(Most) Women As Romantic Nihilists: What Is "Life's Greatest Prize?"

I'm writing the life of my lover Joan Allman, and in the process I stumbled across the topic of "life's greatest prize."

When I was 59 years old, I believed that most women observed a "no-lie zone" within precious or intimate relationships.  There may be some truth to this, but it is limited.  In the 8 years since, I have learned to believe that women lie all the time when it comes to making things look good, especially involving love, and to avoid hurting people's feelings. I used to think females as a group respected the truth, but not now. They want things to be nice, so they fib. They want to avoid conflict, so they fib. They want to look sexually abstinent and respectable, far more than they want to stand for truth. So they fib.

True story:  I dated Sally S. of Tucson about 15-20 times across four months, stayed overnight at her house half a dozen times, mated with her, and then wrote her a Dear John for reasons I have yet to discover. Yet, a few months later, with her new boyfriend listening, she said to me, "But we only went on what--two dates?"

Such a blatant lie for the ear of the new boyfriend, who was a close enough friend to know how long we dated. Sally herself said the first night we took off our clothes together, "We could have been doing this for months!"  I was tempted to say, "So we did it at least three times on nondates, then?"

The "two dates" lie was what Sally wished was the truth at that moment, so she let it become something she was willing to say in a certain situation, to achieve a certain result.

Suppose a woman loves a man for a year and he disappoints her, and she leaves.  She will soon say it never amounted to much, and believe it. He was her joy and refuge while the Earth went all the way around the Sun once.  That's something.

Yet, because it didn't amount to Everything, that makes it Nothing in most female hearts. I call them emotional nihilists, romantic nihilists.  If a dating relationship doesn't change a woman's whole life, it's worthless.

We didn't come to Earth to have another human change our whole life. We came to learn, nay, to recall the Divine Spark Within, or the heart's own repose, if you prefer, and have IT change our whole life.

I knew this when I was with Joan, but didn't focus on it much because it wasn't her reality. There's a woman making, understandably, a lot of money talking to the public about how to obtain "life's greatest prize," the good, long relationship and love we all crave. Perfect example of the good turning out to be not the ally of the great, but its enemy, its counterfeit. Life's greatest prize is, most simply, Inner Peace--finding the Grand Love inside you, love for yourself, for others, and for the whole Universe. You can have a physical lover right there with you from age 19 to 82 and not have true satisfaction in life. Thus if you are greatly lucky, in that situation, there with your life's companion, your cup of happiness just may be half full. Probably less. 

On the other hand, you can live out life alone, every night at home by yourself, and come to gain Inner Peace, and if you get advanced enough in your experience of it, you lack nothing. Nothing! Guess what: you have life's greatest prize! Divine Mother's unwritable, indescribable bliss in your heart. It does not rise out of romantic love. Romantic love can form one certain part of such inner peace--no more.  

The wonderful romantic love, lasting over decades, that some small percentage of us experience--17%?--is a great treasure.  It is self-deception to call it life's greatest prize, and just as well, since such a small percentage of us end up with it.  I estimate that I myself have received this Valuable Mortal Gift--the good relationship--about 25 years.  I'm 48 years past age 20, so please don't think I speak here of theories I have not lived.

There are organized methods for exploring and developing inner peace, love-wisdom within.  And new ones are appearing among us in this age of the world--look up Alice Bailey, Lester Levenson, Byron Katie, or Leonard Orr on the Internet for examples.  Maybe even Joseph Smith and Donald Walters qualify here.  The most time-tested ones seem to come from the meditation traditions of the East, originating in India.  Other religions have variants of this, whether Christianity, Ba-hai, Mohammedanism, Christian and Religious "Science," so-called.  

More, there are systems not requiring belief in God that point inquiring humans in this same direction, with the oldest and biggest being Buddhism.  Or read Marcus Aurelius, a Roman emperor and philosopher who 2000 years ago knew romantic love, so easily taken from us by death or life's surprises, was not life's greatest prize.  Life's greatest prize is something that, once we get hold of it, cannot be grabbed away by any human force, or, for that matter, any demonic one.  That's another reason it's the greatest prize.

