Category Archives: Ahimsa

Faith can blind us

Toward the end of my slow recovery from a frustrating and fatal conflict with my two closest friends, with nonnegotiable sides drawn by a unanimous group of our oldest friends, now mutually dead to me, I heard a political scientist say this:

People get so invested in their belief system that they don’t care what’s true.

The simple truth of this hit me hard, explains so much about our tribal species. The dear old friend of fifty years who accused me of sadistically torturing her poor husband, my closest friend, “to bend him to my will”, is known to everyone as someone with a very strong will. People tend to do what she wants, it’s always easier than locking horns with her. If anyone was bending anyone to their will, it was far less likely to be me than her.

Then there are the facts, a year of cause and effect, my continued attempts at healing a conflict, her silent, steely ignoring of each try, punctuated by fits of rage, her determination to silence me, to be right no matter what. 

The alternative to my death and banishment from our group was unthinkable to her, the humiliation of being exposed as an angry, deeply damaged person incapable of vulnerability, or acknowledging fault when conflict arises.

Of course, when you are part of a cherished group and filled with attachment and belief, as in unquestioning love for a charming, charismatic friend who endearingly needs your admiration, you do not care what the “truth” is.  Her hurt is all that matters.

Faith is the strongest force in human affairs, it is rarely subject to the back and forth of discussion, persuasion and compromise.  Things that should be easy to resolve, in light of clear cause and effect, and empathy for the weakness each of us has, become impossible to ever fix. 

If there is unquestioning emotional faith on one side, and a strong need never to be wrong, no matter what, faith erases any “truth” that might call its rightness into question.  

There in a nutshell is the tragedy of human history.

Beautiful short meditation on gratefulness

The beautiful soothing voice and profound common sense of this Benedictine monk will restore your soul for an interlude of sanity, wonder. You will feel gratefulness for this breath and the next ones you take in. Take six minutes to yourself to let his message flow over you. His life affirming message, spoken against gentle music, is accompanied by gorgeous photography of our miraculous world. I have listened to it so many times over the years I can almost recite it with him.

However pessimistic the amplified ugliness of the lowest human impulses, hatred, intolerance, greed, rage, envy, stupidity and smirking cruelty might make you feel about the world, this is also true, and right, and very important to keep in your heart. It is good to remember the many blessings of our lives, every day.

The gift and curse of writing clearly

If you have something to say, and believe it is important, you can often express it most clearly in writing.  Writing helps you organize, clarify and provide context for understanding and expressing things that can be complicated to sort through while speaking.  Write every day, as a daily practice, and after a number of years, you will hone your ability to set out your beliefs, ideas and feelings clearly in writing.   It feels like a wonderful blessing of my life, that I have acquired this ability.  I would recommend a period of daily writing to anybody who likes to read, think and learn.

To people who are insecure, or angry, or highly competitive, or who don’t share your views, or feel unable to write themselves, receiving something that is written clearly and expressively can be threatening, even infuriating.  It can sometimes instill a desire to take revenge on the fucking arrogant smartass who smugly sets out his thoughts and feelings so clearly, with an overbearing confidence that must be very galling to someone who does not practice this antiquated form of communication.   

When this happens, you will often get silence, which can come for  many reasons, some quite innocent.  Sometimes you will get a polite categorical statement to the effect of “I will never discuss any of these things with you. Please do not send them to me ever again.”  

The identical message can be clearly sent in a more passive, deniable way, simply by never responding to anything you receive from the “writer”.  It is this seamless eternal silence by way of reply that was my father’s pet technique for expressing contempt.  It is one unfailing calling card of the narcissist, a potent weapon everyone who can never be wrong, and will kill you to prove it, keeps sharp and at the ready for the moment it’s needed.

The world is ruled by passion, whatever we are most passionate about engages and moves us the most. People have widely different strategies for dealing with conflict, fear, vulnerability, isolation, anger, grief, taking care of loved ones, health concerns and other challenges.  Better to describe these coping strategies through observation, than to judge them critically.   We are all doing the best we can under often difficult circumstances.

For me there is no replacement for writing down the things that move or perplex me, particularly if they may not be spoken of, or if you are otherwise held powerless.  I feel this way regardless of how often things I’ve written have alienated me from certain people over the years.  

That I tend to think of those who became angry because of something I wrote as largely irredeemable assholes is a character flaw of mine, I suppose.  If you won’t talk about a subject, and get pissy and hostile, or simply silent or categorical, over something I wrote, that’s pretty much all she wrote, as it is written.

