21. Peshmerga is Kurdish for "one who faces death." The Kurds claim they have "no friends but the mountains." I have only a few friends in real life but plenty of companionship in books.
There was a time when certain feelings cascaded over me, and I struggled to wrestle and understand them. Now I think I understand what they are.
The other day I was sitting next to a psychiatric nurse at a poker table. He was manic. He talked in a loud voice and almost non-stop. He revealed that his choice of profession was influenced by the psychic conditions of his mother. He also disclosed that the night before he had had to take a Xanax to relax so he could sleep. We (including our emotions) are nothing but the functioning of the chemicals in our brains.
Note to the following article by a philosopher and psychoanalyst concerning ISIS:
The words hit home with me. Silence and indifference, not thunderous and incessant denunciations, are the hallmarks of superiority. Truths require intellectual courage and emotional fortitude. The scumbags and assholes and motherfuckers who falsely characterize me certainly don't have intellectual courage and emotional fortitude.
1. So what if one is anti-Semitic? A human is allowed to be anything or anybody that he wants to. To be human is to recognize we are essentially free in our choices. What counts is the intellectual and emotional basis of our choices. Further, we must be responsible for our feelings and actions. We must take ownership of them. Stupid and cowardly folks are the ones who try to appear politically correct. Stupid Jews and those who try to appear politically correct never bother to examine in depth WHY anti-Semitism is widespread and has been around for so many centuries. They, like all conditioned animals, readily jump up and down and say, "don't blame the victims!". They don't bother to think no sane human hates a warm, loving, gracious, generous, self-effacing person. Most Jews are far from being warm, loving, gracious, generous, and self-effacing folks. I have interacted closely with them. I know who they are. The destruction of Gaza carried out by the Zionists has been rekindling anti-Semitism in Europe.
2. ISIS jihadists are living on borrowed time. They will be destroyed. The problem with them is that they hate everybody (including themselves. Their suicidal behavior is a manifestation of self-hatred. One must learn to love oneself, no matter what. One must find ways to walk tall, no matter how dire the circumstances), instead of selectively and fairly. There is nothing quite like excess. It never lasts. Nature favors balance and harmony.
"It has become a commonplace in recent months to observe that the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, is the latest chapter in the long story of the anticolonial awakening — the arbitrary borders drawn after World War I by the great powers being redrawn — and simultaneously a chapter in the struggle against the way global capital undermines the power of nation states. But what causes such fear and consternation is another feature of the ISIS regime: The public statements of the ISIS authorities make it clear that the principal task of state power is not the regulation of the welfare of the state’s population (health, the fight against hunger) — what really matters is religious life and the concern that all public life obey religious laws. This is why ISIS remains more or less indifferent toward humanitarian catastrophes within its domain — its motto is roughly “take care of religion and welfare will take care of itself.” Therein resides the gap that separates the notion of power practiced by ISIS from the modern Western notion of what Michel Foucault called “biopower,” which regulates life in order to guarantee general welfare: the ISIS caliphate totally rejects the notion of biopower.
Does this make ISIS premodern? Instead of seeing in ISIS a case of extreme resistance to modernization, one should rather conceive of it as a case of perverted modernization and locate it into the series of conservative modernizations which began with the Meiji restoration in 19th-century Japan (rapid industrial modernization assumed the ideological form of “restoration,” or the return to the full authority of the emperor).
The well-known photo of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the ISIS leader, with an exquisite Swiss watch on his arm, is here emblematic: ISIS is well organized in web propaganda as well as financial dealings, although these ultra-modern practices are used to propagate and enforce an ideologico-political vision that is not so much conservative as a desperate move to fix clear hierarchic delimitations. However, we should not forget that even this image of a strictly disciplined and regulated fundamentalist organization is not without its ambiguities: is religious oppression not (more than) supplemented by the way local ISIS military units seem to function? While the official ISIS ideology rails against Western permissiveness, the daily practice of the ISIS gangs includes full-scale grotesque orgies, including robberies, gang rapes, torture and murder of infidels.
Upon a closer look, the apparent heroic readiness of ISIS to risk everything also appears more ambiguous. Long ago Friedrich Nietzsche perceived how Western civilization was moving in the direction of the Last Man, an apathetic creature with no great passion or commitment. Unable to dream, tired of life, he takes no risks, seeking only comfort and security: “A little poison now and then: that makes for pleasant dreams. And much poison at the end, for a pleasant death. They have their little pleasures for the day, and their little pleasures for the night, but they have a regard for health. ‘We have discovered happiness,’ say the Last Men, and they blink.”