President Trump and the Rules, and the Rule of Law: General Outlook

Any president interacts with the law and with lawyers in 100 ways.  It's the nature of the job.  There may be three reasons why I suppose that studying and writing about our new president and the law could be worth it.

First, there's me.  I'm a paralegal trained by a year in college at an ABA-certified program.  A lawyer teaching one of our classes said, There are hundreds of millions of people in the country, but only two or three million of us know how to do legal research.  All the others, if they want an answer to a question about the law, have to rely on sombody else.  So you're acquiring a rare and useful talent.
I love studying the law and believe in our constitutional law system as one of our grand democratic strengths.

The next reason is that President Trump has a relationship to the Rules, society's norms, far different than any previous president, and far different than most of his fellow citizens.  I think he seems to make up his own rules as he goes along, lives in his own realm where, to some extent, The Rules that apply to most of us don't necessarily apply to him.  Also, because of his leadership role in business and in national publicity, he may often be the exception, one of the few, or the only one not required to live by certain rules.  He may turn out to be the sort who can lead the masses into new rules, while laying aside old ones.

To some extent, it seemed like that might be one of the general themes of the 20th century.  Due to warfare, communication, medical progress, scientific progress, and the development of a worldwide culture, lots of the old rules have been lain aside and new ones taken up.  This has been true in health care, in sexuality, in fashion, in the growth of cities, and certainly in government and law, to name only a few.  We live in an Era of Change and it looks like Donald Trump may be able to be an agent of change, perhaps even more than Barack Obama.

The last reason this subject intrigues me is because I suspect that Trump's willingness to cast aside rules and even laws that apparently govern all of us may get him into trouble and keep him from functioning as well as he might as president.  If he breaks enough rules and enough laws and gets away with it, it could be a bad precedent for future presidents and US leaders.  It could be the first steps away from what has for a very long time been a pretty well-working democracy.  I suspect Trump has little inner respect for democracy, and for learning how democracy works best.  One of the best ways, I think, to keep an eye on this is by watching how President deals with both The Rules and the Rule of Law, and to search back and learn how he has dealt with them in the 69 years of his life before he strode out in the middle of the world stage. 

"Frost You!" The New American Mood?

About three days after the election, I felt subdued because my country just seemed a little less warm-hearted toward people in general than I hoped it would be.  In other words, Frost You! seemed to be the voters' mood.  I didn't take that well at first.  I've adjusted.

Some smart writer in the Atlantic Monthly magazine says that there are some big differences between church-going and "secular" voters in all parts of the political spectrum.  My normal tendency is to be wary of church-based voters.  I like people who can think for themselves, and some of my church experience showed the tendency for my fellow believers to go along with the herd.  This writer may have said 25% of people under, oh, 35, who say they believe in God don't go to church.  These out-of-church voters tended to support Trump and Sanders more than churchgoers with the same political outlooks.  They both feel more like the American Dream has been lost than people who voted for Clinton or Cruz or John Casich or Lindsay Graham.  Graham and Casich especially seemed to lose, to me in looking back, partly because they didn't tell enough people to just frost off.  Then Rubio and Clinton lost because they weren't mad enough--too grownup.

This subject seems a little foggy, but "To Hell With You," to tone it down, popped into my head as a way to describe some of this new national mood.  A little before we inaugurated President Trump, I was driving down a street here in Tucson and saw "a new thing in the world."  It was a large pickup truck with a man of about 30 driving.  He had a big flag or banner posted on a flagpole standing straight up in the bed of his truck.  The flag was white and had the words TRUMP:  No More Bullshit!   Here "bullshit" seems to mean "anything I think is stupid."   

I believe we come to Earth to learn to get along and put up with other people, in spite of how screwy or even wrong we find them to be.  It seems clear that Donald Trump disagrees with me on that.  Yet, if he's not going to cooperate with a wide range of people, it will limt what he can do as President.