Why I hate irrationality

When someone asserts their will without any reason other than “I am asserting my will no matter what, and you may not fucking question or defy me” understand that you cannot reason with this kind of person. No appeal to fairness, decency, reasonableness, empathy, friendship, kinship, mutuality, morality or anything else will make any difference. There is no negotiation with people who are irrational, particularly when these fuckers are in a rage. Their “arguments” are incoherent, there is no conflict that can be discussed, no possible compromise, no possibility of future understanding. Still, it can take decades to understand what you are up against when you suddenly face this implacable truculence in someone you care about, are connected to, have a long, fond history with.

I recently sent several chapters from the second draft of my manuscript to an old friend who asked to read them. I sent them after explaining that I needed her comments, no matter how brief, to let me know she’d read the pages. I told her how hard it is to get feedback from readers, and how necessary such feedback is to understand how certain writings land with a reader, what needs to be fixed or otherwise clarified. Hearing nothing in a week, I sent a follow up note. After another follow up several days later, with no response, I started to get pissed off. It was tempting to write something angry and dismissive. I note that all of this happened during a few weeks of escalating medical troubles and nights of poor sleep.

In the end, I was glad I’d held my disappointment and temper in check. I wrote this to her, after a phone conversation that helped me greatly from a medical perspective (she’s a retired doctor who did research as we spoke and came to a logical conclusion as to the source and cure of my present autoimmune situation), to help her understand why silence by way of response is so intolerable to me.

As you described, when you were upset as a kid you closed yourself in your room and did math.  You were good at it and immersing yourself in it took you away from your hurt feelings and helped you regain a sense of order and control, a very important thing for us puny earthlings, particularly when we feel under attack.   My escape was always writing, drawing and playing guitar in my room.  All of these were things I controlled, and got better and better at, all things that took me away from my unfairly battered feelings.  Writing has been so important since my banishment from the group of rabid lemmings who expressed great love for me over the last fifty years.

My father’s most effective weapon of abuse was silence.  I’d talk to him about something that bothered me, worried me, tormented me, and he’d reframe it, bat it away, blame me, etc.  When I wouldn’t let him hijack the conversation, he’d go silent.  No response at all.  It was, and still is, kryptonite to me.  

Gina, after assuring me she was “happy” to hear my concerns, gave me complete, total, unbroken silence for four months (followed by an enraged teenaged/two year-old’s temper tantrum when I forced a meeting by insulting Flack’s fragile manhood).   Her hapless puppet, the “homo”, made excuses, blamed me, got offended, had hissy fits, defended his wife’s right to be an enraged, abusive bitch, got mad, calmed down, insisted over and over on irrational points, made incoherent comebacks, etc. but his periods of silence would only last a few weeks at a time.   Letters, texts, WhatsApps, phone calls from me were all ignored by the two queens, the homophobe and her pathologically obliging mate, during this ugly transition from friendship to eternal hatred, hatred spread generously throughout a large group that comprised most of my close friends and their now adult children — all revealed to be as emotionally/morally malleable as any lynch mob anywhere.

That is why after I told you I need acknowledgement before I’d send you my chapters it was so hurtful not to hear back day after day, even after I sent a few follow-ups.   Every day when I checked my email it would be like another little silent kick in the nuts, so familiar from anyone in my life who had malice or passive aggressive anger to let me know about. The intent isn’t relevant really, the effect is the same, particularly with my stress level turned up due to ongoing and new health threats, 80% disability, medical negligence, etc..

Anyway, fucking read that short bit I sent you again today.  It will take you about 6 minutes.  Then write “nice”, or “oh”, or “I think this will interest a literary agent” or “I’d suggest changing this, adding this” or “well-done” or “you really have an inflated sense of your literary abilities, pal, dontcha?” or “Bitter much?” or “I think you could lose part 3” or “I think this is so-so, even though the writing itself is OK” or “I know nothing about these things, but good luck” or … you get the point.  Anything but nothing.  Without reader feedback I’m working in the dark much of the time in how this material might land and getting this feedback is generally about as easy as pulling out my own wisdom teeth.

And so, we were able to come to a better understanding of each other and preserve a relationship that could have easily been severed forever. She emailed that she found my chapter about the unreliable narrator, the one a perverse but perceptive friend urged me to write, portraying myself as a despicable villain well-deserving of my punishment, very funny. Several people have found this chapter about my unpardonable faults funny. There’s no accounting for taste, I suppose. But I take this all as progress, boys and girls, and another living example of living and learning to do better, and using Reason and an appeal to empathy to work through tangled, inflamed emotions with someone capable of responding in kind.

Cults, embracing lies as loyalty, the sting of death

Every cult is based on embracing the infallibility of the cult leader. This asshole is usually a charismatic (to some) narcissist, a person who can never be wrong, will kill to prove that, and who rewards any follower who swears undying loyalty to them with an assurance of (usually transactional) love. For the most part.