It may appear that the split between the permissive First World and the fundamentalist reaction to it runs more and more along the lines of the opposition between leading a long satisfying life full of material and cultural wealth and dedicating one’s life to some transcendent cause. Is this antagonism not the one between what Nietzsche called “passive” and “active” nihilism? We in the West are the Nietzschean Last Men, immersed in stupid daily pleasures, while the Muslim radicals are ready to risk everything, engaged in the struggle up to their self-destruction. William Butler Yeats’ “Second Coming” seems perfectly to render our present predicament: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” This is an excellent description of the current split between anemic liberals and impassioned fundamentalists. “The best” are no longer able fully to engage, while “the worst” engage in racist, religious, sexist fanaticism.
But are the terrorist fundamentalists really fundamentalists in the authentic sense of the term? Do they really believe? What they lack is a feature that is easy to discern in all authentic fundamentalists, from Tibetan Buddhists to the Amish in the United States — the absence of resentment and envy, the deep indifference towards the nonbelievers’ way of life. If today’s so-called fundamentalists really believe they have found their way to Truth, why should they feel threatened by nonbelievers. Why should they envy them? When a Buddhist encounters a Western hedonist, he hardly condemns. He just benevolently notes that the hedonist’s search for happiness is self-defeating. In contrast to true fundamentalists, the terrorist pseudo-fundamentalists are deeply bothered, intrigued and fascinated by the sinful life of the nonbelievers. One can feel that, in fighting the sinful other, they are fighting their own temptation. This is why the so-called fundamentalists of ISIS are a disgrace to true fundamentalism.
It is here that Yeats’ diagnosis falls short of the present predicament: The passionate intensity of a mob bears witness to a lack of true conviction. Deep in themselves, terrorist fundamentalists also lack true conviction — their violent outbursts are a proof of it. How fragile the belief of a Muslim must be if he feels threatened by a stupid caricature in a low-circulation Danish newspaper. The fundamentalist Islamic terror is not grounded in the terrorists’ conviction of their superiority and in their desire to safeguard their cultural-religious identity from the onslaught of global consumerist civilization.
The problem with terrorist fundamentalists is not that we consider them inferior to us, but, rather, that they themselves secretly consider themselves inferior. This is why our condescending, politically correct assurances that we feel no superiority toward them only makes them more furious and feeds their resentment. The problem is not cultural difference (their effort to preserve their identity), but the opposite fact that they already like us, that, secretly, they have already internalized our standards and measure themselves by them. Paradoxically, what the fundamentalists of ISIS and those like them really lack is precisely a dose of that true conviction of one’s own superiority.
Slavoj Zizek is a Slovenian philosopher, psychoanalyst and social theorist at the Birkbeck School of Law, University of London. He is the author of many books, including the forthcoming “Absolute Recoil.”
22. Yes, the space between the thoughts.
One of the reasons I enjoy playing poker is that each poker session is very much like a session of meditation. If we are mindful, insights and wisdom will come to us. Certain "recently refined/distilled" "insights":
a. Self-respect is paramount, even though to those who appear to have none by virtue of their actions.
We may not respect others, but all our actions, in one way or another, reflect a desire to make us feel that we are somebody and worthy of respect. This "fact"/need has two consequences:
a. i: When a person does something despicable like lying or stealing or begging or raping, he always rationalizes it.
a.ii: We react with passion when we are not treated with respect, especially if it's based/reinforced/ on lies or deliberate distortion of facts: e.g., my being accused as being a "stupid loser' by a midget who is a clear failure by many yardsticks. Insults or put-downs are acceptable (at least to me) if factually correct.
b. Mercy is important. Moderation is grace in action. Punishment must be commensurate with the crime. Excess causes imbalance. Extremism does not last because it is harmful, not only to others but also to the person(s) doing that. Everything, except maybe love, must be done with moderation.
c. We must learn to forgive ourselves and others over and over again because if we do not, we are sowing seeds of destruction to ourselves.
