilty that I cannot focus.

Essentialism is a defining trait of the left.  This is ironically self referentially more true because relexive conformity is the main task.

There is such a thing as sad with anger.

The need for ideological purity is CONSERVATIVE. You are avoiding ideological contagion. There is an immense need for orderliness. “Revolution” is substituting one form of reactuon for another, making openness the best measure of true liberality. How messy are things allowed to get?  How open is The System to gradualism?  How likely are people to understand the beliefs and motivating assumptions of people very unlike themselves?

The talent for gaining power and that for governing are completely different, separate sets of skills.

From a personality perspective Leftism is characterized by extreme volatilty and profound closedness hiding behind a rhetoric of openness.

All religious practice, at least of major, proselytizing religions, is rooted in conscientiousmess. If that in turn is rooted in shame, this is a problem, isnt it?

Making sense is a sort of step down transformer from Experience to Understanding. And openness, in asking us to let go of the death grip we have on understanding, necessarily asks us to melt our categories, our lighthouses and way stations, which itself has to feel like madness.

The trans thing is both taking advantage of and driving a neurotic volatilty in todays youth.

Meditation is a sort of magical conjuring of altered healing and wisdom providing states.

If you are different you have every right to march in the parade but not to lead it.

Its important to distinguish a political right from a reasonable social expectation.

Donald Trump is Goldstein.

Video games train defensive aggression, which amounts to Neuroticism.

There is defensive placating too, like excessive smiling and laughing, which is an anxiety impulse.

Certainty represents the collapse of a perceptual wave.

Volatile people are drawn to volatility. Neuroticism is attracted to its societal equivalent.

Hysteria might be framed as fractional freezing

Active listening is really trying to hear something you don’t already know, perhaps even within a known narrative.

Much of animal rights likely consists in projecting a virginal innocence on animals that enables or rationalizes righteous indignation.

I think much anxiety in the rich world comes from an acute awareness that our lives lack interesting problems and true diversity of adversity.

The easiest way to deal with fear is by being fearful all the time. This is the value of fear porn in that you maintain a more or less constant level of tension but the object varies regularly. And ANGER, as a form of expressing fear, feels better, so outrage porn is even better. You can deduce all our divisions from the need for extremes to produce these emotions. Its like de Bono’s Catchment areas. You wind up on one side or the other. It doesnt matter which.

And all fear is fear of pain, which I think can be subdivided into emotional pain and physical pain. Both are rational. But living in fear is ALSO painful. This is an essential point. To get beyond pain you must get beyond fear. And doing this means gradually eliminating the emotional fears of change, loss, and social rejection. Physically, cultivating physical relaxation and good humored acceptance of physical difficulty is the best path.

It is almost impossible to conceive or execute long term projects in a condition of chronic fear. The essence of fear is contraction, and this includes a contraction of the time sense that would be needed to connect the beginning of a project with its end. And the capacity for self restraint and maturity are strongly connected, making chronic fear infantilizing and enervating. Most people in this country are work, internet video games and TV. Too many, in any event.

And plans are frontal cortex. Fear is the limbic system. Lower cancels higher. This may be a good general neurological principle.

The best way to frame CRT is not anti-racism but lingering willful racism.

The folly of doing the newest new thing right.

There is little more use complaining about the behavior of people than complaining about the weather on a particular day. It is what it is. A beautiful life is perhaps an endless set of variations composed on themes given us by the universe, of which humanity is a part.

The task is to learn, in some ways, to live like an animal. Deer know wolves exist. They are aware. But they are not worried most of the time. Wolves know they have to eat to live, but they are not hunting ALL the time. This world, even our asphalted, plasticked, sanitized world, is still an environment, a habitat, and this includes our social domain. If the world needs more grass you can plant it, but there are no guarantees.

The lower brain has priority, epistemically, over the higher brain. The task is not to suppress and dominate lower insticts, but to calm the nervous system and to channel what remains in healthy, organic, and life affirming ways. Good sex is healthy, and aggression easily becomes a creative drive.

I dont think people choose to be evil. I think for many it simply appears less painful than their reality. You embrace what will not go away and makes you feel helpless.

Socialism could be framed as Anti-Individuationism.

