Humanity is One... Unfortunately

Why is it that these Buddhist trolls who believe the self is an illusion always have the most unattractive selves? I suppose it's like an unappealing woman who becomes a feminist and decides that gender is just a social construct anyway, so she can pretend she's not missing anything. Likewise, what these vulgarized Buddhists call "emptiness" we call a "major blind spot." It doesn't reflect well on Buddhism, which obviously has its share of perennial wisdom, even if it can never be "ultimate."

I just read a book by one of these blinkered new-age Buddhist types, and all I can say is, if your prose has the capacity to set my teeth on edge, you're probably not as liberated as you think. Rather, you're just in denial of the malignant power of your self, or, at the very least, unaware of the aesthetic requirements of Truth. (Of course, this has no common measure with the inevitable psychic "disturbance" caused by genuine sages, saints, and mystics, which is a mark of authenticity, Jesus being absolutely paradigmatic in this regard. Only the ultimate Life could inspire the ultimate murder in the wrong type of people.)

No, the body and the Self (as opposed to the local and contingent ego) are both real and enduring (i.e., the Real is reflected in both body and Self). Last night the Dreamer provided me with another vivid reminder of this. As I have said before, for all practical purposes, I don't think you can really eliminate mind parasites, any more than you could eliminate all the bacteria and viruses from the world (nor would you want to). But you can "outgrow" your mind parasites. Or, put it this way: if you have a particularly disruptive and dysfunctional mind parasite, you can confront it head on, say, in therapy, and gain insight into its ways and means and try to rid yourself of its mean ways.

But in a more general sense, it is also possible to simply become "larger" and more capacious than your mind parasites, so that they no longer contain you, but rather, the reverse: you contain them by virtue of your psychic "growth" or maturity, and mind parasites can't grow if you don't feed them with the experiences they require. I suppose it's similar to having a robust immune system that can either ward off infections or tamp them down before they get out of hand. An immature or compromised immune system can't do that. The point is that the same infection -- say, the flu -- can be deadly for a person with a compromised immune system, e.g., children, the elderly, AIDS patients, but not a big problem for others. Same parasite; very different result.

Just so, the identical mind parasite -- let's say, envy, because it is so ubiquitous and pesky -- can be contained in one person, but become the ruling passion (i.e., the container) of another, say, a leftist. In so many ways, the left is simply the mind parasite of envy writ large, the normalization of a particular soul-pathology. And once the parasite is normalized, there is no hope of transcending it.

To cite an obvious example, you often hear clueless leftist neo-Marxist elites such as Obama say that they just don't understand how a middle class conservative can "vote against his economic interests" -- which is just another way of saying that they just don't understand people who aren't plagued by envy. Of course the little people are envious. They just channel it into guns, or religion, or homophobia, or voting Republican.

But in truth, affluent leftist elites -- the Hollywood herd of independent minds is the quintessential example -- merely project their own envy into "the little people" for whom they have such palpable contempt, under the guise of "caring" about them. This is why the ministrations of the leftist always feel so creepy and malignant to a normal person. It feels so creepy because it is so narcissistic and "off key," and has nothing to do with your actual personhood. Rather, it specifically robs you of your unique personhood -- which is your most precious gift, being that it represents "freedom lived" (in the higher sense).

For example, I heard someone say that Obama's understanding of the average American seems about as deep as a Bruce Springsteen song, to such an extent that he should appoint him Secretary of Labor. Now, I was a union member and working class stiff for half of my adult life, and it was strictly laughable that Springsteen's depressingly cartoonish vision of a blue collar American Hell had anything to do with my life.

In fact, based upon his morose lyrics, I am quite sure that my life -- and my internal world -- was more rewarding than his. I certainly wouldn't want to be him for anything. I mean imagine, if you will, the darkness of someone who confesses to actually receiving spiritual sustenance from Maureen Dowd and Paul Krugman. That is quite literally hell, equivalent to gaining "intellectual sustenance" from Air America or huffingtonpost.

