The Field of Beans and the Limits of Perception
Posted by Andrew | Filed under Breakfast in the Ruins, Lost Geographies, The Destruction of History
Aaarrgghhh… who forgot to turn off the cell phone alarm for weekdays? On holiday this week, and no need to get out of bed at 6:00 a.m. on Korean Children’s Day… when will I learn???
Slouching into the big room in my new apartment – the one with the computer and the books and other shit all over the floor because I need to buy some new furniture (to replace all the mouldy stuff I left behind in Daegu) – as I checked the mails and messages from the previous night, up popped a link at the “Lunar Barbecue” group page (thank you to Pedro Ribeiro for that) to the following YT vid about Terence McKenna called “Aliens and Archetypes” (from the “Thinking Allowed” TV series, dated 1990)… but what follows is really only tangential to his topic and a brief statement of a thought or two, being the result merely of my reaction to one of his remarks therein.
It has to be admitted that Mr. McKenna always had something very interesting to say about so many things, and whilst I was watching this I caught his brief remarks about communication within and with nature, which made me think: how is it that we ceased being able to do so? Could it be that what we have laughingly called “education” for so long is actually the inculcation of prejudices which make such communication (or even the sensibility thereof) impossible, simply by denying the possibility of such things, and therefore dulling our possible perception of them?
There have been, over the last few years, and especially recently, a flurry of items about how plants communicate via both the air and the soil coming through from various sources; this seems to be an active area of research. It makes me wonder what people will end up eating in the future, as it slowly dawns on everyone that plants are demonstrably sentient, like animals. Some say that eating meat is murder (although some of us just call it “food”), so what does that make eating fruits (often the reproductive organs of plants) and vegetables (their flowers or other storage organs)?
Of course, we would then go on to put on our biologist’s hat (well, I would, at any rate) and ask: “Well, if raising meat in broiler houses and the like is considered bad because it turns animals into products in an unnatural environment and is inhumane, then what are we to make of (say) a broad field of wheat, or a rice padi?” – if battery farms are unethical, then what can we say about a field of beans?
For a long time, I have been thinking that each grain of wheat or rice, each bean in the pod, is a life which has the potential to grow; its nutritional value lies precisely in the fact that it is one of the plant’s reproductive structures, in which energy and nutrients have been invested for the future survival of the species, just the same as (for example) a hen’s egg. The difference, however, is that parthenogenesis in a hen’s egg is a relatively rare event (although it does happen sometimes) and hence is rarely encountered in an egg cup or frying pan because, of course, there is no requirement to fertilise the egg before it becomes useful; its nutrient value for the human consumer would be wasted if the egg started to develop into a chick before delivery [1]. In the case of plant seeds, these would not exist without fertilisation, so we have a situation in which – unlike tubers, roots or even hens’ eggs – it is actually necessary to engender new life in order to reap the nutritional benefits of the plants’ labours, a fact to which we turn an eternally and conveniently blind eye.
Perhaps the tragedy of human existence – in the correct and original meaning and intention of the Greek term tragoidea (“goat song”, of a great person brought low by fate) is that humanity has become thoroughly enmeshed in a lifestyle where it exists purely as a result of squandering both itself and the world which supports it; yet being conscious of the full truth of its existence would cause impossible levels of angst at the thought of eating anything, and so its senses have to be dulled in order to make that existence bearable. Thus, it slowly destroys everything, including itself. It is doubly tragic that this exists alongside a patently untruthful inculcation about the past of humanity, which is used to keep us in a psychotic state and which allows us to be controlled more easily.
However, there are times when we need to be reminded of these things, even if only in passing, as here with the much-missed Mr. McKenna, as well as, perhaps, a nod to Aristotle in being able to express our psychological maturity by considering topics which we might otherwise find unpalatable [2], and perhaps, also, to reflect upon what level of difficulty we might have in actually communicating with aliens when our minds have already been so prejudiced against it on our own world. We have at least been fortunate to have occasional bright lights like Terence McKenna to illuminate our darkness with flashes of insight.
Notes:
[1] Unless you like to eat a balut, of course: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balut_(food)
[2] “It is the mark of an educated mind to entertain a thought without accepting it.”: see https://i.pinimg.com/originals/48/f1/5f/48f15ff7949996f4e65454b4b129fa29.jpg
An End to Civilisation
Posted by Andrew | Filed under A Farewell to Authority, Breakfast in the Ruins, Commentary, General, The Destruction of History
One would like to think that one were a “civilised” person, in terms of its connotations of sensibility and behaviour, but the term becomes unacceptable under the simplest analysis. Which other term could be used more accurately?
This time, I want to broach a theme which I have been mulling over and digesting for a long time, and the use of which – on reflection – perfectly encapsulates the psychological prison from which we have been unwilling to free ourselves. Yet that act of liberation – when it arrives – needs to be a psychological one, and not a physical one; it is a transition from one state of perception to another, a change of viewpoint. Physical liberation cannot come before psychological liberation.
Recently, I have been watching the videos (and listening to the podcasts) of Mark Passio on YouTube. Mark’s focus is upon the occult nature of much of what surrounds us in everyday life, as well as pointing out the common misconception among “lay” people (meaning, in this particular case, people who are not themselves occult practitioners) that the term “occult” itself necessarily equates with “evil”. As he points out, there is no actual connotation of anything in this term beyond its original meaning, which is merely “hidden” or “obscured”, and that many things in daily life are “occulted”, for example (my input here) the results of scientific research, which are usually sequestered behind a paywall erected by publishers. However, Mark’s real focus is with actual practitioners of the dark arts, whom he distinguishes from beneficial practitioners by referring to them as “dark” and “light”. He goes into some depth examining the psychology and motivations of the “dark” practitioners, having been for some ten years, and by his own admission, one of the “dark” ones himself, although, he admits, at a relatively low level.
Part of Mark’s exposition is that the modern practitioners of these dark occult activities are the descendants of others whose blood-line goes back thousands of years, that their own focus is primarily psychology, and in particular psychological methods of controlling large numbers of people to do the practitioners’ bidding; it is thus that such practitioners can attain and maintain positions of relative power, and hence profit and have a better lifestyle for prolonged historical periods despite themselves being relatively few in number. However, the result seems to be that they themselves have become demonstrably psychotic.
You can see almost four hours of his lecture on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odw6q4fcORE
Likewise, when one reads the novels of Carlos Castañeda, his teacher, Don Juan Matus, who was supposed to be a modern-day nagual or Mexican shaman (sorcerer), asserts that the true controllers of our lives achieved their aims by simply inculcating their own psychotic mindset in the general populace. After that, of course, people became easy to control by simply putting the appropriate ideas into their heads and diverting their attention. Let me here quote (at length, for clarity) the appropriate passage from Castaneda’s “The Active Side of Infinity”:
“This is the appropriate time of day for doing what I am asking you to do,” he said. “It takes a moment to engage the necessary attention in you to do it. Don’t stop until you catch that fleeting black shadow.”
I did see some strange fleeting black shadow projected on the foliage of the trees. It was either one shadow going back and forth or various fleeting shadows moving from left to right or right to left or straight up in the air. They looked like fat black fish to me, enormous fish. It was as if gigantic swordfish were flying in the air. I was engrossed in the sight. Then, finally, it scared me. It became too dark to see the foliage, yet I could still see the fleeting black shadows.
“What is it, don Juan?” I asked. “I see fleeting black shadows all over the place.”
“Ah, that’s the universe at large,” he said, “incommensurable, nonlinear, outside the realm of syntax. The sorcerers of ancient Mexico were the first ones to see those fleeting shadows, so they followed them around. They saw them as you’re seeing them, and they saw them as energy that flows in the universe. And they did discover something transcendental.”
He stopped talking and looked at me. His pauses were perfectly placed. He always stopped talking when I was hanging by a thread.
“What did they discover, don Juan?” I asked.
“They discovered that we have a companion for life,” he said, as clearly as he could. “We have a predator that came from the depths of the cosmos and took over the rule of our lives. Human beings are its prisoners. The predator is our lord and master. It has rendered us docile, helpless. If we want to protest, it suppresses our protest. If we want to act independently, it demands that we don’t do so.”
It was very dark around us, and that seemed to curtail any expression on my part. If it had been daylight, I would have laughed my head off. In the dark, I felt quite inhibited.
“It’s pitch black around us,” don Juan said, “but if you look out of the corner of your eye, you will still see fleeting shadows jumping all around you.”
He was right. I could still see them. Their movement made me dizzy. Don Juan turned on the light, and that seemed to dissipate everything.
“You have arrived, by your effort alone, to what the shamans of ancient Mexico called the topic of topics,” don Juan said. “I have been beating around the bush all this time, insinuating to you that something is holding us prisoner. Indeed we are held prisoner! This was an energetic fact for the sorcerers of ancient Mexico.”
“Why has this predator taken over in the fashion that you’re describing, don Juan?” I asked. “There must be a logical explanation.”
“There is an explanation,” don Juan replied, “which is the simplest explanation in the world. They took over because we are food for them, and they squeeze us mercilessly because we are their sustenance. Just as we rear chickens in chicken coops, gallineros, the predators rear us in human coops, humaneros. Therefore, their food is always available to them.”
I felt that my head was shaking violently from side to side. I could not express my profound sense of unease and discontentment, but my body moved to bring it to the surface. I shook from head to toe without any volition on my part.
“No, no, no, no,” I heard myself saying. “This is absurd, don Juan. What you’re saying is something monstrous. It simply can’t be true, for sorcerers or for average men, or for anyone.”
“Why not?” don Juan asked calmly. “Why not? Because it infuriates you?”
“Yes, it infuriates me,” I retorted. “Those claims are monstrous!”
“Well,” he said, “you haven’t heard all the claims yet. Wait a bit longer and see how you feel. I’m going to subject you to a blitz. That is, I’m going to subject your mind to tremendous onslaughts, and you cannot get up and leave because you’re caught. Not because I’m holding you prisoner, but because something in you will prevent you from leaving, while another part of you is going to go truthfully berserk. So brace yourself!”
There was something in me which was, I felt, a glutton for punishment. He was right. I wouldn’t have left the house for the world. And yet I didn’t like one bit the inanities he was spouting.
“I want to appeal to your analytical mind,” don Juan said. “Think for a moment, and tell me how you would explain the contradiction between the intelligence of man the engineer and the stupidity of his systems of beliefs, or the stupidity of his contradictory behavior. Sorcerers believe that the predators have given us our systems of beliefs, our ideas of good and evil, our social mores. They are the ones who set up our hopes and expectations and dreams of success or failure. They have given us covetousness, greed, and cowardice. It is the predators who make us complacent, routinary, and egomaniacal.”
“But how can they do this, don Juan?” I asked, somehow angered further by what he was saying. “Do they whisper all that in our ears while we are asleep?”
“No, they don’t do it that way. That’s idiotic!” don Juan said, smiling. “They are infinitely more efficient and organized than that. In order to keep us obedient and meek and weak, the predators engaged themselves in a stupendous maneuver – stupendous, of course, from the point of view of a fighting strategist. A horrendous maneuver from the point of view of those who suffer it. They gave us their mind. Do you hear me? The predators give us their mind, which becomes our mind. The predators’ mind is baroque, contradictory, morose, filled with the fear of being discovered any minute now.
“I know that even though you have never suffered hunger,” he went on, “you have food anxiety, which is none other than the anxiety of the predator who fears that any moment now its maneuver is going to be uncovered and food is going to be denied. Through the mind, which, after all, is their mind, the predators inject into the lives of human beings whatever is convenient for them. And they ensure, in this manner, a degree of security to act as a buffer against their fear.”
“It’s not that I can’t accept all this at face value, don Juan,” I said. “I could, but there’s something so odious about it that it actually repels me. It forces me to take a contradictory stand. If it’s true that they eat us, how do they do it?”
Don Juan had a broad smile on his face. He was as pleased as punch. He explained that sorcerers see infant human beings as strange, luminous balls of energy, covered from the top to the bottom with a glowing coat, something like a plastic cover that is adjusted tightly over their cocoon of energy. He said that that glowing coat of awareness was what the predators consumed, and that when a human being reached adulthood, all that was left of that glowing coat of awareness was a narrow fringe that went from the ground to the top of the toes. That fringe permitted mankind to continue living, but only barely.
As if I had been in a dream, I heard don Juan Matus explaining that to his knowledge, man was the only species that had the glowing coat of awareness outside that luminous cocoon. Therefore, he became easy prey for an awareness of a different order, such as the heavy awareness of the predator.
He then made the most damaging statement he had made so far. He said that this narrow fringe of awareness was the epicenter of self-reflection, where man was irremediably caught. By playing on our self-reflection, which is the only point of awareness left to us, the predators create flares of awareness that they proceed to consume in a ruthless, predatory fashion. They give us inane problems that force those flares of awareness to rise, and in this manner they keep us alive in order for them to be fed with the energetic flare of our pseudoconcerns.