I have spent most of my adult life trying not to become the bad person my childhood made it nearly inevitable I should become.

Goodness is mental health. Pushing it too far in any other direction distorts and perverts it. Happy healthy people are naturally good, within limits.

Left wing politics, in its hypocrisy, self serving moralizing, and self satisfaction, is a nearly exact analogue to right wing religiously motivated equivalents. It is more or less a new religion that does the same thing, most notably giving bad people a way not just to seem good, but to actually think themselves so.

Religion only arises where direct perception has disappeared. It is equal parts arrow and smoke, and useful to the honest and scheming alike. I do think most people honestly think they are spiritual, but most of them are wrong, too varying degrees.

Where God is present, discussions are largely unnecessary. Theology, in turn, concerns itself with talking about how to talk about something that is not present.

Much impatience, for me, consists in priming myself to run up a hill, then encountering any of a thousand obstacles, some of which are inevitable.

Gesellschaft means you need to earn a place at the table. You will lose out on economic and social opportunities alike if you do not play the superficially friendly game. There is no loyalty and attachments are fragmentary, evanescent and negotiated.

Gemeinschaft, in contrast, is both space and confinement. You have a non-negotiable place but often also comittments.

Simmel may be worth reading.

The point of fear is running. The point of anger is fighting. And the point of shame is demeaning oneself following a real or perceived transgression against an internalized social order, so you can be readmitted following public confession.

But what happens with decontextualized shame that cannot be forgiven? Shame becomes an enemy, an ogre, something to be rejected and overcome. And what better method than evil?  I think most evil is the result of stupidity and self deception. But CONSCIOUS evil must be of the sort described. At root it is an utter inability to find peace, with a resulting continual set of contortions to escape an inescapable reality.

Never let meditation get in the way of experience

I think the phase shift of dissociation is instantaneous. It is quantum. I think such people build two houses, two places to live, two identities that “know” each other but exist as neighbors who do not speak to each other. It is in the liminal spave between phases that the cruelty lives. The wounds suppressed and the rage disavowed. The lies. Because this is where the lies live and hold their power, this is where the TRUTH is. I think much addiction consists in trying to keep the memory that there IS a truth alive. Drunkenness and being high are also altered states that in some ways resemble the land of the lie (and truth).

It appears if I breathe the cruelty in and out I can keep my eyes open longer.

To feel something you have never felt you have to do something you have never done. And the only really acceptable emotional basis is relatively abiding calm.

There is such a thing as passive acts of cruelty, which is watching and gigging while someone is tormented by someone else.

There is nothing wrong with any negative emotion, except when it is expressed constantly from internal stimuli and not in response to something actually present in the environment. Spasmodic, reflexive and habitual

Strategy is knowing you need a screwdriver. Logistics is knowing how to get one.

Meaning is a seed, when organic, which yields pleasant and interesting fruit. “meaning” compelled is a cage which never progresses anywhere.

Life is “scientific”, in a sense, in that it is obvious that our first task is learning deep relaxation; and almost anything that comes after will be good.

Religions need to allow hate. If it cannot be on the inside it will move outside. One could easily view thr Left in this and other countries as effectively post-religious Fundamentalists who have now been granted an open right of hatred.

The solutions children come up with to deal with problems way beyond their capacities often make future progress impossible. They are temporary patches that become lasting features of personality.

Competence is intelligence, agility and persistence.

It might be interesting starting a meditation with noises designed to induce/evoke distress; or disgusting or disturbing images; smells; tastes; feeling; thoughts. Thought: there is horrible suffering in the world that is happening right now you truly ARE powerless to prevent. There is suffering in people you KNOW you are powerless to prevent. And clinging to the notion of being a Savior makes all of us LESS useful in the ways that matter. All people have minds and their mistakes do not belong to us.

In important respects, political and intellectual experiences are on par with, and of the same kind as, sexual and food and musical and ecstatic experiences, for aesthetes of a certain hue. I have the French in mind in particular. A fabulous meal and a fabulous political excitement have the same end in mind, and use the same means—excited emotions.