The cult leader, being infallible, doesn’t need a reason to throw somebody out of the cult, but for the most part, they tolerate cult members who are undyingly loyal.

For anybody who does not go along with a cult leader’s infallible, indisputable so-called lies, taking a self-described moral stand in the name of some asshole abstraction, like “truth”, there is only death. If apostates, heretics, dissidents and critics are not always killed by the leader, and made grim examples of, the spirit of questioning and undermining authority grows like a poisonous weed in the cult. The death inflicted on the questioner is usually spiritual, the hated apostate may never be spoken to, or of, again. Within the cult, this is the functional equivalent of death by physical killing.

 The sting of death is the absence of the person you loved, absolute and eternal, silence that can never again be broken with a laugh or anything else.  With death all possibility for a better mutual future, for reconciliation, for greater understanding and peace is crushed into bitter dust. The bitterness of willfully annihilated love is impossible to describe, though many of us know well the awful taste of it.

Have no negative feelings about anything

If you pack up several of your best recent drawings, address the envelope to a loved one, weigh it, put proper postage on it and walk two blocks,  haltingly with a cane, to mail it to the very house you walked from, have no feeling if it does not arrive twelve days later, or even if it never arrives.   You must not expect things like a government agency holding up its end of the contract it makes when it sells you postage stamps.  It is best always to have no expectation of anything so as not to be disappointed when the world appears to be an unredeemed series of utter shit shows.

Whatever you do, do not try to see your petty problem in any larger context.  There is only doom down the road that starts “I’ve mailed literally hundreds of letters in recent years, including to myself, and none ever took more than three or four days to arrive, what is different now?”  Where does this thought lead you?  To wonder why Biden has not yet removed the Trump megadonor UPS stock owning Postmaster who was appointed by Trump to destroy mail service in order to slow down receipt of mail-in ballots is a thought experiment you should not start.  It is a complicated issue, of course, since any one Nazi senator can block virtually any presidential appointment and Biden needs to appoint two members to the Postal board of governors before the manifestly corrupt Looey DeJoy can be removed from office and sent on his smirking, self-satisfied way.

Have no feelings about the idiotic sham of a solemn, long delayed Supreme Court proceeding to hear arguments establishing whether it is legally permissible for a sitting president, after losing an election, to lie to, whip up and unleash a violent armed mob to storm the Capitol and stop the certification of his electoral defeat. 

We hear a hypothetical about whether the sitting president may legally, and unaccountably, order the murder of the duly elected man who is about to replace him as president, and his running mate, and anyone next in line for the presidency, in order to stay in power after his legal term ends.

There is a universe, offers Trump’s attorney, in an excellent impression of the insane Robert Kennedy Jr., where this would be an official presidential act entitled to absolute immunity from prosecution.   Lets say, for example, that the president truly and honestly believes these people are evil vampires who drink the blood of innocent white Christian children.   After all, the brilliant, respected Alan Dershowitz made the arguably demented argument at one of Trump’s impeachment trials that if the president truly, honestly believes something that nothing he does in connection with that truly held belief can ever be against the law.  After all, führerworte haben gesetzeskraft, as German legal experts used to say during the Thousand Year Reich.

If you can’t walk more than a block without pain, a year after your knee replacement surgery, and the surgeon has no idea how to fix it, that doesn’t give you the right to feel sorry for yourself. Self-pity never helped anyone.

If your primary Care doctor is hard to reach, unresponsive, inconsistent, arbitrary, find a new doctor.  If the new doctor immediately proves hard to reach, unresponsive, etc., do not jump to any conclusions you might come to regret.

And so on, down the fucking endless list of reasons to ever feel sadness, anger, disgust, anything negative.  Be happy all the time, no matter what.  Isn’t that the best fucking advice you ever heard?  Rejoice, there is never a good reason for negativity!  

How do people stay ahead of their demons?

Many people, to avoid thinking about painful or threatening things, keep themselves heroically, productively busy all day and go to bed exhausted.  They wake up early the next morning to work hard all day, every moment programmed down to the minute.  My father used to call this lifestyle “running a full flight pattern” and you can picture a harried, over-caffeinated air traffic controller doing the job of four, eyes darting constantly from the sky, to a computer screen, to the blinking dots on a wall map, to the sky, to the runways below, to his watch, to an open game of solitaire on another computer, to the coffee maker and so on.

Other people try to live in a more contemplative way, allowing time to think, feel, seek a little clarity in a world of chaos and senseless cruelty.  The usual example of a contemplative life is a monk in a monastery, though life in a monastery is highly programmed too.   I have always, from as far back as I can recall, preferred living an unharried life in this mercilessly harried world.  