There must have been something to what don Juan was saying, which was so devastating to me that at that point I actually got sick to my stomach.
After a moment’s pause, long enough for me to recover, I asked don Juan: “But why is it that the sorcerers of ancient Mexico and all sorcerers today, although they see the predators, don’t do anything about it?”
“There’s nothing that you and I can do about it,” don Juan said in a grave, sad voice. “All we can do is discipline ourselves to the point where they will not touch us. How can you ask your fellow men to go through those rigors of discipline? They’ll laugh and make fun of you, and the more aggressive ones will beat the shit out of you. And not so much because they don’t believe it. Down in the depths of every human being, there’s an ancestral, visceral knowledge about the predators’ existence.”
“Diverted” is certainly how one would describe the modern city dweller, and at an observational level, the maintenance of distraction, obfuscation, misinformation and confusion is readily apparent in the media on a daily basis. To keep our minds diverted, we are fed an endless stream of these “pseudoconcerns”, to distract us from the real concerns created by the same people, for whom the world is simply a source of resources to be plundered and recreated into the objects of their desires, and for which the bulk of humanity is merely the slave labour through whose efforts the parasites’ collective dreams are realised. If you should doubt that these things are true, consider that when Don Juan discusses “… the epicenter of self-reflection, where man was irremediably caught…”, he is referring to the inculcated and ingrained narcissism of the individual who has been given the predator’s mindset. The public figures we see in the media, especially in “showbusiness”, are without doubt utterly narcissistic. Think about that. When they say that something is wrong and they think that something should be done about it, are you, as the observer, being manipulated by a narcissist?
But to be specifically on-topic, and to begin to see how easily their control might be exercised, let me begin by stating that a practical magician (occult practitioner) is acknowledged, broadly, to be a person who affects the behaviour of others by putting a suggestion into their minds, to the extent that they find it difficult not to see things in the way intended by the magician. In other words, by programming the listener’s or viewer’s perceptions before the event, an alternative outcome is prevented, or an event is factually different from the magician’s intention but the percipient still sees it as it was intended to be seen. It was for this reason that after the recent Doctor Strange film (starring Benedict Cumberbatch) came out, some online commentators marvelled (so to speak) that less familiar viewers did not realise that about half of what they had seen was actually possible in real life, simply because it relied upon the practitioner’s mastery of suggestion and perception. Engineer the perception of your target, and you too can work magic, or at least maintain an illusion.
This implies that much of what we might call “magic” is not, in fact, necessarily a physical result of a previous action, but rather an act of perception, the outcome of which was predetermined by the practitioner; the percipient has been pre-programmed by careful and selective verbiage and direction of attention to see a particular outcome. This means that it is possible for nothing visible to actually “happen” because the “result” is entirely in the percipient’s head. Much advertising in the media needs to be seen in this light, as both it and outright displays of propaganda are frequently varieties of public programming, in which the public are slowly conditioned, by sheer repetition if need be, to expect something to happen, and to react in a certain way when it invariably does. This is called predictive programming.
Remember: “A lie repeated a thousand times becomes the truth.”
With regard to magical practice, what startled me, some time ago, was how I myself had failed to comprehend what was on a printed page right in front of me, and which related directly to all of this. Reading a copy of a compiled book version of the early editions of “Man, Myth and Magic” (given to me as a present by my grandmother, of all people – what was she thinking of???), one page referred to the Dictionnaire Infernel of the French mage, Collin de Plancy, a book in which – among other magical things – the author had included copies of sketches which he had drawn of demons summoned by himself during previous sessions in the circle. In this particular entry, I read that although de Plancy had drawn/painted the alleged appearances of the demons named in his text, they were not “real” in a physical sense – they were, instead, impressions implanted within the minds of the percipient (in this case, a practising ritual magician or similar occultist), such that a non-occultist standing in the circle right next to him/her would probably not be able to see them; an illusion projected directly into the magician’s mind such that two occultists in the same room would probably see the same demon differently. I actually did not realise the meaning of all this until very recently.
The demon, in this way of seeing it, was pure illusion, and this explains precisely why one demon (or similar entity) would be able to offer infinite visual versions of itself to an infinite number of percipients. This is also like saying that the definition of a physical object would likewise be different between individuals. Maybe that is an important statement. Alternatively: the “demon” was a real entity but its appearance was not real, as it existed only in the sorcerer’s mind and, at the end of the session, could be dismissed. [3]
Now we come to my main point. We have this thing called “civilisation” which is constantly lauded as a state to be emulated and maintained, but it seems to me that this is shaky ground. Why? Well, we should perhaps consider where the term “civilisation” comes from. It comes from the latin civis, meaning “city”. The corresponding modern English verb civilise, therefore, means what? According to WordNet [1], it means:
1. educate, school, train, cultivate, civilize, civilise — (teach or refine to be discriminative in taste or judgment; “Cultivate your musical taste”; “Train your tastebuds”; “She is well schooled in poetry”);
2. civilize, civilise — (raise from a barbaric to a civilized state; “The wild child found wandering in the forest was gradually civilized”).
It is interesting that these descriptions refer to discrimination, training and schooling; no actual “definition” is given here. One would suggest, in fact, that the literal meaning of “civilise” is something like “citify”, meaning to condition people into a suitable mindset for living in a city. And we might ask ourselves why it should be considered necessary to do such a thing?
You see, in the mainstream paradigm’s interpretation of “history”, “civilisation” is supposed to be somehow undeniably superior to an allegedly “barbaric” state which existed beforehand. This is because there is some elitist intellectual arrogance according to which notionally “uncivilised” people are supposed to be “inferior”, when in fact they are more capable of surviving in their chosen environments, and do not surround themselves with the useless frippery which “civilised” man thinks is so wonderful (be warned, however, that historically wherever there has been a minority power “elite”, there have always been a majority of “slaves” to do their bidding…).
In traditional Western thinking, this was expressed in terms of the “uncivilised” life being “nasty, brutish and short”, but generally speaking, people who lived in such a state, even into modern times, represented very little threat to civilisation; if anything, experience has shown that the opposite is true – “civilisation” in the Western model has proven horrendously destructive towards those whom it considers “uncivilised”, whereas the supposedly primitive “savage” was a person more closely in tune with their environment, and therefore more self-sufficient (being better able to find their requisites within that environment) and materially independent. What has really happened is that, having set itself up as a paragon of its own paradigm of a civilised state, the Western mindset has used the “uncivilised” periphery as a threat with which it, in turn, threatens its own citizens with a dire warning of what state they might descend into if they do not give the body politic the authority and resources to defend itself (and therefore, by implication, the citizens over whom it exercises its dubious “authority”). The nominally “uncivilised”, therefore, have usually ended up as the victims of the better-armed “civilised” nations. You couldn’t possibly observe a clearer and starker example of iniquity. Yet we call it civilisation.
Let us also ask ourselves what happens when the body politic’s identified “enemy” already happens to be, er, civilised. What normally happens is that they then try to dehumanise their notional “opponent”, the better to justify irrational (but highly profitable) warfare against them, which also has the helpful (from the elite’s point of view) characteristic of reducing the population of underlings… Our problem here is that the West has been self-regarding and narcissistic, and when their opponents are of a similar level of “civilisation”, ad hominem attacks (which is really what their irrational rationalisation of their intended or practical assaults are) is all that they have left. And as they are often unable to prove directly that what they assert is true, they are not above falsifying evidence and controlling its presentation at home to justify their destructive activity abroad.
We should also be asking ourselves what this actually means for the individual “citizen”, as all of this cannot possibly have happened without some obvious reason. To put it into an appropriate context, let us return to our supposed “primitive” and “uncivilised” person. Remember that we suggested that such a person must be more in tune with, and therefore self-sufficient in, their native environment, whether it be the forests of Africa or South America, the jungles of Borneo or even the coastline of sub-Arctic North America. People who lived in these places traditionally were able to feed and clothe themselves and do a range of other life-related activities without huge inputs of technology, but the essential point I would suggest here is that the logistic chain through which raw materials came to them was extremely short; they did not need expensive stores to offer them processed pseudo-foods, for example, because they knew from experience where to find what they needed to make things themselves. Likewise, they would have a way to clothe and house themselves and did not have to buy the raw materials for building their dwellings, because they could just walk out and get it for themselves, for free.
There is no mystery about this; what we have termed “civilisation” is simply the entrainment and coercion of people to travel from the countryside, where they were more or less self-sufficient, to the cities where they were dependent upon supply chains which were then used to siphon off the wealth that they were generating with their labour. The controllers (or their gofers) then also moved in (and, according to the experience of Mark Passio, are still moving in) to buy up the vacated land cheaply. The majority of the population, by this methodology, have slowly been deprived of their original resources and wealth. And with the added finance resulting from taxing their own “citizens”, the controllers then moved on to do the same to the inhabitants of other lands to increase their profits – empire – and the footsoldiers who achieved this were the same people from their own lands who had already been asset-stripped by their dubious leaders.
So we now see that what we describe as “civilisation” cannot be anything but a millennia-long confidence trick perpetrated upon the gullible by Passio’s “ancient psychologists”. The very people who were abused and coerced into becoming the hands of the power elites were the ones who created all of this, while the elites claimed all of the kudos and profit. Those who actually broke their backs putting it all together were the ones who were intentionally forgotten by the official histories because they were factual (or later, economic) slaves; a living could not be earned except by working for the elites in one form or another.
The greatest mistake that a modern “citizen” could possibly make, when repulsed by seeing the sequelae of this process, is to assume that there is a ready political cure for it. There is not. The rise of the Left since the time of the French Revolution has not led to any kind of Utopia – quite the contrary, since those people simply represent another narcissistic power clique who use the masses to whom they pay lip-service to achieve their own ends, and then show their utter contempt for them by abandoning them. Politicians are not there to serve the interests of the “citizens” – their function is to control the “citizenry” on behalf of their masters who exploit them. The obvious (and rather simplistic) dichotomy of “political thinking” is merely a dialectic imposed to split mass opinion and set people against each other. At best, any “revolution” has been merely a mask behind which authorities hide, and in which those who are ruled willingly enter into an increased servitude. The people you vote for represent only the interests of your rulers – everything they say is lies. The “facts” presented in the media are “facts” which are convenient to their narrative; the “education” you received suited their requirements in potential workers at the time, as well as constituting “propaganda” in their own right (because they were according to the dominant paradigm, and necessarily restricted in scope according to circumstances). Always think it possible that your “thoughts” are not original and your own, but were put there by someone else.
The first thing that anyone confronted by all of this needs to do is to learn to distance themselves from their emotions, since (as Passio explains) it is mainly by emotional dependencies and fear of a false unknown that the majority are usually manipulated. The second thing to be aware of is that in order to do this, they have to make people believe that there is some kind of a threat, be it a warlike enemy, or something in the environment, and then push this relentlessly, like a drug, until the public emotion has reached such a fever pitch that they are begging the leaders to provide a solution. In the modern context, the third thing to realise is that the controllers usually have some kinds of “provocateurs” to provide instantaneous stimulation to sweep people along – to lose themselves in their emotions and thus be more willing to react in the heat of the moment. It is for this final reason that we should always treat apparent “rebels” with suspicion, lest by losing ourselves while under their influence, we should simply be achieving the aims of the “leaders”. The very fact that any such person may be (a) in the media and (b) stridently criticising the status quo is a sure sign that they are provocateurs, and not genuine at all.
If this methodology seems somewhat far-fetched, it may be that you are suffering from a condition which came to be known as “Stockholm Syndrome” [2]. In other words, because of the apparent beneficence of your captors, it is difficult for you not to be sympathetic towards them when confronted with an alternative view both of them personally and their behaviour. But they are your captors: you live in a goldfish bowl, and they throw in some food for you every now and then. You are afraid of venturing beyond the goldfish bowl, because despite your restricted environment, it actually feels safe; and what you see through its walls is distorted and disturbing to your sight. You do not wish to remove the distortion for fear of the truth being even more disturbing; and so you stay in your goldfish bowl, accepting your situation; therfore, as we suggested at the beginning, your physical liberation is precluded by your refusal to first undergo a psychological liberation – to see that there is a different world out there and that you do not need your dependency. But the price of losing that dependency is the responsibility of making decisions in your own interest, something which the afflicted seem unwilling to do because they are so inured to being led by someone else, and to being in thrall of authority. It is only when we realise that the “authority” is flawed and factually toxic and destructive that people will realise that self-determination is not so bad, after all; better to die free and self-determining than as a helpless, mind-controlled slave. This is also what our aforementioned “neoteny” is all in aid of: the inculcated and conditioned maintenance of an immature psychology in the individual, the better to prevent them from making more informed decisions which might be detrimental to the Body Politic.