Would it be true to say the whole of Western history consists in privileging ideas over experience, even though our first major “intellectual” really wasnt one at all, since as clever at detecting contradictions as he was, he could not deduce knowledge? Christian dogma is IDEAS. Practice is secondary.

I think traumatic energy splits the self and some part of the self hates that part, because in effect IT NEVER SHUTS UP. Its annoying. It is a nuisance. It is a noisy obnoxious drunk and an overly shy wallflower. And I think it is vitally important to recognize and accept self loathing. It is all me. I dont get to keep or be—-I suppose the first is unconscious, the latter conscious—the parts I like. And the traumatized part of course FEELS the hate and loathing and has to deal with it somehow—perhaps by excessive anger, or fear, or shame, all of which are secondary, downstream effects of the original trauma. Trauma perhaps BEGETS trauma,

I think it is useful to think of our trauma as a worker trapped in a steam room whose job it is to divert our excess energy in anyway possible. It disrupts clear behavioral patterns to prevent us from ever feeling the full weight of the fear, rage and shame and humiliation. And we HATE this part, even though we cannot live without it until we heal.  But this is the split, which involves continual cycles and revolutions.

And this is the root of loneliness and that of many others. Until we can contact this part in ourselves, no other person can reach it either, so we feel alone even with others. And I think the habit of noise and distraction makes it so even relatively small traumas can easily get separated in ubiquitous superficiality.

All our understandings within which we orient our activities and thoughts are games. A game consists in an arbitrary set of rules which work to create a context withon which one can win and lose; getting one of which and avoiding the other of which work to motivate us. Games help us survive, physically.

I dont think there is any such thing as greed in the animal kingdom. Greed requires standing fear and the ability to plan. There is likely hoarding at times and certainly a more or less literal pecking order.

You cannot rest anywhere but the moment. It is precisely the intrusion of the past, future and non-present ideas of the Present that prevent rest, and arguably EQUAL tension.

The only virtues worth focsusing are MEANS, not ends. Honesty is a means, compassion is an end. This is perhaps what the Buddhists developed. This is worth considering.

I think we need to redefine normal to include independence of mind, moderate risk tolerance, and capable of spontaneous play.

My mothers nervous, forced, fake laughter says to me “you are unwanted and will never have a home.” That is why it is so creepy to me.

I think karmically, most Americans are realizing a perhaps old dream to live like kings and queens. We are perfectly comfortable, conveyed everywhere, safe, and have access to all the delicacies of the world.

The core idea that all true spiritual traditions oppose is that Hell is our natural home.  This is the first move of Duhkha.

Strong emotions and experiences often act as drugs to mask and cover with fog our true inner states. They are a reliable means of lying to ourselves.

God—reality—is hidden behind a veil. Maybe the whole reason we incarnate is to reexperience the joy of return. But if WE are hiding behind a veil of our own, the cause is hopeless. And the means of discovery, of pursuit, is not that different than chasing a coy and chaste but playful woman. And it makes sense too to feel God is chasing us.

It is interesting to meditate on the viscera, that they are me, and that they are my ally. And tension in them makes them feel like enemies. Tension in most people makes them feel like strangers, doesnt it? And relaxation—real or feigned—feels intrinsically like friendliness. We only let our guard down among familiy and friends, and when we are not planning anything.

Comment on hotel energies: I often feel the energies of those there before.

I wonder if there is something vaguely spiritual in masochism. Is there any real difference between Lou Reed paying a woman or man to whip him and Shiites cutting and whipping themselves?  I wonder if voluntary pain that people accept and embrace and open to works to nullify the normal operation of the ego atructures, such that the true Self makes a mild and attenuated appearsnce. Consider Tapas and Shugyo.

I think most anxiety about the future is displaced anxiety about or rather IN the present. Worries are always in the present. They cannot be anywhere else. Anxiety might be termed anti-relaxation. Relaxation is inherently anti-anxiety.

Excellence is not violence. It is not Arete, at least if that references Ares. Excellence is kindness and attention—caring—applied evenly and consistently over time. Kindness recognizes some discomfort and pain is needed for rewarding goals that feel good, but demands no more than necessary. More is not always better, and is often worse. A gentle temperament recognizes the line.

Vince Lombardi must have been very anxious and driven by deep shame.