My 15 Weary Thoughts On Roswell In Weary Post #15

With this post, I have posted more times in 2017 than I did from 2009 to 2016.  Is that good?
Needs to be a website.

No Aliens

1)  Normal humans are not very good at seeing accurately.  You're going to have all kinds of wild stories told by people who believe them in good faith.

2)  Rarely will the wild stories be true.

3)  Here's one I actually thought of myself:  Roswell aside because it was too long ago, if there really are alien craft zipping around, why have we had cell phone cameras all over the Earth for about 15 years and no really obvious UFO photos have yet shown up?  We can catch the police killing people and put it on tonight's news.  Why can't we catch the aliens, if they're here?  Maybe aliens are faster and sneakier than police.  (Note added a year later:  there are a group of such photos on Youtube.  UFO photos don't get much circulation.)


4) It is hard to prove that a nonexistent thing does not exist.  You can give 17 pieces or evidence that X is not here, or there, or there, and it can still in theory be over the next hill.  It is somewhat easier to prove that something did not happen.

5) In this case it is just as hard to prove that Something Beyond does exist.

6) Officer Weaver's 1990s report does not say "We know Project Mogul was found at Roswell."  It says "We can't be certain and Project Mogul, active at the time in NMexico and classified, seems the most likely explanation," a hell of a lot more likely than a damned alien ship.
7)  The NY Times and many other sober heads reviewed the Roswell case, and most somberly came to the anti-alien conclusion.  They/we are faced with the blunt facts that a) no nonEarth technology became known to the public and b) no Off-the-Earth biological forms showed up in public, either.
          So now we look at what impresses me differently than these somber heads.

Yes Aliens

8)   Leslie Kean, the full-time US journalist most working on UFO stories led the reporting on a huge UFO December 2017 story in the NY Times.  In her book, UFOs, she writes:  When Britain and France released UFO archives just under 10 years ago, the NY Times "focused on a few of the silliest" documents and "provided readers with the standard ridicule and blatantly biased approach traditionally employed by that noted paper."  (p. 118)

9)  Kean gives light to the only "Establishment Press" article on Roswwell I have read was oddly uninterested in reviewing censorship of the press and threatening of witnesses at Roswell.  Quoting UFO cultists and understating witness accounts of odd materials seemed more newsworthy to a science reporter, W. Broad.   One more mystery of Roswell.    See post of Feb. 17.

10) It only took 1/3 of the known age of our universe for sentient life to evolve on Earth.  Given the size of what we see with telescopes, the chance that homo sapiens flew the first spaceship Ever, Anywhere, is essentially zero.  We're not alone in the universe.
       To restate this, there's not a question of intelligent life existing in other places.  It does.  The only question is whether such life has flown here--and crash-landed.

11) If a nonEarth craft was found in 1947, it is completely plausible that the feds would hide that fact, at least until it was clear what they were dealing with.  Then later they might well go on hiding it to avoid revealing details of off-Earth technology they were "reverse-engineering."

12) Let's postulate that the dopes are right and Mack Brazel found a spaceship not built here.  It might never have become, even yet, completely clear what we are dealing with.  Or the truth might have been so frightening that it is best to hide it from people at large.  Like Stargate or the Empire Strikes Back.  If the Empire is six years from striking back at us, how much good does it do for me to know about it before the death ray hits the ground next to me?

13) Colonel Blanchard, high in the only nuclear-weapon-holding unit on Earth, told P. R. officer Walter Haut to tell the press that the unit had a flying disk in its possession.  It is fair to believe that Blanchard had a level-headed idea what a sensation this news release would cause.

14) It appears likely that West Point-educated Blanchard knew something that justified giving the public this "wild impression."

15) The odds that Blanchard, working with intelligence officer Marcel, would release a statement about a flying disk, when what they found was in fact Project Mogul material (a more elaborate weather balloon than normal with other pieces very clearly made on Earth), seem to be under 1 in 10,000.  Mogul was esoteric material, but Blanchard and Marcel were no more likely to conclude that it was alien technology than they would be to so conclude about Kevlar.