Again, quoting Carlos Castaneda at length, Don Juan provided an insight into what was required from the individual:
Don Juan kept on pushing his barb deeper and deeper into me. “The sorcerers of ancient Mexico,” he said, “saw; the predator. They called it the flyer because it leaps through the air. It is not a pretty sight. It is a big shadow, impenetrably dark, a black shadow that jumps through the air. Then, it lands flat on the ground. The sorcerers of ancient Mexico were quite ill at ease with the idea of when it made its appearance on Earth. They reasoned that man must have been a complete being at one point, with stupendous insights, feats of awareness that are mythological legends nowadays. And then everything seems to disappear, and we have now a sedated man.”
I wanted to get angry, call him a paranoiac, but somehow the righteousness that was usually just underneath the surface of my being wasn’t there. Something in me was beyond the point of asking myself my favorite question: What if all that he said is true? At the moment he was talking to me that night, in my heart of hearts, I felt that all of what he was saying was true, but at the same time, and with equal force, all that he was saying was absurdity itself.
“What are you saying, don Juan?” I asked feebly. My throat was constricted. I could hardly breathe.
“What I’m saying is that what we have against us is not a simple predator. It is very smart, and organized. It follows a methodical system to render us useless. Man, the magical being that he is destined to be, is no longer magical. He’s an average piece of meat. There are no more dreams for man but the dreams of an animal who is being raised to become a piece of meat: trite, conventional, imbecilic.”
Don Juan’s words were eliciting a strange, bodily reaction in me comparable to the sensation of nausea. It was as if I were going to get sick to my stomach again. But the nausea was coming from the bottom of my being, from the marrow of my bones. I convulsed involuntarily. Don Juan shook me by the shoulders forcefully. I felt my neck wobbling back and forth under the impact of his grip. The maneuver calmed me down at once. I felt more in control.
“This predator,” don Juan said, “which, of course, is an inorganic being, is not altogether invisible to us, as other inorganic beings are. I think as children we do see it and decide it’s so horrific that we don’t want to think about it. Children, of course, could insist on focusing on the sight, but everybody else around them dissuades them from doing so.
“The only alternative left for mankind,” he continued, “is discipline. Discipline is the only deterrent. But by discipline I don’t mean harsh routines. I don’t mean waking up every morning at five- thirty and throwing cold water on yourself until you’re blue. Sorcerers understand discipline as the capacity to face with serenity odds that are not included in our expectations. For them, discipline is an art: the art of facing infinity without flinching, not because they are strong and tough but because they are filled with awe.”
“In what way would the sorcerers’ discipline be a deterrent?” I asked.
“Sorcerers say that discipline makes the glowing coat of awareness unpalatable to the flyer,” don Juan said, scrutinizing my face as if to discover any signs of disbelief. “The result is that the predators become bewildered. An inedible glowing coat of awareness is not part of their cognition, I suppose. After being bewildered, they don’t have any recourse other than refraining from continuing their nefarious task.
“If the predators don’t eat our glowing coat of awareness for a while,” he went on, “it’ll keep on growing. Simplifying this matter to the extreme, I can say that sorcerers, by means of their discipline, push the predators away long enough to allow their glowing coat of awareness to grow beyond the level of the toes. Once it goes beyond the level of the toes, it grows back to its natural size.
“The sorcerers of ancient Mexico used to say that the glowing coat of awareness is like a tree. If it is not pruned, it grows to its natural size and volume. As awareness reaches levels higher than the toes, tremendous maneuvers of perception become a matter of course.
“The grand trick of those sorcerers of ancient times,” don Juan continued, “was to burden the flyers’ mind with discipline. They found out that if they taxed the flyers’ mind with inner silence, the foreign installation would flee, giving to any one of the practitioners involved in this maneuver the total certainty of the mind’s foreign origin. The foreign installation comes back, I assure you, but not as strong, and a process begins in which the fleeing of the ‘flyers’ mind becomes routine, until one day it flees permanently. A sad day indeed! That’s the day when you have to rely on your own devices, which are nearly zero. There’s no one to tell you what to do. There’s no mind of foreign origin to dictate the imbecilities you’re accustomed to.
“My teacher, the nagual Julian, used to warn all his disciples,” don Juan continued, “that this was the toughest day in a sorcerer’s life, for the real mind that belongs to us, the sum total of our experience, after a lifetime of domination has been rendered shy, insecure, and shifty. Personally, I would say that the real battle of sorcerers begins at that moment. The rest is merely preparation.”
If an individual is repulsed by the sight of what their controllers have created, the “discipline” spoken of here by Don Juan is the maintenance of the sensibility which allows us to see it, to keep our eyes focused and trained upon it, and to avoid the recidivistic habit which would otherwise cause us to forever revert to the former controlled state, because the inculcated desire to delegate important decisions to “authority figures” empowered by ourselves leads, in the end, only to destruction. [4] The real world that we want to see will never come to fruition until we insist upon self-determination and self-ownership, and exercise the self-discipline necessary to do both successfully.
These have been the concepts which have been foremost in mind since my cancer operation earlier this year. I was frightened at the idea of having a fatal medical condition, but more frightened at the prospect of death, so I voluntarily surrendered to a procedure in the first major surgery of my life, and the result was that said life has been prolonged; nobody knows for how much longer, but we are all mortal and can only prolong our lives by making the correct decisions. At the same time, however, the realisation that nobody gets out alive has turned out to be motivating: this is MY life, I make all the decisions and I accept responsibility for those decisions. I have always disliked the ways in which some people have tried to involve themselves in my life and influence my decisions, and now I have a zero-tolerance attitude towards such interference. If people don’t like it, tough. I will make no apologies for my self-assertion. And what has emerged from this is greater self-discipline (somewhat more than previously, at any rate) and overall determination about the things I want to do and how I want to spend my life.
Bottom line: this is my personal existence. It does not belong to any government or to anyone else, but to me alone. I will determine for myself what I will eat and drink, what thoughts I will keep in my head, how I support myself and my own ultimate fate. I will not delegate these to anyone else and I will maintain the discipline until the time comes to submit to mortality. Which, I hope, is a long way yet to come… and if that means being “uncivilised”, then so be it. If history has any lessons to learn, it is that in the end, all “civilisations” have proven to be as mortal as any of their citizens.
[1] https://wordnet.princeton.edu
[2] https://www.history.com/news/stockholm-syndrome
[3] See “The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abra-Melin the Mage” (translated by Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers) for how an ancient practitioner might have done this. A version is available online at http://www.hermetism.info/pdf/Grimoire/The%20Sacred%20Magic%20of%20Abramelin%20the%20Mage.pdf.
[4] See: https://www.activistpost.com/2018/04/how-the-globalism-con-game-leads-to-a-new-world-order.html for some more enlightenment, so to speak, on this topic.
Entr’acte II
Posted by Andrew | Filed under A Farewell to Authority, Breakfast in the Ruins, Cancer Diary, Commentary, General, Living in Korea, The Destruction of History
As things have been rather quiet with Yours Truly of late, a brief blog to bring everyone up to speed…
As a freezing cold winter slouches kicking and screaming into spring, and factually some of us are not getting any younger, we are also waiting – still – to sign our new contract and move on. How so? Well, I have (so to speak) “been here before” – caught up in the time-consuming activity of background checking for the new position, which is associated with the military. Again. And this time I think it is worth the prolonged agony, based upon what is a quite extensive experience of different employers.
See, in recent years, I’ve been through an alarming number of institutions, and the original motivation for chasing them for jobs was that I always thought they were professional entities, but the experience I have had with them (as a vulnerable E-2 visa holder) has been stressful; no wonder my hair has dropped out! And this whole thing has been very… disillusioning, as if the depth of diabolical despondency I had sunk into before I even left the UK was not enough. It has become very apparent to me that (in this particular instance) I was severely misguided in my assumption of “professionalism” in these companies, and so, now that the opportunity has arrived, I have had to reassess my opinions and ask what kind of employer is most suitable, and the answer is simple: the ones who will, for reasons relating primarily to their relationship with the Korean government, always honour their contracts.
Now, don’t get me wrong: the situation remains one in which I am surprised to discover that even at the tender age of 55 (in other words, I will be 56 this year), there are still institutions which will throw new opportunities at me: even the fact that I have been treated for (and technically am still “recovering from”) cancer has – it seems – not dented their enthusiasm. And this time, the essential “difference” is that my students will be exclusively high schoolers, which is something of a departure from my norm. However, the greatest surprise is the apparent eagerness, on the new employer’s part, to get me in there no matter what; so I temper my natural anxiety at being perilously close to the end of a visa with an element of patience and expectation – in anticipation of a positive and, one would hope, a mutually beneficial relationship to come. And I hope it lasts for a suitably substantial length of time. I’m talking years, dude!
It’s not clear yet how this will pan out because of the fiendish length of time I am having to hang on, right now, waiting for the (already apparently positive) result of the new employer’s two-stage security clearance checks before actually putting pen to contract, as my current visa is slowly edging towards expiry; also, surprisingly, the lack of actual details of the post itself, as the “interview” turned out to be something of a damp squib (apparently I was expected to do some kind of demo, but the recruiter didn’t pass that on to me, among other things, quel surprise). But, previously, I have worked for the Royal Air Force back in the UK and have done instructing for another military employer here in Korea, the KDLI in Icheon, Gyeonggi-do, so it’s not like there will be a huge surprise, in terms of practice and procedure (and security implications, of course). Right now, it’s just a case of being patient and getting in there ASAP.
But an interesting theme seems to be emerging while I am waiting… it’s been a long, long time since I had the dubious pleasure of a TV in my apartment, and truth to tell, when you consider that a lot of the time, I only want to watch older stuff (with exceptions such as trying out the latest Star Trek and X Files), and the amount available for free, on-line and on demand, from the likes of YouTube, DailyMotion and – right now – 123MoviesHub.ag [3], means that a TV is basically unnecessary; everything is digital and available for free through my Internet cable. This doesn’t mean that TV is actually redundant (UFC, anyone???), but the dominance that it had over my mind when I was younger is shattered forever. I made a choice, and the result is that my mind is much freer. I need hardly point out that as this is Korea, much of what I might have to subscribe to here would also be rather irrelevant in cultural and linguistic terms.
All of which means that I have become progressively more open to information and opinions which formerly I would have considered ridiculous, unjustified and downright way out, which subsequent events have demonstrated to my satisfaction are possibly more deserving of consideration and merit than social (and media) conditioning would previously allow me to countenance. And yet, at the same time, I do think that since I was a teenager, I have been on a path away from notional orthodoxy, be it in terms of historical truth or scientific honesty, for example, in search of a kind of verisimilitude which cannot be tolerated by a control system the machinations of which depend upon the demonstrable covert destruction of important historical materials, the perversion of historical events and the erection of whole paradigms which work only as a result of indoctrination and saturated media propaganda (Bill Nye, anyone? Neil DeGrasse Tyson??? Who will the next buffoon be?) which seems to be resulting, especially in the USA, in a new caste of younger people who are emotionally unstable when their knowledge or opinions are questioned. This latter is the very opposite of learning and wisdom, and it is very revealing that, being unable to mount a rational and complicated argument against even just a person with a different opinion, the response tends to be a kind of emotional violence akin to that of a two-year-old. A recent example from Sputnik:
Professor Says Men and Women are Different
At a personal level, I am repulsed by this kind of thing, and it has been stimulating me to look more towards traditional philosophers; it does seem to me that inculcated infantilism is not a suitable response to the dangers which are arising in modern societies – and if you look at places like the Ukraine right now, it’s not “new” dangers that are arising: instead, it’s the return of the “old” dangers, rooted in the previous centuries but especially the events and attitudes of the mid-twentieth century. There is a word for this, and that word is recidivism – meaning a return to a former, inferior and usually criminal or otherwise socially unacceptable mode of behaviour [1]. Experience shows us that it is usually not a good idea to try to return to the environment of our past, primarily because we have changed – the increase in our knowledge and experience, not to mention the resulting changes in our personal sensibilities which also change the limits of what we will now tolerate, is what really makes a return to a past situation impossible. It is for this reason that we will often hear that the transition from an old paradigm to a new one is referred to as “being like dying”, as we shed the old attachments, possibly with great psychological difficulty, in order to accommodate the new – which seems somehow reminiscent of the comment by Max Planck: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” [4] – except here, of course, it is the concept which dies rather than the adherent.
As an example of the type of new input that I have been accepting, take a look at “Redesigning Reality”, a relatively new vodcast put out regularly by Dylan Charles of “Waking Times” [2] fame, assisted by his friend, Jeff Anthony, whose response to his own bodily injuries has been very philosophical and mature and has impressed me greatly:
http://redesigningreality.com
and you can see them regularly on YouTube:
plus, perhaps, honourable mentions for the likes of Vin Armani and his show… but alas, I do not tune in to Vin as often as I should.
However, we have to face all of these (and other) potential inputs with a severe caveat: none of them is one hundred per cent. reliable.