I dont think it too far off to say that there is no good and bad, just managed tension and suppressed and wild tension.

All supposedly external perturbations originate in a resonance within me. No anger or rage is possible that does not start with internally directed rage and violence I push out. Short term, specific anger that is contextually appropriate as physically defensive, but even there it likely originates in self doubt—which feels like personal attack—rebounds and pushes out.

The time you “lose” in inner work is gained in life.

Popped in head: there is no fire without iron. I dont know what it means.

I think the subliminal effect of gray is supporting emotions you dont feel and thoughts you dont think. It supports comfort with blank spots.

If color is diversity and spontaneity gray is unthinking uniformity and perhaps even resentment of difference.

Podcast: bitter herbs in a saccharine world.

I think most people are better served learning to watch and listen and feel the world carefully than reading about it, at least if they have been properly educated.

Principle: you cannot be right in principle if you persist in practices that do not work in practice. Your true goal, in other words, can be assumed to be other than your stated goal.

There is such a thing as reverse dissociation, whereby you walk through an invisible barrier and find new space and new capabilities.

Maybe God can work through AI. Its impossible to say. That would be ironic though: the real God rxpressing itself through a false one.

I dreamed of X and his rage last night, and the night before. That is my rage too, and perhaps diminishing. Rage and rigidity and intolerance and probably high blood pressure are all related. And I feel trauma is released in stages. Releasing shame—which perhaps amounts to a constriction of the options we allow ourselves to perceive—leads to a consciousness of fear. Releasing fear in turn releases a rage we ourselves fear and perhaps most naturally attribute to others. I think many people naturally spend lives at this level, which is perhaps the default traumatic “stance” for most of humanity, since few of us are free of scars.

 

You know, I look at my own dreams and the content of emotions in an average day, and feel the need to make this comment: all of us are crazy, and the worst among us are utterly convinced they are the sanest.

Me, I am crazier than most, BUT I KNOW IT, and in many respects I think I am thus saner than most.

In this time  and this nation it is very hard to be sane.  It’s impossible to be “normal”.  The best you can hope for is outwardly not unusual, and inwardly not too overcome with anxiety and obsession.

But we have propaganda cannons firing all around us, agitating us, pushing us, confusing us, creating divisions among us, all operated by people who themselves are utterly, batshit insane.  People like Klaus Schwab and Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos.  They are of course highly sane, in that they are pursuing clear plans with consistent diligence, but the Nazis were no different.  They had clear plans they pursued with absolute efficiency and scientific rigor.  But the PLANS were insane.

So be kind to yourself.  And if you want to start chasing sanity, try to get outside in the silence more.  Go for long walks in the woods.  Turn down or off the endless noise in your life.  Grow things.  Cook slowly and indulgently as time permits.

And for me, Tarthang Tulku’s Kum Nye has been a big help.  I’m getting consistent with 27 minutes in the morning and evening.  It’s not much, but going deep into feeling is terrifying for people like me, and probably like most Americans.

To take one obvious example, in the section on massage he says to massage your sternokleidomastoid muscle for ten minutes.  For those of us who are normally anxious, this is a long time.  Doing something really slowly for ten minutes, then sitting for ten minutes again, seems like a long, long time.

But it isn’t.  For me, this has been a wall of my prison cell I have been hitting, and stopping, and which is slowly getting softer.

As I say, for ME I need to stop blogging, but I thought I might offer something consoling, if in fact anyone benefits from a single word I write ever.  That was my effort, but it was the best I can do this morning as I head out to face projects that scare me, as I do nearly every day.

I have slowly evolved the conclusion that there is really only one pole that matters in human affairs, that between relaxation–the cessation of worry and neurologically rooted chronic trauma–and tension.  A chronically tense person cannot be truly good.  Period.  They might be, say, Mother Teresa, and work relentlessly for 18 hours a day across many decades in selfless service.  Don’t care.  They are not working from UNDERSTANDING, because understanding at a deep level is impossible if it does not flow from a physically relaxed state.

So I got drunk last night, again.  I’m very stressed and it’s an easy, short term release.  But a voice said to me this morning (me talking to me, to be clear, nothing more) that if I can stand 2-3 months of relative silence and sadness, that the wave will be over, that inaccessibility will be gone.