16)  A cluster (closer to 70 than 20) of reports have emerged from people associated with 1947 Roswell, pointing to one of these:  a) superhuman materials beyond not only 1947 technology but 2017 technology   b) bodies of "creatures" not known on Earth   c) behavior of closely involved people that does not make sense, when explained by official accounts.  Example:  rancher George Cisneros, Carey p. 66-7    I have bolded this item because it's the one that keeps me coming back to Roswell.  Officialdom's version of events can't account for the behavior of 1) Frank Joyce 2) Jesse Marcel 3) Pete Anaya 4) Frankie Dwyer 5) June Crain 6) Arthur Farnsworth and something like 42 others.  Either these people have to be dismissed as providing unreliable accounts, or there's something we don't know, deliberately hidden.  I find the latter the likely option.

17)  One subcluster of #16 is widely separated people later claiming to have been ordered to shut up about this subject and, in many cases, threatened with great harm if they spoke out. 

18)  Another subcluster of #16 is people who never said they were ordered to shut up, but whose behavior is best accounted for by supposing they were.  Example:  Doctor Jesse Marcel Jr's story of how his dad acted when he came home a couple of days after the press release.  Also both Mack Brazel's behavior, recanting his initial story.

19)  The classic case of #17 is Dee Proctor.  His whole life he utterly refused to discuss what he saw while out with Brazel the first morning.  Yet twice in private to reliable persons, once to his mother when he learned she had cancer, he admitted the nonEarth explanation was correct.  Dee was as deeply involved as anyone could have been; he rode with Brazel when they found the debris.

Slow Down, Roswell, You're Movin' Too Fast #14

The History Channel did a program on Roswell (2002?) that makes a couple of Pretttty Solid Points hinting it could be good to slow down on these alien conclusions.  Karl Pflock wrote a book called Roswell:  Inconvenient Facts.   He says: if the Air Force had found alien bodies or technology at Roswell, there would have been a response in the national security apparatus.  It might have been covered up at the time, but now we would be able to look over all the documents we have from that period and see signs of that.  There would have been an attempt to develop defenses.  There would have been the sense that we could indeed be vulnerable, and we damned well better do something about it.  There's no sign of that kind of large response in the system after 1947.
I'm not sure, but that just might be the single best anti-alien argument I've heard since I got genuinely curious about Roswell when I stumbled through there by accident on my way from Sedona, Az to Dallas, Tx in May, 2015.  Here are three rivals, other sound anti-alien points, and a counterpoint at the end.

1)  No documented surge of base activity.  Jim Wilson, an editor, reviewed daily personnel records at the Roswell base.  Walter Haug and a number of others report a great surge in activity after Brazel's report.  The debris cleanup itself is claimed to have taken many days, and the increased activity went on for some time after.  This is not reflected in the daily personnel logs of July, 1947.
Two months after I wrote this note, I read an interview with Tom Brookshier, a pro football player who grew up in Roswell and was a teenager at the time.  He said, I worked at my dad's filling station and lots of guys from the base stopped in.  "When the UFO incident happened in '47, the base was closed to outsiders for about a week as if a curtain had been dropped around it.  After it was lifted, the guys from the base became very distant" and didn't want to talk to me.
The Project Mogul explanation has simply No Way of accounting for a memory like that coming from an innocent local teenager.  1) The base hadn't even been told about Project Mogul.  Project Mogul would look like an odd variant of a weather balloon.  You wouldn't do a big drastic closure to outsiders for finding some new sort of Air Force equipment.  It would be overkill.  You almost certainly wouldn't call out the Commander on the 4th of July weekend.  2) Why did the soldiers clam up?  The only rationale making sense to me is there was Some Big Secret to keep.  Again, it's too big of a shoe for Project Mogul to fit.