One would think that this was the prime result of enlightened exposure to conventional media – the realisation that there is a limit to how much credence we can extend to them. So, for example, recently Vin had David Icke as a guest on his show:
David represents an interesting example of information and opinion input, largely because of his long-time claim regarding the manipulation of humanity by unseen reptilian beings, for which he has frequently been lambasted by the mainstream media. But here’s the interesting point: take this away (or ignore it temporarily) and focus on the rest of his message, and what do you discover? It all connects well, and makes a disconcerting amount of sense, as well, perhaps, as being a lot more humane than the conventional narratives. Notice here how well it seems to interdigitate with Vin’s personal take on the situation. Subtract the one part of David’s narrative which is difficult to prove, and the result is a coherent picture; there is nothing which David expresses which should attract disrespect from the listener.
This is teaching us something: no source of information is absolutely reliable and foolproof, so approaching verisimilitude means having the bullshit detector on and weaving our way through a constant morass of misinformation and disinformation to uncover reality (note that I do not say “the truth” here). I would not accuse David of disseminating such materials – rather, the interesting point is that when his most contentious (and difficult-to-prove) topic is placed to one side, the rest makes striking sense. We should do this until it can either be definitively proven or disproven.
The implication here is that there are truthful elements within all narratives, but according to the reliability, affiliations and provenance of the originators of those narratives, each needs to be assessed on his/her/its own merits and compared with other narratives to arrive at a more realistic assessment of what we are seeing and hearing. To what extent are any of these truthful? How do they corroborate or deny each others’ veracity? Sometimes we need to return to these fundamental points, especially when we realise the extent to which such institutions as schools and universities are really just indoctrination houses for a particular paradigm. This point should be foremost in our minds at all times; we cannot judge the truthfulness or falsehood of what confronts us otherwise. When we hear the sayings of others, when we watch a documentary or read a book or a newspaper article (online or offline), what we are confronted with is either an opinion (which may or may not be reliable or truthful, depending upon previous inputs of information to the speaker) or a concoction of facts and non-facts intended to bolster support for a particular agenda – which I once saw in an old cartoon expressed as (and here I paraphrase): “a subtle blend of truth, half-truth and anything but the truth.”
To put it another way: On the spectrum from zero to one hundred per cent. “truthfulness”, where would you routinely place what you hear in the news? This is always a simple and convenient way of measuring things, and I often use this kind of scale for other purposes with my students:
On this scale, I would put David Icke at about 85%.
The final element here relates to my recent brush with death in the form of colorectal cancer, something I had not expected, but having said that, something for which I was mightily glad to find an accommodating surgeon; and the fact that post-operative recovery seems to have been so rapid (due to the experimental device used) cannot allow me to ignore the implications for the future. But one side-effect I have discovered, at the psychological level, is a loss of patience. By this I mean to suggest that the sudden unexpected encounter with mortality, having made me realise that my days are ultimately numbered, has stripped away my usual forbearance with certain social behaviours, and the constant attempt by certain sources to indoctrinate me into the obviously false paradigm is one of these; another is the visible recidivism in both myself and others, which will result in stagnation if allowed to proceed unchecked; essentially, I have lost my tolerance for distractions, and feel as if I want to apply Occam’s Razor to everything, the better to avoid constantly wasting precious time.
So from my current perspective, the arrival of my new employer has to be seen in terms of how it will enable me to develop and progress, as it is not like previous positions – what promise does it hold in its own right, and what might it eventually lead to, bearing in mind that I have never subscribed to (what seems to me to be) a rather antiquated view of “retirement” – excuse me? If I arrive at an age at which employers no longer wish to take me on, does my life suddenly end? Does my brain suddenly stop functioning? Of course not – this is really nineteenth-century thinking, a leftover from a time when employees of such institutions as the British railways could have the luxury of working for a single, reliable employer for their whole lives and then stop working. But my mind is too active for that. So we now arrive at a time of transition.
Last night (a Saturday night spent at home – again – because of the post-operative strictures imposed by the surgeon) I was looking at the philosophy of Epicurus, noting how it seems to fit quite well with my own outlook on pleasure and pain and (believe it or not) the avoidance of unnecessary acquisition of material satisfactions, and today, whilst thinking about this, noting afresh (and not without some surprise) how the basics of life could have changed so little since the man himself was alive. It is in this frame of mind that I will be facing the future – avoiding unnecessary discomfort (I would not use the word “suffering”, as this is illogical) by choosing carefully the things I wish to have in my life, and bearing in mind that what the likes of advertisers and other contemptible mind-controllers want me to waste my time on are not necessary for the essential core of my lifestyle. I am not someone’s convenient target market, I am a rational human being and will resist the tide of greed and idiocy in search of a reliable picture of reality.
So I come closer to the time of signing and remain here for a short while longer, throwing out trash and planning the transition, but it’s probably a good idea to remember that the avoidance of recidivism usually involves throwing out some of your own junk. That, I think, is a good point to end here: letting go of my junk and opening my mind to new vistas of knowledge and thought. Epicurus, at least, got that part right.
References:
[1] See also the definition given at http://www.dictionary.com/browse/recidivism?s=t.
[2] See: http://www.wakingtimes.com
[3] See, for example: https://123movieshub.ag/series/star-trek-discovery/
[4] See: https://www.brainyquote.com/search_results?q=max+planck
The War that No-one Wanted (Continued)
Posted by Andrew | Filed under A Farewell to Authority, Breakfast in the Ruins, Commentary, General, Living in Korea, The Destruction of History, Uncategorized
And what should be doing the rounds lately, but:
The War that No-one Wanted
Posted by Andrew | Filed under A Farewell to Authority, Breakfast in the Ruins, Commentary, General, Living in Korea, The Destruction of History
It’s probably because I don’t have a TV any more (and I would probably only watch UFC etc. all the time if I did), but if the Norks lobbing the occasional dud missile into the sea constitutes “provocation”, might I respectfully suggest that the people saying this are in need of “medication”?
Because you’d have to be living in a media-shill-controlled little bubble to think that the Norks are going anywhere fast. The parties with an interest in all of this are clear to see and the Americans in particular should have been sitting around a table with the Norks, Chinese and Russians, at least, to find a solution.
War on the peninsula is not inevitable but is being stoked by those who profit from it, for whom any person who is not in their diabolical little circle (ordinary people in Korea, North and South, plus the remainder of humanity) is expendable trash, that’s exactly how they see us.
And if anyone starts to raise the dubious spectre of “Democracy versus Totalitarianism” or similar waffle to justify a conflict, let’s remember that there used to be regular meetings between the concerned parties (“democratic” and otherwise), and an agreement was reached to help the Norks with their power requirements, which the Americans were proposing, but, ah… the disadvantage of “Democracy”, in this case, is that when the citizenry are swayed to change their administration, policy also changes, and that is why we are talking about this today, otherwise the “problems” with NK would have been solved around fifteen years ago and everything would have been much more tranquil.
But hey, there’s no profit in peace… is there?
Pentagon should move US military families from S. Korea ahead of possible war – Sen. Graham
Breakfast in the Ruins II
Posted by Andrew | Filed under Breakfast in the Ruins, Environment, Lost Geographies
Absolutely. I have nothing to add to this.
The (Alleged) Death of Dialogue
Posted by Andrew | Filed under A Farewell to Authority, Breakfast in the Ruins, Commentary, Gripes
What follows is an edited and extended rant in response to an online friend’s link to an article in The Federalist. [1]
As a remote but entertained observer of politics both in the USA and Europe (and therefore, by extension, in my homeland, the UK), I am sometimes – nay often – left gobsmacked by the execrably low level of public discourse. The USA is a place where ‘free speech’ is allegedly enshrined in their Constitution, which is all fine and dandy, but very often nowadays you will notice two things about it: that it is routinely abused, on the one hand to cause gratuitous offence, and on the other in a narcissistic manner, as if the very fact that one could speak freely means that what you say needs no prior critical faculty in the grey matter (read: bullshit filter), yet in the end, peoples’ intolerance will be the death of it.
When it comes to the right of free speech – something I would never wish to deny to anyone – it does seem to me these days that its abuse in the US stems from the notion that ‘freedom of speech’ equals the right to say literally anything, which common sense clearly suggests it does not. In particular, the tendency of people in positions of financial or political power (I shall leave religion to one side for the purposes of this diatribe) to spout out anything that they think their audience wants to hear (with the aim of gleaning more votes) has been demonstrated in abundance during the 2016 US Presidential campaign, more particularly, one thinks, by the losing party, meaning that onlookers have been alternately buffeted between hysterical laughter and mindless horror for the duration. We won’t continue to trouble ourselves with the fates of the sore losers, except, perhaps, to note with a little more amusement that among the so-called ‘snowflake’ population – young millennials who protested so vigorously against the possibility that The Donald, who seems to originate from outside the rarified atmosphere of normal political circles, might actually win and allegedly had to retire to ‘process’ the ultimate (negative, from their point of view) outcome – were often demonstrable hypocrites who did not even bother to actually vote (the startling figure of 48% non-voters among that group of electors has been bandied about). [2]
‘Free speech’ means that one should be allowed to express one’s opinion without fear of persecution. It does not mean freedom from criticism (which is a different barrel of sardines entirely), or freedom to libel or slander others. Yet this seems increasingly to be what many people desire – the enshrined right to vilify, demean and otherwise generally insult people without fear of legal or physical retribution. To this we might add the increasing general intolerance of many to anything but their own opinion; however, this only serves to remind us of my previous remarks in these pages because what we are seeing is the expression of narcissism; they don’t like to be reminded that their echo chamber is not private.
I have personally been shocked (but on reflection, not necessarily surprised) at the kind of malicious talk of some in the anti-Trump camp, who have thought that their candidate was ‘the One’, when in fact she (yes, I’m talking about Hillary, not Bernie or any of the others) was clearly ill, received more than twice as much in donations as her main opponent and still lost, flip-flopped between all kinds of stated positions and, being part of the Rarified Few, patently thought that the election was hers, like some kind of entitlement. This was a person who would have taken the US and everywhere else (and their dog) to World War III, which was clearly what some of her major financial donors wanted. As for The D., I would say that we should sit back and see what he is able to do. At the time of writing, he still hasn’t assumed his elected office and one would at least like to be charitable enough to suggest that he surely couldn’t be as bad as some of his predecessors…
What brought me to the keyboard today was an article linked on Facebook from The Federalist, which appears to be an American on-line publication with a more right-of-centre slant than one tends to encounter on a routine basis. This is called The Death of Expertise and was written by Professor Tom Nichols of the U.S. Naval War College (which sounds kind of ominous)[1]. I read his article and while I would agree with him broadly as to his main points, I have a fundamental disagreement with him when it comes to the desirability of ‘experts’. Partly, this is a humorous hangover from previous participation in the UK business environment, where we often say that ‘X’ is an unknown quantity, and a ‘spurt’ is a drip under pressure, but also partly that people are often described as ‘experts’ without any guarantee that their alleged ‘expertise’ will lead inevitably to favourable results or situations.
But I would like to assert my view that a person like myself with a background in practical science is hardly the kind who could be branded (as I think this author is trying to do) as a ‘non-expert’ (although in commenting on this, I have to point out that I am not an American citizen myself, and have no desire to be, the way things there seem to be going). One of the reasons I gave up on science is that much of it is falsified and cannot be supported by the data as they stand (or to put it another way, current paradigms fail to account for all the anomalies), and the ‘healthy option’ of having a range of competing hypotheses which could replace the current paradigm is barely ever mentioned because of the emotional, financial and career-related attachments that practitioners enjoy, and do not want to lose. Someone like myself will always be critical of authors like this because when they write, they are really trying to justify themselves and the system which supports them. To take a parallel from science when reading an article like this, one has to remember that waaayyyy back in the year that I was born (cough, cough), Thomas S. Kuhn was already lamenting, in his landmark tome “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”, the fact that ‘normal science’ had given way to ‘verification’ of the paradigm rather than trying to challenge it; likewise, in his own book “Against Method”, Paul K. Feyerabend asserted (against a wall of criticism) that ‘normal science’ involved an anarchistic process in which the progress of a scientist’s career – if successful – involved an awful lot of schmoozing and ass-licking. This is essentially what we are seeing here, in the political context.