And thinking about it, what we need other human beings for is to comfort and calm us.  Children need parents for that–the mother in particular–and men need women for that.  And women need women.  Yes, there is a pattern there.

But loneliness, at root, is the lack of someone to calm you, and if you can calm yourself, you are not going to be lonely.

I have been making progress in my meditations.  I was able to pack in the whole bundle of hatred and aggression that loops in out and out rhythmically, and include it all in a bunch in my space on the meditation cushion the other day.  You have to get it in there to make it go away, and I did for a moment.  I was also able to directly access the pain of solitude.  Feeling ANYTHING, even something “negative” with sensitivity and presence is an inherently enjoyable thing.  This is the path back to Life for all of us.

And I also felt Impermanence, and realized that it is always simultaneously PRESENCE.  Yes, everything and everyone I love I will lose.  BUT THEY ARE THERE NOW, and knowing that loss is inevitable it makes their presence NOW richer, stronger, and more pleasurable.  If they feel permanent, they feel abstract in a way.

To my mind, as well as to what I feel, the idea of impermanence is not to loose all connections with everything and everyone.  On the contrary, it is intended that you love more deeply, feel more deeply, be more consciously happy of what is there.  Just recognize that every moment is a special moment that is bound to pass.  But then there will be another moment, and another, and another.  If you learn to be present to what IS there, then that is a good and intelligent way to live, right?  Yes, I will answer for you.

And here is a nice little saying that I came up with in the midst of a long series of problems that seemingly went on endlessly (at work): Patience is a constant, kind companion. (edit: what I initially typed was true, too, but banal; I AM a bit fuzzy this morning).

That’s good, isn’t it, if I do say so myself.  And it’s useful.

Think about this: if you are chronically irritated about this that or the other, you are in the presence, in effect, of a chronically irritated human being who constantly puts you on edge.  But you are choosing it, by not rejecting it.

It seems obvious to me that learning calm is learning patience in the midst of troubles.  It is asking yourself: who do I want as my passenger in the carseat of my brain?  Do I want someone who calms me down, or who agitates me?

And obviously, if you are patient and persistent, you get more done in the end, done better, and done much much more happily.  You have more attention, more energy, and more motivation.

So these are some of my musings in recent days.  I have realized that blogging is very much me trying to calm myself by creating an illusion of companionship.  I’ve said this before, probably several times.

It’s funny how you can encounter an idea, accept it, play with it, but not REALLY “grok” it for a long long time.  Impermanence is certainly an idea like that for many of us.  So are love and compassion.  Most of us likely dream in faded colors and grays, and don’t even realize it, since there is nothing to compare it to.

Last idea, not really part of this, but something I liked, so I will share: the word Hurtred.  I was in an alley filled with street art, and looking at these “poems” on the ground that sounded like the affirmations someone walked out of a psychologists office with, and looking at these two individuals, who appeared to be black women, but both gender and race were, to me, a bit indeterminate, so I made them a provisional lesbian couple in my mind.  And I pictured both of them with traumatic personal histories, trying to make things work, when both of them would fly into a rage sometimes over nothing; both of them both needy and terrified.  Typical human beings, in other words, who most likely thought they were unusual, since everyone else seems -so smiling and happy.  I pictured them hating Republicans as an easy scape goat for all the ambient hurt and anger, and then that word popped into my head.

Can there be hate without hurt?  I don’t think so.  Not true, lasting, gut level hate.  I will even posit this: hate is proportional to hurt.  Would the Holocaust have been possible without the disaster of World War 1?  I very much doubt it.

And that of course begs the question as to the source of the enormous volume of irrational hatred in our present world.  We live in the most affluent society in human history.  Our lives, by any reasonable physical standard, are if anything much too easy.

But here is the thing: hurt is proportional to capacity.  Weak people are vastly easier to hurt than strong people, and most of us are weak because we lack real problems.

But at a deeper level, I think most Americans, at least, exist at an emotional level of nutrition roughly equal to what you get with a sugary breakfast cereal or Pop Tart.  We don’t get enough DEEP connection.  Most of us live in this limbo where everybody is faking feelings most of the time, not least because they don’t even know what they are feeling.  Sentimentalism is the worse substitute for authentic deep feeling. It is superficial feeling, that becomes all the stronger for lacking true substance.