Unlike me, Springsteen was and is a pampered millionaire who has never worked a day in his life. But outward circumstances do not alter the contours of the self, which again, endures. In Springsteen's case, he had to do something with his envy, since it could no longer be rationalized, so he simply put it into people like me. At the same time, he became a leftist, which allowed him to be free of my imaginary (projected) envy of him, since now the government will "appease" my (his) envy by taking away stuff from "the wealthy" and giving it to contemptible losers like me. I wish that Springsteen would just stop voting against his economic interests and leave me alone.

The whole thing is so transparent. When the left complains about "tax cuts for the wealthy," this is simply their psychic transformation of greed and envy into a bogus altruism that allows their parasites to "sleep." But these parasites never sleep, as the Dreamer reminded me last night. What the leftist really means is that "poor people are envious of my stuff, so we'd better give these losers some 'free' stuff from the government, so I won't feel so persecuted by my undeserved wealth." This is why all the Hollywood entertainers complain about "CEO pay" or "income disparity," but not a single one of them complains about the excessive salaries of movie stars or rappers. You will never see Sean Penn structure his contract so there is not such a chasm between his salary and that of the lowly set carpenter or assistant editor.

The self does not end at your skin boundaries, that's for sure. Projection is going on all the time, and it's best to try to understand what you're projecting rather than imagining that you are free of this ubiquitous mechanism. You may not feel your toxicity, but that's because we do.

In other words, before you blithely proclaim that "all is one," you had better understand what this implies, i.e., its dark side of unwanted psychic influences passed from mind to mind. Obviously this applies on both the micro (individual) and macro (collective) levels, and both above and below. For example, Obama's bogus call for "unity" is actually just tyranny in disguise, since his notion of "bringing us together" is "to have conservatives live with getting a 100% liberal agenda jammed down their throats" (Bill Otis). There is the white unity from which the diversity of colors emerges, and the black unity that denies diversity by blending all the colors.

Likewise, Jimmy Carter is a transparently loathsome, vicious, and poisonous human being who is not only clueless to his evildoing, but sanctimoniously imagines that he is morally superior to the rest of us. Carter will never know how toxic he is, even though (or, more precisely, because) the toxins leak out everywhere, and we must bear them. And yet, he is at peace.

Indeed, Carter is a man of peace. But like so many others of his ilk -- Gandhi comes to mind -- he's really just a peaceive aggressive S.O.B. in denial of his belligerent parasites. Never trust a peace-monger, unless they happen to be carrying a big sword and know how to consciously use it, and whom to use it upon. Righteous aggression is infinitely preferable to the morally depraved passive-aggressiveness of the left, who are quite naturally kind to the cruel (e.g., Hamas) while being cruel to the kind.

Anyway, just as the immune system is based upon a sophisticated system of identification in which your body is able to distinguish self from not-self, the more you know about your mind parasites, the less likely you will be to act them out in the manner of yesterday's "enlightened" troll, who is the only person who is unaware of his samskary monsters. In short, if you are unaware of your mind parasites, someone else will be, for I regret to inform you that We Are the World, and there's not a damn thing you can do about it.

This is the peril of living in the "human community," which is a vast field of projection, for better and worse; without projection, we could never become human, but pathological projection leaves us either less than or "all too" human. Thus the wise words of Jesus, "watch and pray," or pray while keeping one eye on your mind parasites, so they don't prey on you -- or others.

Reminds me of a Big Joe Turner song, in which he assures his scheming woman,

If you see me sleeping, baby,
Please don't think that I'm drunk.
I got one eye on my pistol
And the other one on my trunk.

***
Leftists have hijacked the educational establishment to use it as a huge projective field in which to infect children and young adults with their mind parasites. Dr. Sanity:

"Taking the mind of a child and feeding it exclusively on your ideological pablum is not only the most cruel and abusive of behaviors; it also ensures that such a mind becomes cognitively stunted and morally impaired (much like the minds of teachers so steeped in ideological bullshit like Bill Ayers and his cohorts from the 'loving' 60's, who so proudly and caually approve of oppression and violence toward those who disagree with them)."