The author is talking here about the larger political arena, and while he is right to lambaste those who criticise the practitioners in this field on the basis of their personal delusions and acquired (inculcated) opinions, he unfortunately shows where he is coming from when he starts name-dropping with some of the 20th century’s greatest unhung criminals – the likes of Kissinger and Brzezinski. What he is really saying is that when you criticise ‘experts’, you are criticising the ‘status quo’. This is, in itself, wilful obfuscation: we would all acknowledge that (a) a brain surgeon is a virtually unchallengeable ‘expert’ in his field and (b) virtually any commentator (other than another ‘expert’ brain surgeon) would be unable to contradict said brain surgeon’s opinion as to methodology with any reasonably sophisticated or even meaningful argument. However, the brain surgeon operates in an area where peer review (and managerial and other feedback) works to prevent disasters as far as possible; colleagues in the field would be able not just to criticise his practice, but to make positive suggestions. One cannot say this regarding (for example) broad areas of science, where very often an erroneous paradigm is maintained at all costs, and even the direct observation of phenomena (and the data resulting from research) is deliberately obscured so that questioning the data and their interpretation is made extremely difficult. And the more difficult observation becomes, the more outlandish the claims; I have made my opinions clear about this in a range of blogs, but not before undertaking a lot of reading and attempting to understand the nature of the criticisms as well as the phenomena being observed.
To comprehend the nature of my criticism here and my continued reference to the practice of science when the author’s original theme was political, consider the following: the practice of engaging militarily inferior ‘enemies’ at great distance from the homeland mirrors the scientists’ practice of constantly attempting to place phenomena in sufficient isolation, be it in space or time, that casual observation is in fact rendered impossible. Examples from cosmology include the so-called ‘Big Bang’ and ‘Black Holes’, not to mention ‘Dark Matter’ and ‘Dark Energy’. We are still living in an age where the power of stars and even the heating of planetary interiors is thought to be due to radioactive decay even though more logical hypotheses such as EU now seem more relevant.
In both cases, when non-practitioners desire to see things for themselves, chances are that practitioners will defend their contemptible little patch up to and including litigation, enactment of specific and targeted new laws (as has been seen in the aftermath of Fukushima in Japan, and now elsewhere) and in the final resort, outright murder of critics. Even U.S. Presidents are not immune from this.
We see also that “Tom Nichols is a professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College and an adjunct at the Harvard Extension School.” In other words, he is a well-integrated component of the ruling system whose career is closely bound to its survival; his interest is political as well as practical. But his ‘expertise’ is such that he could never come to me and tell me how to improve a chromate conversion coating on zinc by altering the pH, or likewise how to remove metals from solution by a similar method. I also doubt if he could tell me anything useful about soil husbandry, animal rearing or solar or wind power if my final disenchantment with politics should persuade me to head for the hills. MY education, training and experience therefore lead me to distrust HIS ‘expert’ opinion and to suspect that there is a subtext to this article, and to think that I am right (Kissinger, Brzezinski). I therefore challenge his assertion that a person like myself should be considered unfit to pass comment in the political arena, and advise Americans to be even less tolerant. In reality, he’s trying to tell his fellow citizens how to think.
The kind of obfuscation seen in the scientific context is now rampant in the political arena, where the broad “West” is clearly trying to justify starting World War III by demonising countries such as Russia and China and dependencies such as Syria, and their prime agents are their puppet media; where are the signs that we need to understand the nations in question? How is Russia, in particular, posing any kind of ‘threat’ to the West? The ‘system’ controls the media (do what they say, or lose your career), demonstrating how dangerous the ‘gatekeepers’ can be; and the fact that many modern American laws seem to be the result of industry lobbying and graft rather than solid scientific investigations and/or popular opinion demonstrates the falsehood of this so-called ‘democracy’ itself. Surely modern America is an obvious plutocracy when such things can happen? And when people in the know reveal those things which the system wants to keep hidden, they are not labelled as ‘citizens exercising their democratic right to free speech’, they are ‘whistleblowers’, demonised, legislated against and maybe even murdered for their efforts and opinions. Yet, for some reason, this system advertises itself as the epitome of democratic sanity. Perhaps we should remember that the incoming President got himself elected by (a) inflaming the ‘mainstream media’ to get their outlandish reactions and (b) made (and is still making) extensive use of alternative media to get his messages out. That is democracy and inclusion. The ‘mainstream media’ represent the exact opposite.
Unfortunately (from my own point of view), those who claim ‘expertise’ in the political arena must always be subjected to the most rigorous criticism, because their errors (which may be in concert with the interests of large industrial entities) are of a nature where the consequences of their execution may be dire and when they themselves are dead, other people’s descendants have to handle the downstream sequelae. One would not wish to support a system, as can be seen in so many countries these days, where there is sufficient obfuscatory power that legal systems can be co-opted to actually prevent people from uncovering and interpreting its inconvenient data. Increasingly, so-called ‘liberal democracies’ have been enacting laws to prevent both journalists and citizens from discovering and disseminating information about things that affect them (like Fukushima), the media are dumbed-down and demonstrably complicit in the obfuscatory process and the media themselves shout down anyone who questions anything the system doesn’t like to be in the public arena. This behaviour even extends to sciences like cosmology, which is an utter disgrace to the broader scientific enterprise.
Why all the obfuscation, you may ask? What is the point of all of this? Well, the alternative word for ‘obfuscation’ here would be ‘occultation’, yet when we think of the word ‘occult’, science is the last major field of human endeavour that comes to mind, showing that this methodology of disguise has worked extremely well so far. Science is just as much an ‘occulted’ activity as any Hermetic Order, and therefore its practitioners seek to make access difficult for the ‘uninitiated’; likewise practitioners of politics and the performing arts often have similar involvements, which they often give away with their words and gestures. Mark Passio goes into this in some depth here [3]:
So thank you, Professor, but you’re not an ‘expert’ in any area which interests me. Rather the contrary: from what you are saying, it seems like you are trying to justify a system which essentially disrespects the opinions of intelligent and experienced onlookers like myself, and represent said system’s ossification and elitism. In my opinion, this kind of haughty commentary is only a step or two away from criminalising political dissent… oh, wait…
[1] http://thefederalist.com/2014/01/17/the-death-of-expertise/#.WG8fBOJEFTy.twitter
[2] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3942278/PIERS-MORGAN-Memo-millennials-awful-feeling-ve-got-called-losing-happens-want-know-win-stop-whinging-bit-learn-lessons-Trump.html
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1V98DsNXi0
Minor edits: Sunday 12th February, 2017.
Why All Taxation Is Theft
Posted by Andrew | Filed under A Farewell to Authority, Breakfast in the Ruins, Commentary, Gripes
Damn right!
This is an anarchist talking… something we need to understand better, if only because current political philosophies are so bankrupt and common sense is sorely needed:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6C1M_7BzZ0
Always remember: Theoretical anarchism is only ever enlightening.
Discovering Terence McKenna and the Tyranny of Neoteny
Posted by Andrew | Filed under A Farewell to Authority, Breakfast in the Ruins, Commentary, General, The Destruction of History
The greatest benefit of having a resource like the Internet is the way it makes so much information available. The chance of making serendipitous discoveries is enormously increased by being able to interrogate and cross-reference vast databases, such as those of Google and YouTube, and this birthday weekend was no exception… I listened again to someone I had heard of previously and respected but did not view often enough, and discovered that he had hit a nail quite squarely on the head some time before he died…
Also, since I begin writing this piece of extended bile, over the big pond in America they had an election, and what a surprise, the candidate favoured by the press lost! And in the process of trying to condition the electorate into believing that Killary was a better bet than Flump (as if this really represented any kind of reasonable choice), they lost their own credibility forever. The notion that the American press are ‘free and impartial’ is gone, and people are looking to alternative news sources for a true account of reality – and Europe has wasted no time in trying to enact legislation to stifle the voices of the genuinely ‘free’ sources. But more of that later…
To celebrate my 53rd birthday (quietly), and by invitation, I took a bus to Changwon that Friday [8] afternoon and stayed at my customary motel. The ‘party’ was, alas, merely four of us, but of course, it’s the fact that those few people cared enough to come and give whatever gifts they felt were fitting for the occasion that is most important.
We’ll skip over that event, and cut to the early hours of the morning: munching on a couple of cheese toast sandwiches (my avoidance of gluten-rich products tossed temporarily out of the window due to a case of the munchies), I found that there was plenty of unsecured wifi available to that room, and watched a very interesting two-hour lecture by the late Terence McKenna:
(The point in question is at about 31:30 minutes into play time)
For those of you not familiar with this person, he became famous for his studies of ethnobotany and the relationships between psychedelic plant extracts and shamanism, and their use as entheogens [1]. Like many of those who have sampled potent psychedelics (although this is not absolutely necessary, of course), his mind became much more open to ideas which conventional ‘education’ (read: ‘social control propaganda’) would otherwise stifle and suppress, and he made a set of remarks which, even at that early hour and with a masticated glob of cheese toast sliding down my throat, struck a chord and made me realise that he was discussing precisely what I myself had been suspecting for a very long time, although perhaps using a rather different phraseology: the inculcation of a state of neoteny in humans as a means of social and psychological control.
McKenna’s extended description of ‘neoteny’ was not as accurate as I myself would have preferred, although his initial definition was fair enough: in animals, neoteny consists of the retention of larval (or other immature) body features whilst simultaneously being able to reproduce. In other words, the retention of juvenile morphological features of the species in the adult morph; this is also referred to as paedomorphism or paedomorphosis. When I was younger, the most commonly-quoted example of neoteny was that of the Axolotl (Ambystoma mexicanum), in which retention of neotenous features is postulated to be part of a survival mechanism in environments which tend to be low in available iodine, which is required for the thyroid gland to produce the growth hormone thyroxine. Experimentation showed that administration of iodine, either as an injection or in food, permits an increase in thyroxine production and consequent metamorphosis to the adult (salamander) form.
The main neotenous features observed in Axolotls are the retention of the larval tail and external gills, as well as underdeveloped fore and hindlimbs, but they are able to produce viable sex cells, and thus also reproduce. More widely, however, as the term refers to the retention of juvenile features in adults, there are notionally ‘neotenous’ features which separate humans morphologically from both supposedly ‘ancestral’ primates (surviving apes have more extensive body hair than humans, for example) and other cultural or other ethnic groupings within the species (see [2]). Interestingly, commentators such as the late Lloyd Pye also pointed to a range of such features which, it was claimed, constituted evidence that humans were not, in fact, apes [3].
McKenna postulated that humans had historically been kept in a state of psychological neoteny, and that their immature mental state mirrored that of their bodies, which in fact more resemble those of baby (or even foetal) apes rather than the adults of other ape species. Cultures supply individuals with a simplified and likely mythologised explanation of reality, which is extremely convenient for those parties whose interests are well-served by the distraction and ignorance of others, and such a mechanism therefore keeps people in a psychological state which is more easy to control – alienated and psychotic. He has absolutely hit it on the head.
McKenna’s interest in psychedelics and entheogens led him to suggest that they allow the individuals who use them to mature intellectually beyond their inculcated psychologically neotenous (read: ‘juvenile’) state and see the control system for what it is. It is interesting to note that in this lecture, he points out that he did not personally encourage or assist others in the use of psychedelics, which probably suggests why he was still lucid as the years advanced whereas another well-known tripper, Timothy Leary, seems to have become rather a wreck later in life.
For our purposes, however, it is probably sufficient to realise that a service such as the Internet functions rather like a psychedelic, in the sense that the abundance of stimulation (information) and connections between events can allow us to form a more accurate picture of the world than our cultures (read: ‘mutual self-repeaters of the propaganda of our would-be controllers’) desire us to see; specifically, the artificial limits to our horizons imposed by conventional publishing and media have been subverted by the democratisation of technology and information. Thus, rather than listening to the radio we might instead subscribe to a set of podcasts or Internet streams which we feel present us with more representative viewpoints, opinions and information; and now virtually anyone can create these, and since many of those who do so are likewise in a psychologically neotenised state, we have to use our intellectual faculties (in the sense that McKenna uses the term ‘intellectual’ here – in his own words: “Anyone who has figured it out”) to distinguish the diamonds from the dross. A huge amount of the material available on the Internet is pure disinformation, intended to create disorientation and keep observers distracted, and it takes critical faculties to avoid this, something which seems to be a bit of a stumbling-lock for modern educational paradigms. It goes without saying that because of the democratisation of the transmission process, we can access it repeatedly and at our own convenience, rather than as and when the originators (formerly the dominant TV and radio networks) desire.
My own experience with the Internet since 1997 seems to be that no source of information is one hundred per cent. reliable, neither at the institutional nor the individual level; an opinion is just an opinion (a point which is very important to bear in mind when, for example, you are a student using a textbook which is periodically ‘updated’ to a ‘new edition’ – it is surprising how much content may be replaced, but does this necessarily imply that what was replaced was somehow ‘no longer important’? Who decides these things? And did those bits of information cease to be? Surely the phenomena they describe are still with us?). Those with authoritarian tendencies would surely like us to believe otherwise, but that only undermines their own credibility, as the disparity between reality and their delusions is often clearly visible. We form a much more accurate picture of reality in our minds when we realise that every fact should be verified by as many sources as possible; this way, truths link with each other and non-facts are increasingly excluded [7]. Paradoxically, perhaps, we need to keep an open mind at all times, lest we dismiss facts in error by excessive scepticism.