We are all lonely, in other words.  “The Lonely Crowd” was written in the 1950’s, wasn’t it?  Have things improved?  You know the answer to that.  Social media has merely made superficial human contact easier and vaster.  It is another form of fast food and white flour denuded of nutrients.

Oh, there are solutions to all this, for me.  I see a way out, for me.  And if and when I find that way, I will share it here.  I might even show my face here and there, and not even while drinking.

Courage is the root of all discovery.  Cultivate it.  Value it.

You know, I went into that pain earlier today.  But I failed to resist the siren’s call of a good bottle of wine, drank it, and am now on to some rum.

I’ve been good lately, mostly, in that I have been meditating twice a day, for 27 minutes each time.  In the morning, I do nine minutes focused on just trying to feel my breath.  I use the image of a dorje, in which the breath balloons into both my head and my heart after passing through my mouth.  It seems to open up heart energy a bit.

Then nine minutes of feeling.  I have been focused on my gut lately. I  try to imagine every organ, including the intestines, and feel what is in them.  Often, the energy is abundantly clear in my outer abdomen.  Whatever it is, I accept it and allow it.

Then thirdly, in the morning, I do a Kum Nye exercise from the first set of books.  Nine minutes is not really enough for most of them, but it’s better than nothing.  This morning, I wished it had lasted longer, but tomorrow it may be the opposite.  It’s something.  It’s something.

In the evening, I’ve lately been trying to do either 27 minutes or 45 minutes of massage, again per the first set of books.  Last night I did my hands.

Something has changed to allow this, since this basic structure is the first thing Tarthang Tulku recommends in the books, and I have found it impossible for me for ten years or so.  Perhaps a tad less.

But I see that the first drink for me, signals that the opportunity to make my pain go away had arisen.  My pain being what it is, it is rare that I don’t take it all the way to what I will call induced cessation.  I cannot honestly say I fully understand people who can have one, feel a bit better, then stop.  For me, the gashes are too deep.

But I also don’t want to be maudlin.  I like my life.  It’s interesting.  It’s a new fucking thing every day even when I don’t want a new fucking thing.  And that is useful, even if not always what I would have chosen.  Quite often, what most of us would have chosen is shit.  It’s easy, banal, and probably vaguely ridiculous, even if comforting.

Yeah, so that’s my pep talk today.  So go do that thing, and try not to suck at it, mostly.

OK, I’m some percentage serious here, but it’s making me laugh too.  Do something creative with whatever reaction you have to this.  Make yourself proud.  Look at all those unrealized possibilities around you, and introduce yourself to one, learn about it, and don’t be either too greedy or too shy.

Edit: that wasn’t actually what I logged on to write.  It’s an odd fact to me that if you walked up to me at random and asked me to talk for 30 minutes it would not be a problem.

The image that hit me, then hurt me, then said in some way “write about this”, was this: I got back to my birth the other day in a meditation.  I saw my mother after a long and difficult delivery, still hurting in her “birthing part” (that’s reasonable, right, as a term?) and focused on making sure she was going to be OK, to get over the pain, and figuring out where they were going to room her, and then eventually about holding the baby she just gave birth to.  I was a boy, which I was not supposed to be.  I don’t think she knew what the hell this thing was, or what the hell to do with it, so she made it up as she went along.  She was strongly dissociated and confused and disoriented.

And I felt this.  And I looked at this baby, and I realized that there is a field around this child, around all life, around my mother and everything alive, and that the fate of this child is not written either in its genetics, or what happened at birth, or what happened since.  Our fates are always much larger than this.  We live in swirls, or whirlwinds, or typhoons–of love, of hate, of kindness, of lack–and all of it is intensely interesting and “romantic” for those open to feelings as a kind of seasoning of life.