23. We must not carry any sorrows and regrets inside us as we are going through life. Instead, what we must have is an attitude that yes, mistakes were made because of our stupidity and ignorance, but we are bigger than our mistakes and we have learned from the mistakes. So we are now wiser and stronger because of the mistakes, not only made by us but also by others. Life is a learning process, a sum of our experiences and our choices. We valiantly and joyfully go through life acknowledging that there are indeed moments of joy and uplifting encounters in the general spiritual emptiness and the moral indifference of the world around us, and that we are indeed bigger and stronger spiritually and intellectually than the human animals we despise. We already determined who the human animals are by their actions regarding truth, love, sex, money, power, and pride.
We must really know who we are and where we stand in relation to others.
24. Meditations on Bushido
Seven virtues of Bushidō (as visioned by Nitobe Inazo)
The Bushidō code is typified by seven virtues:
Rectitude (義 gi?)
Courage (勇 yū?)
Benevolence (仁 jin?)
Respect (禮 rei?)
Honesty (誠 makoto?)
Honour (名誉 meiyo?)
Loyalty (忠義 chūgi?)
Associated virtues
Filial piety (孝 kō?)
Wisdom (智 chi?)
Care for the aged (悌 tei?)
In May 2008, Thomas Cleary translated a collection of 22 writings on Bushido "by warriors, scholars, political advisers, and educators". The comprehensive collection provides a historically rich view of samurai life and philosophy. The book, Training the Samurai Mind: A Bushido Sourcebook, gives an insider's view of the samurai world: "the moral and psychological development of the warrior, the ethical standards they were meant to uphold, their training in both martial arts and strategy, and the enormous role that the traditions of Shintoism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism had in influencing samurai ideals." The translations, in 22 chapters, span nearly 500 years from the 14th to the 19th centuries.
A woman of the past long gone just informed me that next week she will have a stop over for a few hours at the airport of this mountain desert town and is wondering if I would like to meet her. My reaction was to put on my running shoes and head to the mountain top. As I labored through the winding path to the summit, my vision took on a clarity. I love her no more. She has become a complete stranger to me. The past means nothing to me except as a lesson. I thus gave her no reply. My silence spoke volumes of my feelings for her. Love, like honor and self-respect, is not fully known unless it is put to the test. Instantaneous reactions, not long deliberations, reveal one's attitudes about love, honor, and self-respect. Today, I have made a vow that I am to be filled with Bushido.
Today the sky is bluer than usual. Not a single fluff of cloud to mar the blueness of the sky. The air is crisp and invigorating. I am in the yard, breathing in deeply the unpolluted mountain desert air. I am looking up to the sky. A vastness of white and blue. My soul is taking off like a rocket, flying up and far, far away. I am the sky.
A woman of the past long gone just informed me that next week she will have a stop over for a few hours at the airport of this mountain desert town and is wondering if I would like to meet her. My reaction was to put on my running shoes and head to the mountain top. As I labored through the winding path to the summit, a clarity came to me: I love her no more. She has become a complete stranger to me. The past means nothing to me except as a lesson. I thus gave her no reply. My silence spoke volumes of my feelings for her. Love, like honor and self-respect, is not fully known unless it is put to the test. Instantaneous reactions, not long deliberations, reveal one's attitudes about love, honor, and self-respect.
Words are always personal. They mean whatever we take them to mean, their lexical meanings notwithstanding. Although we always talk about love, honor, and self-respect, we all don't conceptualize them the same way. We have our own understandings and interpretations of these concepts based on our values and experiences. These concepts mean differently to different people. Not only these concepts, but all concepts suffer the same fate. There is no true universality of meanings accorded to them. Each individual human has his own way of understanding and handling of them. The Self is not necessarily the same of the Other. Despite some commonalities, are we not islands separated by vast distances of water? Among the more intelligent and/or educated folks, each one of us/them fancies he is superior to the Other and complains or disdains of being not understood. It remains, in the final analysis, who is more honest to himself and others. Take the case of love, while everybody desires and needs love, not everybody understands or deserves love. The cardinal, número uno, rule/requirement in the game/nature/essence of love is that to be loved, one must make oneself lovable. Nobody loves a sarcastic, self-oriented, self-centered, narcissistic person. Love is not about Self. It is always about the Other. Ironically by focusing on the Other, the Self gets, ultimately, gets what it wants from the Other. To be able to receive, one must learn to give of oneself. And to be able able to give of oneself, one must be comfortable and honest with oneself. Love, like charity, begins at home.