2)  Think about reliability needed to build interstellar craft.  The common cars built in, say, 2010, seem to be about five times as reliable as those my parents drove when I was a kid.  Now multiply that sort of progress by 1000 and you might be able to get to Mars, which is the next world over.  Tell me somebody comes from Orion or the galactic central bulge or from the nearby satellite galaxy of the Greater Magellanic Cloud.  To do that you multiply the reliability of the technology by 1000 again.  Then that kind of vehicle crashes in a lightening storm in New Mexico?   Give me a break.

Any answer to "an interstellar ship WOULD NOT crash?  Two quick ones:  1- Maybe the ship came from a world without lightening.   Lightening is kind of fast and kind of powerful.  2-Are we, by this argument, positing a technology that cannot crash on a planetary surface?  Are our visitors presumed to be mortals?  Were the gods astronauts?

3)  I watch a few minutes of a pro-alien Roswell movie.  When the officer looking at the debris field says to his colleague, "No one is out hunting for this.  This isn't one of ours," my chest starts to tingle.  So I want to believe the big interesting story.  This urge to believe seems suspicious.  It feels like a built-in bias in favor of nonEarth explanations. 

Therefore maybe we need to quote Simon and Garfunkel's 59th Street Bridge Song, "I'm come to watch your flowers growin', feelin' groovy, slow down, you're movin' too fast, all is groovy."  And I thought the 59th St Bridge Song was by some one-hit wonder.  Quite the opposite.  I first saw Paul Simon in Woody Allen's film, Annie Hall.  Simon invites Annie to come work with him in California.  On the verge of losing his girlfriend to the Surfer State, and to Paul Simon of all people, Woody's character Alfie, says, "Why would you want to live in a state where the chief cultural advantage is that you can make a right turn on a red light?"  I've always just about fallen off of my chair from that line.  I'd say it was more true for Idaho, and that California's chief cultural advantage is that you can surf year round.

Now the counterpoint.  Jesse Marcel Jr is an MD.  His dad brought home some odd things that first night from the crash site.  He was gone for a day or two.  When he came back, the young son looked expectantly at his dad for something interesting to hear.  What else had he learned after piquing the boy's curiosity?  What does dad do?  Shrugs it off.  More.  "We're never going to talk about that again.  That's all I can say about it."

Let me try to recall when I was 10 and my Dad had something unusual that caught my attention.   What do you know when you're the dad of most conscientious ten-year-olds?  That parents are the source of many of the interesting things that come into the kids' lives.  My dad brings home some odd stuff from work and wakes us up in the night and says, "You kids have got to see this stuff."  First of all, he never did that once, so Dad Marcel must think he really has something different.  Then my Dad Paul, imagine, leaves for two days and comes back.  I've been waiting for this moment for 48 hours.  I turn and walk over to talk to him as he sits at the kitchen table.  "Hey, Dad, what was it?"  He's in a position to say something that's the highlight of my week.  That was easy when I was 6, and in a few years I won't care about almost anything he says.  So he would really like to give me some nice piece of info.  Paul turns slowly and looks me in the eye and says in his serious voice, "I was wrong, son.  It really wasn't anything to get worked up about.  In fact, I can't tell you anything more about it.  I can't talk about it."
"Why not?"
"That's the way things are at work sometimes, son, and I know it doesn't make sense to you, but it's all I can say."

What would make my Dad treat me that way?  Fear is the only explanation that comes to mind.  I have to conclude that Jesse Marcel Sr. was afraid of something, of talking, of saying any more about what he thought he knew, or he wouldn't have treated his children this way.  Doesn't it smell six ways to Sunday like, right there in the Marcel house in July, 1947, something was being covered up?  The odd, funny type of balloon used by Project Mogul just can't explain Marcel's response.

I've said before the problem with Roswell is that the official explanation is the sensible one, but its weakness is that it can't satisfy me on 27 or 127 fishy loose ends.  Major Marcel clamming up to his son is one more of those loose ends.  Does that prove an alien "Grey" died at Roswell?  No, but it hints at it.