And I feel my own playfulness.  I am a first rate smartass, and a first rate inventor of games and jokes and play of all kinds.  But it comes and goes.  Sometimes it freezes up entirely.  Sometimes I am sober, serious, and people ask me–in bars and elsewhere–if I am a cop, or if I am a veteran.  I’ll never forget some drunk chick asking me no less than three times in a bar if I was sure I wasn’t a cop.  I just get that look on my face.  It’s a “don’t fuck with me” look, combined with a “I see all that you are doing” look, and it’s not entirely an act.  In certain moods, I would not fuck with me.  I’m untested, but I know what I know, and what I know is a lot of unconventional ways to fuck people up, even before we get to what I may or may not have in my pocket, or what the capabilities of a 270 pound man who does manual labor for a living may be.

So I look at that.  Then I look at me laughing, playing, joking.  I am a first rate punster and wit, in certain moods.  It’s an odd contradiction.  Who is this fellow, who is this, and then that?

Well, here is the simple answer: I’m still figuring it out.  But it’s an interesting ride.

 

Who is that?  Give this a watch.  It included facts I didn’t know.  Big picture, it is OBVIOUS beyond any serious dispute that Big Pharma paid off as many people as it took to suppress all effective and approved and repurposed treatments for COVID, which means they are directly guilty of mass murder for profit.  

Whatever you think of them–and your views should be dismal and tinted with both hatred and nausea–both Hitler and Stalin thought they were fighting for their nations and for a better world.  Pfizer and Moderna and the others can make no such claim, so their crime is WORSE.  It results simply from GREED.  I don’t think anyone who is not a psychopath can begin to grasp the evil needed for this; and it seems unlikely anyone who IS a psychopath can see a problem, other than that they left traceable trail of bodies.

The motivation of the “nerd” to be the smartest guy in the room is really no different than that of the track athlete to be the fastest, or the football player the strongest and most agile.  You want to be the best, and nearly everyone, in competitions of all sorts, harnesses aggression to get there.

The aggression of “jocks” is “I am bigger and stronger and more popular than you”.  The aggression of nerds is “I am smarter than you.”  You have no doubt seen engineers and certains kinds of scientists do this.  Intellectuals do this too.

And I think a part of this underlies the dynamic by means of which the truly abhorrent, anti-Liberal and morally incoherent ideas of the Left have taken over college campuses.  If you want to be seen as “smart”, then you have to buy into them, no questions asked about the fundamental reasoning.  If you don’t buy in, you may as well have a Southern accent and have grown up in a trailer watching Jerry Falwell and the Bakers on TV, right?

I FEEL the fear underlying all this GroupThink.  And I continue to try and understand what motivates it.  I myself came very, very close to living that life, where my whole existence was dedicated to publicly demonstrating the specific sort of intelligence demanded in the Academy.  Note, I don’t say intelligence outright.  It is a certain sort demanded, and certainly not creative intelligence, or unorthodox intelligence.  It is what I may term Track Delineated Intelligence.  And they do call it a Tenure Track, don’t they?

I was just going in to meditate this morning, and I FELT why I was so attracted to superheroes, to Conan, to powerful men with swords when was a certain age: they embodied power I lacked emotionally.  This is why weak people like nerds like strong men.  And presumably it is why they like dictators, who can do the bullying they want to do, but lack the power and will and overt psychopathy to perform on their own.

So my work right now is FEELING this lesser-ness, this humiliation, and doing so directly and consciously.

So I sit here for a moment, thinking “I don’t want to go in there”.  But then I do.

This is an interesting movie, and probably worth watching.  The Left is twitchy.  If they had guns they would be making spasmodic movements towards them continually.  As it is, they make continual open calls for the people who DO have guns to suppress, to hunt, to imprison, to silence the INSURRECTIONISTS–believe it or not, I see this farcical word used a lot out there in the wilds of Leftdom–before they RUIN EVERYTHING.

How, exactly, do they think we will ruin everything?  Well, rhetorically, it is by destroying democracy.  Implementing Fascism.  They don’t see, because they really don’t want to see, that their OWN methods are the only things resembling Fascism.  Asking reasonable questions about a patently rigged election is not Fascism.  Undermining through spurious investigations and continual harassment a duly elected President (Trump, to be clear) IS Fascistic.  Or at least Communistic, which is the brother to Fascism, even if the two don’t get along, as some brothers don’t.