I have to admit, I feel smugly superior to those running a full flight pattern, the coffee and cocaine achievers I’ve known, the exercise addicts, self-righteous compulsive workaholics of every stripe.  I am also compelled, of course, in this case in my disdain for the outer directed, those who march ahead according to the dictates of a brutal status quo keeping themselves constantly too busy to ever question the orders they are following or why they are running full tilt all the time.  

The most engaging part of a person is their inner life, what they are like when nobody is judging them.  To be allowed to see the vulnerable core of another person, to me, is the greatest gift a person can give you.  The trust and acceptance involved in this kind of sharing is, to me, the essence of love.

I am living in a fucking dream world, of course.  I spend an hour or two every day typing, putting my thoughts and feelings, and sometimes my dreams, in order, making them as clear as I can, to myself and to anyone who might stumble on them.  Even if you are well-paid to write, and I am not, man (or woman) does not live by writing alone.  It is a beautiful and indispensable thing, to be able to write clearly, but it is not something you can do all day.

Generally, when I am stressed I have always gone for a long walk, or a strenuous bike ride.  Or do some pushups, which always get my heart pounding and make me feel strong.  A brisk bit of exercise is a wonderful thing for calming the mind, getting some air flowing through the stuffy attic.  Currently I’m unable to walk more than a block or two, complications from knee replacement surgery almost a year ago.  Pushups lately are also off the menu, as the pain from my left synovium seems to have migrated up the entire left side of my body, into my left hand and left shoulder.  Physical exercise, an old standby, is not one of my stress relief options these days.

I always feel better when I spend an hour or two playing the guitar, or, in a pinch, the piano.  My left hand, while willing and able, is playing on borrowed time before the pain in the fingers make it impossible to continue.  The fingers get the unmistakable message in about five minutes.  Ordinarily, in my frustration, I’d throw myself on the ground and grunt out some push ups, but, currently, that would only lead to shoulder pain in addition to the hand and knee.

So what do we say about these constraints on a contemplative lifestyle?  I’m fucked, in a word.

Luckily for me, I have inner resources many do not.  Unluckily for me, you find the outer resources curtailed enough and your inner resources become overloaded. 

Then, in a word, you’re fucked.

Trauma for beginners

Trauma is the unbearable feeling of being powerless against a malevolent, deadly force intent on destroying you. It is the searing terror felt in a nightmare, the panicked vulnerability of not only being defenseless against a deadly enemy, but also finding yourself unprotected by anyone you’d expect to defend you. Trauma is an actual wound, of a different order from the things that annoy, frighten, hurt and threaten us because it is deadly, relentless and will certainly kill us.

A quick internet search adds this: trauma is a person’s experience of emotional distress resulting from an event that overwhelms the capacity to emotionally digest it.

Being traumatized regularly changes our reactions to the world, our health and even our DNA.

When you need understanding and a loved one suddenly shows you a face like this:

You are fucked. If you have experienced trauma, and a pattern of betrayal during moments when you were most vulnerable, you can smirk and shake your head at an old friend glaring silently with the implacable mask of an indomitable psychopath. You can opine to someone else about what an immature, enraged asshole the glarer is. You can shrug it off like an adult and go about your business.

It is only later, when you try to close your eyes and go to sleep that you find yourself unable to keep your eyelids closed. You are suddenly hyper-vigilant, disoriented, in a world unaccountably turned vicious and supremely threatening. The essence of trauma is that terrifying feeling of defenselessness, of betrayal by those who claim to love you.

There is a class of traumatized people who become reflexively brutal dominators of others. They only feel safe when they’re certain that they can control everyone around them, that there is no possible threat to them in any given room. They exert this social dominance using charm, guile, a politician’s toolkit, all sorts of devices, until they feel threatened. Then their only possible response is to attack and eliminate the source of the threat, and they do this by any means necessary. They will literally kill you, if it comes to that.

There are other traumatized people who, able to feel the heavy weight of betrayal without being crushed by it, maintain their empathy toward others. This type seeks reconciliation after a conflict with a loved one rather than demanding capitulation on pain of eternal, blind revenge.

I don’t know what decides which traumatized person emerges from trauma as the sadist/masochist or the injured nurturer. It may be that the latter group found themselves saved by someone who showed them real compassion when it mattered most while the destructive ones never found any relief when they were in the most extreme pain.

What I do know now is how essential it is to stay away from the extremely damaged type that lives in a dark, zero sum world where there is no possibility of redemption once hurt occurs. Those fuckers will kill you, if it comes to a choice between you and them. If they become dictator they will build death camps to put disloyal, betraying fuckers like you in. Count on it, their type has no other choice.