The simple fact that so many authoritarians would like to limit free speech and to regulate what can and cannot be shared over a vast network like the Internet only serves to demonstrate that effective communication makes hiding secrets difficult, and the people who have the greatest desire to hide secrets are those whose (neoteny-based) power would be destroyed by it. How odd, then, that it is the authoritarian who loves to suggest that “if you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear”!
“Let him that is without sin cast the first stone” is my response to that one!
At the heart of what McKenna was adumbrating, however, is the notion that by limiting and diverting the natural process of information accumulation through education and experience (and of course, by deliberate distraction in the form of the media, organised sports, etc.), authority keeps the majority of the citizenry in a psychologically and emotionally stunted, immature state, with a view to controlling them by imposing artificial barriers which people themselves then reinforce with stereotyped (culture-determined) behaviour (a point often repeated by our own dear David Icke). The citizenry therefore remain in an essentially psychologically juvenile or ‘neotenised’ state which is self-perpetuating for as long as those same citizens are prepared to tolerate the disinformed ‘peer pressure’ which supports the current paradigm. It is only when they are prepared to reject this that wider and more accurate viewpoints become possible, and the neotenous ‘spell’ is magically broken.
In the past, when I personally have thought about these things, I have often considered what I call the ‘tyranny of the familiar’ – the fact that too many people exist within a culturally delimited ‘comfort zone’ and are unwilling to venture beyond it for fear of the great discomfort involved, which of course also includes the derision of peers due to the pernicious bubble of “… but everybody knows that..!” or “… but we’ve always done it this way!” … so how about this for a new concept? Try to be an enlightener and an opener of doors, rather than a mere repeater for the contemptible statist/collectivist controllers? Do you really need to be one of their robots? Indeed, what proof could you offer to others that you are truly an individual and a unique thinker? Where do the limits of your ‘knowledge’ really lie? When you read a book or a news article, are you doing so with a sufficiently critical mindset, or do you simply accept things as ‘facts’ because an authority figure is broadcasting them? Where does the ‘authority figure’ get his or her ‘facts’ from?
This is, I think, something we all need to discover. For example, when we look at the lauded ‘achievements’ of ‘civilisation’, what are we really seeing? If achievement requires venturing beyond the socially-enforced bounds of behaviour or thinking (here we might, as an illustration of ‘limits’, pause to reflect upon what is considered ‘acceptable’ to the current cosmological paradigm), is what we see from any particular era in human existence a set of creations produced by the thinking of free minds, or merely ‘reflections’ of the current thinking which seemed at the time to be ‘free’ simply because it was not subjected to realistic criticism, as it was actually conforming with the accepted and current ‘norms’? What is ‘civilisation’ really worth? One would venture to suggest that ‘civilisation’ and ‘culture’ are as separate as the stock market is from the wider economy, yet we allow an illogical mental link between the two to persist and the result is extremely damaging.
Worse, how about the bizarre position of an archetypal ‘Power User’ of computers, a stereotype which seems to have emerged very rapidly in tandem with the aforementioned democratisation of computing technology, where a person could be very adept in the use of a particular software package, but legendarily could not figure out how to turn the machine on and off? One would like to think that this was merely the stuff of urban legend, except I have known (and still know) so many people whom this characterises exactly – and not solely in relation to the use of computers either (you can find tons of real-life examples at Computer Stupidities [6]). People in ignorance (and I myself could be one of them, as a single person’s knowledge is strictly limited, which was Socrates’ most memorable point) assuming that certain types of behaviour are correct, when in fact they don’t realise what they are doing or whether it is beneficial or harmful. I have a feeling, personally, when I step back for a moment and ask myself what is really happening when I undertake even the most trivial activity, such as the substances I use for cleaning or personal hygiene, for example, that my own ignorance or refusal to acknowledge that my own actions may be in some way detrimental to the wider environment is thoroughly reprehensible. But I don’t have the whole story… and preventing people from having the whole story is they key to controlling them. ‘Someone’ decides which ‘news’ is worthy of publication and which is not, according to their own agenda; ‘someone’ decides which information is worthy of inclusion in the pages of WikiPedia, and actively removes anything deemed ‘incorrect’ according to their prejudices, rather than factuality; and ‘someone’ has been responsible for the repeated loss of knowledge throughout history through the destruction and looting of libraries, achieved by a hidden hand manipulating vast masses of people. War, in particular, is very effective in this regard as a plausible ‘excuse’ for ‘unavoidable’ damage, and a very convenient and lucrative smokescreen behind which to hind all manner of evil deeds – the wilful but clandestine destruction of society’s wisdom being one of them. We are constantly hammered by the idea that war is somehow ‘unavoidable’, when in fact, it’s just a rich man’s game, and the rest of us losers are expected to foot the bill, both financially and in terms of lives lost.
We come full circle when we consider the entertainment industries, whole sectors of society which are purely engaged in making ridiculous (and perhaps unjustifiable) profits from indulgence and distraction. It has not escaped my observation that these industries, whose business is essentially the promotion and exploitation of pointless flim-flam and the concomitant emotional responses to stereotyped visual tropes, are also intimately involved with the attempt to predetermine what users may or may not actually do online, not realising perhaps that this will eventually lead to a hypocritical and parasitic industry which will self-destruct as the Internet becomes little more than a means of consumption (or maybe it already has – witness Hollywood’s constant obsession with ‘sequels’, and when they proved to be insufficient, they started on the business of ‘prequels’… as our dear friend D. Icke often puts it, “You just couldn’t make it up!”).
Additionally, the bankers don’t even want us to have real money any more, but want to replace that purely with numbers in (their) databases. Thus they will control everything in our lives, and we will be forever and irretrievably ‘neotenised’ and increasingly dysfunctional and incapable at a personal level. Is this not a despicable and tyrannical vista to behold? It’s already happening in places like Denmark [9]. Or maybe people will develop a bartering system to replace money when their ‘governments’ only allow them to have a bank account and a piece of plastic. At least when the predicted economic collapse arrives, people will still be able to trade!
We do have to note, however, that the attempts to censor and limit access to the Internet may already be demonstrably self-defeating. For example, remote payments by such means as credit cards. As I have been living in Korea for such a long time, my bank (in England) now refuses to send items such as new cheque books, credit and debit cards to me as they have (apparently arbitrarily or whimsically) imposed an ’embargo’ on certain countries, and have told me repeatedly that South Korea is among these, however illogical that may seem. The entertainment industry loves to use the Internet as an excuse to force people to cough up more cash, but maybe is ignoring the fact that electronic payments are still an impossibility for huge numbers of the global population, and for the dumbest of reasons. But as a lot of their modern products are also correspondingly dumb and unworthy of purchase, why not just keep your cash to yourself and strangle them out of existence with the power of your wallet? Let’s face it, you won’t miss them…
At the same time, in the visual realm of what are often referred to as ‘special effects’, there has been a strong tendency to create a kind of ‘virtual reality’ which is clearly intended to be, ultimately, sufficiently indistinguishable from the real world that the latter can comfortably be ignored, as if our whole lives were being eked out on a film set – or rather that the boundary between the ‘real’ and the ‘unreal’ can no longer be detected easily, making the visual validation of falsehoods much more straightforward. And the fact that some precious people seem to think that their own behaviour should emulate the tantrums and follies of the various mind-manipulated moppet celebrities forced down their throats by the so-called ‘entertainment industry’ merely underlines a point in my previous articles about the dangers of narcissism – such a person is very easy to manipulate – and we can’t fail to notice that narcissistic, self-important personalities are also especially prevalent in the world of entertainment. Again, this is a kind of maintained neoteny, representing the intentional juvenilisation of personality, and consequent mass juvenilisation by imitation. Beware of the formation of a cult around a ‘personality’ (read: ‘celebrity’) when examination of the latter reveals them to be little more than a hollow, manipulated shell. More and more, famous people under stress have been seen to experience very public ‘meltdowns’ which are being observed on TV – just Google for ‘celebrity meltdown’, the list is endless [10].
It all means that in every possible way, we must resist the tyranny of imposed neoteny, and the only way to do this is to surround ourselves with verifiable facts and counter-arguments to the constant flood of deliberate disinformation and outright lies which mockingly purports to represent ‘reality’. It means that we need to supply our own antidote to the sensual and intellectual garbage constantly forced upon our consciousness by the agents of our would-be controllers, and construct our own factual schema to counteract the encroachment of a pernicious ‘virtual reality’ which seeks to imprison us in our own personal ‘goldfish bowls’ of distorted vision and narcissism. And most importantly, perhaps, we should vote with our wallets and choke them all off at source.
References:
[1] Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence_McKenna
[2] Wiklipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoteny#Neoteny_in_other_species
[3] See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHFh3Z0DOQ4 for the full lecture. Unfortunately, Pye used to espouse a lot of otherwise dubious ideas, such as the stories of Zecharia Sitchin, which are interesting but somewhat discredited.
[4] See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KboPUQ0xCDs for McKenna’s lecture; discussion of cultural neoteny begins at 31:30
[5] Note that neoteny is characteristic of the Tiger Salamander family, of which the Axolotl is a member; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axolotl
[6] Rinkworks: http://www.rinkworks.com/stupid/
[7] Take a cue from the late journalist John Keel, who sought at least three verifiable sources of information for each occurrence in his investigations of UFO incidents, and used this as a filter for exclusion of a huge corpus of witness accounts.
[8] Birthday Thursday, October 15th 2015; went to Changwon the next day.
[9] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/11586778/Denmark-moves-step-closer-to-being-a-cashless-country.html; since I began writing this, Sweden have now started making similar noises – google ‘sweden cashless society’ and notice that the prominent news sources on the first search page were also Killary supporters during the 2016 Presidential election.
[10] See, also, the ridiculous parade of celebrities who screamed that they would leave the country if Flump came to power. Example: http://www.ibtimes.com/if-donald-trump-wins-presidency-these-18-celebrities-will-leave-us-will-canada-be-2440762 … my first reaction on seeing a lot of this stuff was: “Who..?”
Disambiguation
Posted by Andrew | Filed under A Farewell to Authority, Breakfast in the Ruins, Lost Geographies, The Destruction of History
In a previous article, I adumbrated what has recently become – for me – a key component in my quest for truth: the dire effects of ‘plausible deniability’, applied in multiple dimensions, to confuse and confound peoples’ world-view and thereby obfuscate any clandestine activities undertaken by ‘vested interests’ who would prefer that said activities remain obscure and – ideally – ignored and undetected by the wider public, who in one way or another are actually funding it all.
Time to wake up and smell the bullshit…
But first, some explanation of the term I intend to use here, for those who have not encountered it before. ‘Disambiguation’ refers to the process of separating out single meanings in situations where multiple meanings are able to apply. So for example, here in Korea, because the writing system is simplified (has only forty-four characters, and is therefore an ‘alphabet’ rather than a ‘syllabary’), a foreigner learning the language may often have to make reference to the corresponding Traditional Chinese* characters from which words are derived (in South Korea, roughly 70% of words in use in spoken Korean today are said to be of Traditional Chinese derivation) in order to separate out the correct meaning. This is because the transition from a complex syllabary to a simple alphabet leads to numerous homophones, where previously words (in this particular example) in Traditional Chinese would have been easier to distinguish because Chinese is a tonal language, and each lexeme is obviously separated from others which sound similar. Lexemes with the same sound are disambiguated by their different characters.
To bring this idea together with my current thinking, after many years of reading about UFOs and aerial phenomena generally (and this means my reading stretching back into the early 1970s, when many readers here were not yet born), a similar idea began to gnaw at me: after all, some of these, at least, must be natural, and there were hypotheses which hinted at this. But the study of apparently ‘unidentified’ aerial objects suffers from the same syndrome seen so often, where the observer’s ability (or lack thereof) to distinguish phenomena is hampered by lack of access to information – interpretations are flawed because of the limitations of knowledge imposed upon them, either by themselves (restricting the areas into which they can move for information) or by others (reading the pet theories of other individuals which are not supported by either observation or a logical framework based upon observation and existing information, or by a process of intentional and deliberate disinformation and misinformation). It is a sad fact that one of the hallmarks of a free and open system for information interchange – the Internet – is the anonymity which allows people to nurture and expound wild theories and speculation about any subject under the sun without any need – or indeed inclination – to engage critical faculties (Scott C. Waring, I’m talking about YOU). [8]
We might add to this lamentable picture our own observation that, given the requirement for gullibility on the part of their audience, there have been (and continue to be) a large number of individuals who have been profiting in the long term from the willingness of their listeners to cough up dosh to hear the same tired old mish-mash of reports and factoids which bedevil the UFO community (they know who they are, names need not be mentioned further). This is an area where much speculation results from the slightest possibility that a story might be true, despite the acknowledged fact that the only consistent aspect of the field is its inconsistency. Misinformation introduced at the right time results in long-term disorientation: satellite observations presented at the highest level of pixellation as proof of a civilisation on Mars, or the Moon, for example. Enough, already!