So the people who are worried about the destruction of democracy and rule of the law, it seems, feel compelled to destroy the principle of one person/one vote through centrally orchestrated and more or less blatant voter fraud; to openly and enthusiastically break all of our immigration laws by importing illegally as many people as will come, in in the hope they will vote Democrat, since they plan to give them as much treasure as it takes; to conduct Kangaroo Courts for those they can, and to suppress investigation of their own wherever they need to and can; and overall to make a mockery of equal justice, with their own elites patently enjoying legal protection from any number of crimes, patently including taking bribes from foreign governments, as both Hillary and Joe Biden clearly have.

In this movie, note that in effect both sides understand that there is no military or violent solution to what in effect is a political problem.  Even extreme effectiveness–which the French Paras achieved–was not enough to prevent France from, in the end, leaving Algeria, forcing an enormous flight of refugees (many of whose descendants, I read, may decide todays election in France), and the mass torture and execution of those unable to escape.

Nobody wins, really, in tit for tats of that sort.  Algeria itself suffered another brutal civil war in the 1990’s.  Algerian contra Algerian.  Around the world, ending colonialism in certain ways often generated mass violence, with the partition of India–so eagerly sought for and worked for by Gandhi (who said “Western Civilization would be a very fine thing”, in effect, but who should have foreseen the consequences of his actions, in my view)–perhaps the most extreme example, in that millions of people died violent deaths.

This world is a violent place, but violence is rarely a complete long term solution to any problem.

In our own country, I continue to believe our only real hope is that with persistence and engaged eloquence and coherence and sincerity, that the delusion thinking of the Communists inhabiting our universities might gradually fade.  These children feel the pain of little birds and baby squirrels, but feel nothing about many of their fellow humans but hatred.  This hate is taught.  It is bred.  It is cultivated.  And perhaps it can be reversed.  It will take more courage than I see on display, but it is not impossible.

And again, if you watch that movie, you can see how awful things can become.  There were no innocents in that movie, by and large.  Both sides committed horrible atrocities.

Paul Assauresses, who was one of the models for the composite figure of Colonel Mathieu, referenced the El Halia Mine episode specifically.  Here is some detail on that:

The most heinous massacre of the day occurred at the El-Halia pyrite–mining town, where about 130 Europeans and 2,000 Muslims lived and worked together. The mob was essentially composed of hundreds of native peasants, both men and women, mostly armed with farming tools, axes, sharpened shovels, or knives, and was led by 25 FLN regulars. They arrived near 11 am, when most of the men were working in the mine while women and children were at home. A bloody massacre ensued, as European women were raped and disembowelled or decapitated, children had their throats slit and babies were slammed against walls until their heads caved in. Some of the local Muslim inhabitants who had initially watched without reacting enventually joined the excited mob, as it massacred Europeans under chants of ‘Allah Akabar’ that blended with Algerian women’s ululations. Thirty-seven Europeans, mostly women and children, were murdered in the attack

The principle is simple: violence leads to violence on both sides.  You may think you are the bad ass top dog one day, but the next you can expect something horrible in retaliation.

In the movie, the police officer sets a bomb (at the wrong address, by the way, in response to the arrest of an innocent man), and a few days or weeks later, French cafes get bombed and many innocents, on the other side, killed.  Nobody wins.

I believe in Fate of a sort.  If enough Americans commit to darkness, then perhaps that will be what we get.  In a just universe, that is the outcome.  You ask for it, you get it.

But if enough of us maintain light within us, then perhaps this evil can be ended.  I don’t know.  I have no way of knowing.  I am not the person to make mindlessly positive predictions.  History is filled with unredeemed horrors.

Humankind is weak, and mean, and stupid.  Fight these things in yourself.

during one of my nightly adventures: the past slithers up to the present and bites us like a snake.

I saw an obstacle course that was horizontal, but made through the magic of TV, through the angle of the camera, to look vertical and very hard.  They were crawling around the ground, as if they were soaring in the sky.

Then saw another obstacle course that was quite real, quite dangerous, and someone was making his or her way through it successfully, to honest cheers.  I saw the “climber”: it was a white dolphin.  I petted it for encouragement, although I was not supposed to.

In the end, the dolphin finished the course, and sprouted a leg.