25. I am getting a feeling and a confirmation with each passing day that I am a late bloomer with regard to almost everything: morally, physically, intellectually, and even romantically. My understanding of things is getting more incisive and I am more at home with myself while I recognize that I am different and maybe even better than most folks I have come into contact with. Certain basic realities are driven home to me. But I could be delusional about my mental prowess. I could remain as stupid and gullible as I was. At any rate, life is getting too short to be self-conscious. What really counts is the ability to enjoy the remaining years of my life on this planet. There is absolutely no need to kill myself as Yukio Mishima did. I don't intend to shock the world. I am just a nobody. What I really want to do today is to be less stupid and more informed than who I was of yesterday. As Mishima himself wrote, the artist disguises in order to reveal; the man of society disguises in order to conceal.
So friends and citizens of the world, lend me thy ears. I am disguising and learning who I am at the same time. I always remember a wise man told me after having witnessed the sound and fury of my frothy, wounded pride. "Listen, amigo, all the sounds and noises you just made cannot heal the wounds of a blind man who has just walked into a lamp-post. You must learn to realize, it's your blindness, not the lamp-post that was at fault. You must learn to be less self-righteous, to talk less, and to observe silence more. Silence should be your friend and your guide."
I have meditated on the words of that wise man ever since, especially when memories of pain involving my youthful and immature past rush back and torment me. I slowly am coming to terms with my stupidity and gullibility. If I had been indeed smart and clever, no woman would have walked out on me. And it was stupid of me to wallow in pain and self-pity for so many long years. Failures in love finally brought forth moments of insights about myself and the women I foolishly "loved".
26. I am drawn nearer to the idea of living my life as if this very week and maybe even this very day were my last moments on this planet. So should I continue hating this and that asshole or motherfucker, or am I better off concentrating my time on more important projects? To be great is to be misunderstood, I keep reminding myself so. This world is full of dumb, stupid, ignorant assholes who deserve no pity or compassion from me. I just have to ignore them. Those motherfuckers are just like animals. I just have to pay them no mind while I walk on my path. Now I understand why certain men whose faces betray no expressions and whose voices are dry and cold as ice. They have been through much. They have known ignorant and stupid human animals who are full of vanity and ego, but no true pride or honor.
On a night like this ("En la noche como así"), I am keenly, acutely aware of the solitariness of human condition and the tenuousness of human connections. Deep down we humans are all alone. And we must come to terms and make peace with that aloneness. All the friendships and loves and get-togethers are just temporary respites from the aloneness. We lie to others to make ourselves look good; we lie to ourselves so we don't feel too much pain. We fancy that we are good, honorable, and respectable, or at the very least, "okay". We don't want to admit openly that we are lonely and that we feel something missing in our lives, something resembling peace and serenity and contentment, because we are lousy conversationalists and of boring, if not irritating, company. We quiveringly, tremulously wonder if we are nicer and less selfish, less self-centered, less sarcasm-laden, we probably would have more friends and would find love. Character is Fate. At my age, regrets are bad. The Present is everything.
27. F.N. alleged/asserted that one must have chaos within oneself in order to give birth to a dancing star. Whether the allegation/assertion is true or not, it does not matter a whit. What does is that the metaphor is beautiful, sublime, and strikingly original. Yet it also eerily knells and echoes of madness. Madness is crossing the line and going over the boundary of rationality. Madness is a breakthrough and a breakdown. To fully benefit from madness, one must be able to come back to this side of reality and rationality. For that to occur, one must possess self-awareness and courage and capacity for change. Grammar is order while poetry is going beyond order. Language is where the mind finds itself. Thus, we must pay close attention to how a person expresses himself. Often he engages in simulation and dissimulation. Only very rarely does he reveal himself. To lie is human; for one to speak only of facts and truths, one must be comfortable with oneself and rejections while respecting silence. One speaks only when one has to. Words emerge after long stretches of silence usually have a distillation and concentration of truth and power and vulnerability. Words must be like nudity. To have a beautiful naked body, one must spend time working on it. For words to have impact, one must spend time thinking about truth and wrestling with poetry. So, while Hugh Prather famously said, "I am afraid to tell you who I am because I am afraid you don't like who I am, and who I am is all I have.", I, Wissai, laughingly enunciated, "I am not afraid at all to tell you who I am, and I don't give a fuck whether or not you like who I am, for I know if you are smart enough to know who I really am, you will really like me. And if you are a woman, watch out, you may even end up falling in love with me."