Observations have themselves been shown to be subject to a number of influences, one of which seems to be the curious habit of mirroring technologies with which the observers themselves might be familiar; commentators have speculated that this would allow the operators of such craft (when encountered by the observers) to pass themselves off as people like themselves, rather than obviously ‘alien’ or perhaps government operatives, a point elaborated by (among others) the late John Keel.
When investigating any phenomenon which might be described as ‘natural’ (and even if they originate on another planet, UFOs are not actually ‘unnatural’ in the sense of being ‘unreal’, but rather are ‘dislocated’ from their point of origin), we need to keep an open mind and be wary of the pitfalls of trying to fit observations into any new or pre-existing schema without good reason. This would be especially true in situations in which similar external characteristics might cause natural and unnatural (i.e., in this case, technology products) phenomena to be conflated. This is a very important point to bear in mind.
Again, this returns us to the notion of ‘plausible deniability’: being able – at least to some extent – to hide things (which ‘someone’ has decided, arbitrarily, need to be hidden) behind other phenomena which are actually natural is a very convenient form of obfuscation; the more so if they are objects which exhibit (or appear to exhibit) some advanced technology which is inexplicable in terms of conventional daily experience. We should be warned at the outset that UFOs are not the only phenomena to which this type of thinking may need to be applied. And since a ‘real’ UFO would undoubtedly be the product of technology which is both highly advanced and (perhaps) literally ‘alien’ in concept, we are faced with four or five essential classes of observable phenomena:
1: natural phenomena, possibly of an electrical nature, which persist for some time in the atmosphere and are, in fact, created by a combination of natural events. Among other things, we should refer to Paul Devereux’s ‘Earth Lights Hypothesis’ and the ‘Electric Universe Hypothesis’ to discuss these. There may also be a ‘cryptid’ involvement in these.
2: technology products of purely terrestrial origin, which probably represent exotic manned or unmanned vehicles, and which may even have quite mundane intended functions, but which look or behave strangely to the untrained and unfamiliar observer.
3: technology products of extraterrestrial origin, relatively exotic crewed or uncrewed vehicles which may have relatively mundane functions such as observation platforms, but which may be engaged in scientific or military (as we understand the terms) functions. Little of the information which becomes available to the observer during encounters would be familiar enough for them to understand the technology, the intention of the operators or the intended function of these devices. This much would remain true, whatever their actual origin may be.
4: the objects represent living entities of an unknown type, who are able to hide normally but who become visible at certain times, under certain conditions. Again, a potential ‘cryptid’ involvement which is often suggested in discussions of this topic.
5: most contentiously perhaps, and supported largely by rumour and speculation, technology products of terrestrial origin but modelled after examples of (allegedly ‘captured’) extraterrestrial equivalents, intended for various purposes but built entirely terrestrially, although possibly with the assistance of the ‘originators’. This grouping includes alleged ‘reverse-engineered’ craft, of which there seem to be many stories and typical locations where they are seen and stored when not in use. However, when considering this latter classification, we should always bear in mind the ‘alleged’ part!
It is not my purpose here to engage in an exhaustive categorisation of UFO types. Rather, my interest is to discuss the desirability of separating them out – to apply ‘disambiguation’ to them – from natural phenomena. Our first call should be to two theories which are undoubtedly closely intertwined: the ‘Earth Lights’ theory and the ‘Electric Universe’ theory, and for reasons which will become clear as we proceed, we will visit the second of these first.
One of the most bizarre aspects of so-called ‘modern science’ is the extent to which, when confronted with new data which contradict existing models, practitioners engage in a kind of ‘cognitive dissonance’ and refuse point-blank to accept the notion of falsification of their cherished hypothesis. The extent to which a practising scientist will doggedly stick to trying to ‘verify’ a theory when evidence is pointing in a completely different direction is both touching and pathetic. But there are two very important points to be borne in mind when practising science:
1: In science, the most essential part of any hypothesis is that it should be falsifiable. This is because the closer the hypothesis comes to verisimilitude – a closer and closer approximation to reality – the better able it becomes to predict previously unsuspected or unobserved phenomena. If there is an accumulation of data which are observed regularly in the course of investigation and experimentation, but which cannot be explained by the hypothesis, it must eventually be considered ‘falsified’ and replaced by another competing hypothesis which does account for these data, or ‘anomalies’ as they were called by Thomas S. Kuhn (among others). It would not be inappropriate to suggest that since verisimilitude cannot be approached directly, but rather in a prolonged and stepwise fashion due to the periodic falsification of successive hypotheses, one hypothesis has to be judged against the other in terms of accounting for a greater proportion of these ‘anomalies’ than its predecessor – but not all of them. It is the basic and essential function of a successful hypothesis to account for more of the observed phenomena than its predecessor. The succeeding hypothesis would probably be able to subsume the original observational data more accurately within its new conceptual framework.
2: Human beings are very prone to try to fit information into frameworks or ‘schemas’. The problem with this is that there are many factors involved as to exactly where in any theoretical framework any phenomenon should be placed. The above example of Korean (or Japanese) simplification versus Traditional Chinese exactitude illustrates exactly the kind of pitfall waiting for us when our interpretation is wrong, and why it is so important to check. Good science has (or should have) a variety of hypotheses, competing to interpret the same data, some of which are more likely to be a closer approximation to reality than others, and which therefore have the equal and automatic right to be heard and used as tools in investigations.
We might add to these that the more extreme the individual practitioner’s professional isolation becomes, the less they are likely to be able to import ideas from other fields which might bear fruit in their own investigations – indeed, this is a process which is discouraged in many organisations, and was a hallmark of paranoid twentieth-century military thinking from the beginning of World War II onwards, with all the disastrous consequences we have seen. Prior to that time, it was considered normal for scientists and technologists working in disparate areas to discuss what they were doing and what their research had discovered, but now we seem to have a situation in which discussion only takes place within a group of professionals, and others (who might be able to contradict them, or at least promote plausible alternatives) are excluded and marginalised. In America, this process of ‘compartmentalisation’ really appears to have taken off under the oversight of Vannevar Bush in the ‘Manhattan Project’ [2].
This is the fundamental malady of modern science: the practitioner’s lack of tolerance for (and the necessary consideration of) hypothetical competition. It accounts, perhaps only in part, for why modern science is so divorced from reality and appears to see the public only as a source of income. Supported through tax dollars levied upon the wider populace, the modern scientist builds a vast paradigmatic empire, but because this is science, that empire is built upon shifting sand; no matter how successful a paradigm may prove, the accumulation of anomalous (from the paradigm’s point of view) data must eventually cause its collapse. Addiction to the group paradigm – which may be used to argue for extensive public funding, for example – will continue until that group is actually forced to admit exactly what part (or the whole) of their paradigm is incorrect. The field is then (theoretically at least) open for succession.
At the same time, practising scientists clearly see the general public as ‘ignorant’ and in need of education – their education – by inculcation into a paradigm which is probably shaky at best, but which needs a ‘critical mass’ (i.e. sufficient magnitude of quorum) of popular support to avoid being denied funding. In concert with the mass media (whose practitioners, of course, are also not specialists, and therefore depend upon science for their material, and follow it largely blindly), practitioners persistently and rabidly promulgate their ‘party line’ and often are happy to indulge in pathetic ad hominem attacks upon opponents when logic fails – a rather strange practice from those who would have us believe that science is impartial, evidence-based and can provide all the answers to our questions, and surprisingly like the kind of reaction one would expect from a True Believer when their ability or patience abandons them in the face of hostile criticism – this latter being precisely the kind of public reaction which is so useful when it swings in their favour. Practitioners should be more intellectually honest, and admit it when they cannot answer because they do not know, rather than trying to cover it up with dissemblance and misdirection.
So science as it is normally (in the Kuhnian sense) practised may be interesting, amusing or entertaining, but as an important part of science is actually to be incorrect (which allows progress by later falsification and verisimilitude), it cannot be taken one hundred percent seriously – especially when it says, for example, that it needs huge public funding to split small atoms. It simply represents one small ‘area of knowledge’, possibly false according to the particular (peculiar? remember phlogiston!) interpretation of the times, and must therefore take its place beside other sources of ‘knowledge’ and compete to be heard. The usefulness of science ends when the knowledge it produces no longer has any practical value or, worse still, leads to dangerously incorrect interpretations of the natural world because of a pathetic and petulant refusal to accept that an accumulation of experimental and observational data have proven it to be wrong. Instead, it has become a cult. No more evidence would be required to demonstrate that ‘science’ is actually a ‘religion’.
The case of UFOs shows some of the worst attitudes prevalent in science, although one could point in other directions such as – for example – ‘cryptozoology’. Here however, we begin with the ‘Electric Universe’ hypothesis. According to this, the universe is suffused with plasma, and this plasma, being highly conductive, allows huge electrical currents to traverse cosmic distances, and the behaviour of this electrical current in the cosmic medium is responsible for forming all large, observable objects. And there is plenty of laboratory-based evidence for all of it. [10]
We know that the universe is composed of 99% plasma, and this was basically confirmed by the Explorer-1 satellite [1] launched by NASA in 1958. Ironically, America’s first successful artificial satellite, lofted into orbit in response to the success of Russia’s Sputnik I, produced data which contradict the entrenched scientific notion that Earth somehow exists in splendid isolation and is somehow not connected to the rest of the universe by anything other than gravity.
Let’s take careful note of this: a universe dominated by the presence and conductivity of plasma cannot behave in a way dominated by terrestrial processes. ‘Terrestrial processes’ exist only on Earth – that is why they are called ‘terrestrial’, or has nobody noticed this? And if the universe is dominated by electricity, we should be asking ourselves what the effects of this ought to be upon our lives. We should observe direct and indirect effects of massive current flow on a regular basis; and the magnitude of the observed effects is indicative of the strength of current flow.
This means that, historically: (a) there is a variety of effects which have been recorded which relate to our small part of the galaxy, which result from a wider flow of plasma-borne current which surrounds us, and (b) the force with which these effects manifest themselves changes as a result of the localised passage of current through the solar system, in much the same way that, say, the brightness of a bulb in a building can vary because of all the switches in said building being turned on and off all the time. In the Electric Universe context, stars are born in strings (because of the gross structure of a ‘Birkeland current’) and are connected electrically by intervening plasma. Their brightness can therefore vary according to the current load, like any terrestrial light bulb or other functional resistor.
The amazing thing is that this flow of current, and the effects which follow on from it, have been completely ignored at worst, or deliberately misinterpreted (to fit the prevailing paradigms) at best by scientific practitioners. As Kuhn rightly pointed out, the problem with ‘normal science’ is that established practitioners are more concerned with ‘verifying’ the theories they espouse, rather than challenging it and getting closer to the truth. They are afraid of threatening the existence of the thing which pays their salary, afraid of losing public funding for their temporary flim-flam (as any state in science is purely temporary), and afraid of losing credibility because they got it wrong, rather than challenging the theory and proving that their new hypothesis displays greater verisimilitude than what went before. Too much money and too many reputations and institutions are at stake when they do that. If there is one thing about modern science that is truly lamentable, it is that scientists are more likely to be gladiatorial in defence than attack. That is truly shameful.
It is ‘really coming to something’ when a famous American Bible scholar can produce videos which give a more accurate account of observations – and give appropriate credit to non-Christians who see things more clearly:
Let’s be perfectly clear about one thing: the prevailing theoretical cosmogeny is utter and contemptible rubbish. We exist at the end of a process, not at its beginning, therefore we cannot make anything but the wildest guesses at what went before unless there is some kind of written or oral record of past events, and what is available must be scrutinised and cross-checked if possible to avoid errors. But if the paradigm we use is itself false, then there cannot be any correct interpretation of what we see; it is impossible because we have tied ourselves to a particular viewpoint, and we are not willing to venture outside of that claustrophobic conceptual straitjacket. Whatever his other faults might have been, the late Dr. Isaac Asimov was quite correct when he suggested that the concepts used to interpret an observational phenomenon were more problematic than the observation itself, whatever that original observed object or phenomenon may have been.
According to the current conventional Western cosmogony, the Solar System of which we are a part is supposed to have condensed out of a cloud of hydrogen and dust. Because of the use of isotope ratios to determine age, there is an upper limit to the age of the Earth of less than 5,000,000,000 years [4]. The accretion process is supposed to have been gravitational, with smaller bodies coalescing into larger ones until we have what we see today. But common sense suggests that if the Electric Universe theory is correct, then this process is impossible because any particles in any particular area of space would have very similar electrostatic charges, and would therefore repel each other; hence gravitational coalescence is unlikely. A more powerful force is required to coalesce disparate particles of matter to form large, solid objects.