28. Pythagoreanism: : the doctrines and theories of Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans who developed some basic principles of mathematics and astronomy, originated the doctrine of the harmony of the spheres, and believed in metempsychosis, the eternal recurrence of things, and the mystical significance of numbers.
Well, the above is an approach to realities. Another approach, perhaps more pragmatic and life-oriented, is concerned with lengthening life's longevity through finding happiness. We make ourselves happy or unhappy. We, not the circumstances, are the masters of our own feelings The efforts expended by us are the same. The only difference is the direction. It takes wisdom---a higher, applied, and learned form of intelligence---to be happy. So, am I really happy? Oh, fuck, yes---finally---I realized so a few days ago when certain insights rushed to me while I was riding a stationary bicycle. It is better late than never, being happy. Ever since, I've been looking at life with a new vision and attitude. And I laugh more at myself and at the assholes in this world. But mostly I don't laugh. I just snicker and chuckle at my follies while having a bemused smile on my face at the follies of the assholes. I no longer wish to exterminate the assholes and scumbags and motherfuckers of this world anymore. They all soon will die at their own hands or others'. After I told a smart-aleck asshole about my new "vision and attitude", he predictably posed a question to me, "But Wissai, don't you feel much better about yourself and make you a better person in the eyes of others if you just forgive and forget the people that you nauseatingly characterize as "assholes, scumbags, and motherfuckers".
I leaned back and emitted an eardrum-busting laugh and then I smilingly told him, "Listen, my "friend", 'forgive and forget' is a cliché and I hope you recognize it for what it is. Just because everybody parrots that hackneyed phrase, that would not make it an eternal verity. The truth of the matter is that we humans don't forgive and don't forget. Not all of us, anyway. Not you. We have two things called memory and vengeance, remember them? We invoke the oft-repeated phrase 'forgive and forget' because vengeance is not feasible now. We pretend to ourselves and others that we are noble-minded and wise because that is the politically correct and seemingly wise thing to do. But if we are honest to ourselves, we would unhesitatingly strike at those who badly hurt and injure us if an opportunity comes up. Meanwhile we engage in "soft-core" tactics of slandering and badmouthing. True forgiveness is silence and complete oblivion. Come on now. Be honest. Don't pretend to be who and what you are not. I laugh and snicker and chuckle because that makes the waiting more tolerable. Remember, this world is teemed with evil, weak, stupid, and ignorant folks. It's not healthy to wear a frown when meeting them. It's far better to smile at them openly and laugh at them discreetly. We must laugh our ways through life and to our deaths.
Anyway, I'm done "talking" to you. I need to get back to the song 'La última mañana que pase' contigo". Yes, the morning, the goodbye before I got on the bus to the airport, the sunglasses that hid her tears, and my stupid, immature, unwise desire to come back to her."
The following was my reaction to a friend who disclosed that he might have blown his opportunity with a pretty 23-year-old woman. My friend is 30 years old and has been looking around for a wife.
"Thanks for sharing. Sigmund Freud had an awesome elaboration on the duality/dualism of human nature. So please pay close attention to that. Succinctly put, humans have a Death Wish. We are own worst enemy. We tend to do self-destructive things. A well-balanced person has integrated well the warring polar drives/qualities/ attributes in humans: the Death Wish and the Will to Live. You deserve happiness. You deserve pretty women and all other fine things in life. The key is whether or not you want them badly enough and work hard to get them without sacrificing higher values like honesty, loyalty, fairness, justice, etc...In the end, we have to answer to ourselves. Our conscience is the gatekeeper of our soul, of our worth as a person. There are always girls/women in this world. Always be prepared to seize the opportunity. Napoleon famously said, 'Opportunities only come to those who are prepared.'
Guess what? I read recently about Laugh Yoga. As a consequence, everything is "laughable" to me now. I think I have reached a new level of self-discipline by confining my latest few entries here in my blog instead of sending them to the usual "victims". Ego would be just bad for me. It would keep me perpetually juvenile. I don't really need confirmations or accolades at my age when most people I know are dying like flies. Life is meant to be fun and happiness from self-actualization, not external praises or admirations. A man is insecure if he needs validations and confirmations.
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