A second argument against gravitation being responsible for what we see is the thermal activity of the outer planets. Space is very cold, and as we travel further out from the sun, the available radiance per unit area on any planet decreases proportionally. Yet we can see that the outer planets have very high-speed winds and enormous storms. Conventional science cannot account for this beyond suggesting that (in the case of Jupiter, for example) this is because of heat resulting from the eternally slow gravitational contraction of the planet, or to radioactive heat emanating slowly from the core. The possibility of another source of energy than the decay of radionucleides at the core of a planetary body is apparently never voiced in official astronomical circles. Neptune, however, is the furthest of the gas giants from the Sun, yet it has the highest observed wind speeds! [5] All of them radiate more heat energy than they are known to receive from the sun. [9]:
• Jupiter: radiates 1.5 – 2 times the energy it receives from the Sun. Excess left over from formation (cooling cake model).
• Saturn: radiates 2-3 times the energy it receives from the Sun. Excess comes from frictional heating from raining liquid helium.
• Neptune: radiates 2.6 times the energy it receives from the Sun. Excess comes either from frictional heating from raining diamonds or from gravitational contraction of debris absorbed by Neptune in the early days of the Solar System.
• Uranus: radiates 1.06 times the energy it receives from the Sun. Excess left from formation.
We might additionally be tempted to ask exactly where the required quantity of radionucleides might have originated which would be required to generate the necessary internal heat within our Solar System’s ‘gas giants’. If stars and their satellites are generated by electrical mechanisms, would larger planetary bodies really need such a method of generating internal heat, or is it actually because they are functioning rather like resistors in a larger electrical circuit?
According to the Electric Universe theory, our sun is an electric node in a galactic circuit, and is variable because the magnitude of the galactic electric current flowing through it also varies with time. Similarly, the planets are affected as conductive components in a circuit, and exhibit effects such as heating (take note of this, it’s important) which result from this. One of the most basic experiments in physics is simply to pass a current through a conductor and measure its temperature; the functions of light bulbs, electric fan heaters and even simple plug fuses are based upon the effects of this. The resistance of the conductive material to the flow of current produces heat and (with higher current) light.
Here is where current cosmology seems to fall flat on its collective face. Rather than take into account the possibility that much of what they are observing relates to the flow of electrical current through the Solar System and base their interpretation of observed phenomena upon an electrical paradigm, astrophysicists, cosmologists and other space scientists have put themselves into some kind of intellectual backwater by postulating the presence of unseen, undetectable ‘Dark Matter’ which somehow permeates everything and mysteriously accounts for phenomena which would more accurately be described as ‘electrical’ in nature. So the outward flow of particles from the Sun is characterised as a ‘solar wind’ rather than an ‘electrical current’ (currents need charged particles to ‘flow’) between the electrodes of a virtual cell, where the Sun is actually one of these.
The ‘Earth Lights’ theory follows logically from the ‘Electric Universe’ theory, and surprisingly, perhaps, also complements it, at least in part. Since the Earth is under constant electrical stress, relief of that stress would result in electrical discharge, in much the same way that compressing a quartz crystal releases energy as electricity or light [3], or the charge in a thunderstorm relieves itself by large-scale lightning discharge. But here we come to one of the problems of interpretation of phenomena. Such discharges seem sometimes to give rise to a form of ball lightning which is (for some time at least) self-sustaining and can travel for some distance from its point of discharge, presumably guided by localised surface charges in its surroundings, which it finds alternately attractive and repulsive.
Balls of plasma seem at times to appear from nowhere, even emerging from the ground or from bodies of open water when conditions are apparently right for them. They are seen more easily at night, but if certain suppositions are correct and so-called ‘UFOs’ possessing a uniform grey colouration during daylight hours are the same objects, then this could explain a great deal. Most importantly, science (and even more importantly, perhaps, a lot of UFO ‘believers’) would be forced to admit that these were natural phenomena and begin investigating them properly at last rather than as an occasional curiosity. You can’t seriously suggest to this author that such a widespread phenomenon is even remotely ‘harmless’ to air traffic!
The energy of the discharge is what gives it its colour, and again, this is relevant to the ‘Electric Universe’ theory because here, the colour or brightness of a star is not related to its size or composition, but to the localised electrical stress to which it is subjected by the ambient galactic current. So higher energy input corresponds to an output of increasingly blue-wavelength light, and low energy input to an output of increasingly red-wavelength light; and we note that accounts of these objects at night (UFOs, not stars, in this particular case) cover a range of colours, whereas similar objects during the day, subjected to bright sunlight, are said to appear a metallic grey colour. This is a clear indication that we must be careful when we try to interpret any phenomena of this type. It is interesting that some night-time UFOs are often said to exhibit (a) different colours of light, and (b) colours which change correspondingly with their activity. Interestingly, there seems to be plenty of observational evidence that some UFOs, at least, have some form of electrical-gravitic propulsion system – assuming that they are guided craft rather than natural phenomena.
The beginnings of an obfuscatory system begin to arise before our eyes. Since these localised, ball-lightning phenomena have been known from antiquity, they are not in fact unfamiliar. Technology products which use a similar mechanism for levitation and aerial motion can therefore be dismissed as something else, hence plausibly denied. The point of which being that a technology product can therefore be distanced from oneself, i.e. the obfuscating party, by keeping such things obscure, mysterious and remote in technological terms from the befuddled observer. It has not escaped this author’s attention that visual observations are usually at the limit of resolution (i.e. observable distance) due either to the resolving power of the observer’s eyes or that of any recording device (such as a cell phone camera) which they happen to have to hand when the object is sighted, a situation which the gradual (and by now virtually complete) transition from light-sensitive film to CCD technology has not improved. Another problem relating to more modern technology is that, when zooming in on a distant object, the actual shape of the object is completely lost as the light passing through to the sensor is stopped down by the iris diaphragm; the result is often a diamond shape, and this is only confirming that the camera is working properly!
There is another connected phenomenon which should be mentioned. As mentioned above, a theoretical upper limit is placed upon the possible age of the Earth, based upon what can be observed, and similarly for the universe itself. In the case of the latter, one branch of ‘evidence’ is said to be the ‘cosmic microwave background’, which is supposed to be akin to an ‘echo’ of the ‘Big Bang’ (to use the late Fred Hoyle’s comical term). One thing we notice in scientific accounts generally is the tendency to try and fix some kind of ‘datum line’ to events, in much the same way as the birth of Christ was taken by Christians, so that each year thereafter was referred to as ‘in the Year of Our Lord . . .’. But history, even in the debased and conveniently sanitised version presented to us, clearly did not begin with the birth of Christ; that, however, is an issue for another discussion. We merely note here that the ‘Big Bang’ is an hypothesis resting upon very shaky (and clearly falsifiable) foundations; and that excessive expenditure upon experimental equipment cannot produce ‘facts’ when the underlying data contradict the theory. So attempts to estimate the age of the Earth can only be as good as the methodology used, and if that methodology should prove unsound . . . the data produced are nonsense. Think about that the next time you hear an expression like: “The age of X has been reliably dated to Y by carbon dating.”
The reason why the ‘cosmic microwave background’ might not be allowable is simply this: As mentioned above, according to NASA’s own measurements, the universe is 99% plasma. Plasma conducts electricity, therefore massive amounts of electricity are constantly passing through virtually every point in the cosmos. The passage of electrical current through a conductive material produces magnetic fields, and we are talking here about massive currents passing through huge conductors. High-energy magnetic fields produce radiation. So electromagnetic radiation – including microwaves – can be produced anywhere, at any time, and therefore cannot be adduced to be evidence of anything except the presence of plasma, currents and magnetic fields at the moment of observation, in the location in which it is observed. Er . . . that’s it.
So we might ask why it is that a sort of ‘artificial event horizon’ (to co-opt a term from astronomy and cosmology) could be thought so necessary? The answer is that it is a kind of mind control – an artificial temporal and psychological barrier beyond which it is not deemed necessary for the ordinary mind to go, at least in the minds of those who would control us. We become more easily controlled by being divorced from the true past, in which context we would see everything as it really is – unnatural and unreal, and . . . controlled. Remember that previously, we began to understand that history as we know it is only partly true, due to a combination of selective destruction and wilful fabrication; and the provision of an artificial datum line, as well as an artificial time line originating therefrom, is all part of this. Obfuscation, fabrication, and plausible deniability have given us the world we know today; a world in which one phenomenon is hidden behind another, and whole areas of phenomenology are frozen completely out of any scientific discussion, simply to prevent the collapse of careers and industries which are of debatable utility to general humanity, and which we probably do not need . . . and probably never did in the first place. Oh, but they do generate an awful lot of profit!
The simple fact is that once one part of the puzzle falls out of place, once one card in the dubious house of cards buckles and flips out, the rest follows. For example: What would undermine the use of radioisotope pairs in the determination of the ages of rocks? It would be if the isotopes used had an origin different from that which is assumed by conventional science. And how would that happen? It would happen if they were actually created at an earlier time, by stupendous and catastrophic electrical events, events which encompassed and bathed the entire solar system, affecting all things therein equally, but probably later in time than the dating method would seem to indicate. This would mean that the origin of those isotopes was instantaneous at some point in time, and even that the matrix in which they were formed may not have been pre-existing. This might also explain why large collections of discrete crystals are usually to be found buried in rocks.
But it would also represent an artificial ‘datum line’ of destruction; perhaps it destroyed everything on Earth that it encountered and left only broken remains and rubble behind; again, a notion we should bear in mind when we see the shattered surfaces of other planets and moons and – almost certainly – when we observe the large-scale structures of our own Earth. The destruction of visible history would lead naturally to the construction of fables in the mind of those who came afterwards. And later, some form of ‘rationalism’ would be instigated when it was realised that the survival of past events in metaphorical or legendary form could be used to obfuscate those events, using the claim that they were ‘unscientific’ and ‘mere folklore’ (or other convenient expressions to that effect). But this only serves to show us that the rise of ‘rationalism’ after the Middle Ages is an attempt to hide and disguise whatever message was being passed down to us by folklore. And that is mind control.
If so-called ‘UFOs’ are in fact natural, as some have speculated, how might we explain their sudden appearances? The origins of ‘Earth Lights’ may well be due to the release of localised geo-electrical stresses (as seen in some of the work of Dr. Michael Persinger [6]). Interestingly, a similar proposition has more recently been made regarding the so-called ‘Hessdalen Lights’, which have been the subject of ongoing research for many years (see, for example, [7]). In the context of the ‘Electric Universe’, such a release of energy on a large scale is proposed to lead to an overall decrease of electrical stresses on a larger body by forcing fission into a larger and smaller one – the charge is then spread over a greater surface area, but also this necessarily leads to the formation of a smaller body, and hence, this could be the simplest mechanism for the formation not only of planets from their parent stars, but also smaller bodies from their parent planets (think ‘the moons of Jupiter’). This illustrates the scalability of electrical phenomena, and it is also disconnected from any ‘Uniformitarian’ notion based upon the observation of purely ‘terrestrial’ phenomena; as stated previously, phenomena based upon the prevalent conditions at the Earth’s surface cannot be invoked for other known celestial bodies, many of which do not have an atmosphere or even conditions suitable for liquid water!
Since modern science is largely based upon ‘Uniformitarian’ principles, the whole enterprise is undermined when these are challenged. And since the universe is actually open to anyone who cares to observe it, when challenging observations arise, the only way to maintain the status quo is to insist that they cannot be true “because [insert mainstream scientific garbage here].” By obfuscation of the boundaries of reality and illusion, this status quo is maintained, but for how much longer, as the prevalence of both conflicting data and emerging paradigms becomes crushing?
If people were really well-educated, they would accept the possibility that there could be more than a single possible interpretation for any single observation or phenomenon; they would question things more openly because their minds were correspondingly open to new ideas. But modern ‘education’ seems to be part of a larger effort to delimit the margins of possible thinking, so that the kind of ‘disambiguation’ promulgated here is difficult, if not downright impossible; and what passes as ‘knowledge’ is merely the ability to memorise and regurgitate indoctrinated ‘factoids’ on demand. But this would imply, would it not, that so-called ‘science’ was in fact little more than ‘pseudo-science’ itself, because its practitioners were wilfully skirting and avoiding any discussion of important parts of wider reality, which anyone can see in their daily lives, and trying constantly to fob people off with pat answers just to get them off the practitioners’ backs?
So we approach the end of this diatribe by returning to the observations of UFOs. The key issue here is not whether they exist; the problem is that there is (and always has been) acknowledged to be a small percentage of observations which conventional thinking is unable (or unwilling) to separate out into ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’, and my contention here has been, firstly, that this is part of a long-term arrangement to hide or otherwise disguise ‘something’ by obscurity and obfuscation, which by rights should have been ‘disambiguated’ from other phenomena long ago; and secondly, that this is preventing the progression of science at the paradigmatic level due to the steadfast but dogmatic and illogical refusal to encompass and assimilate changes which would lead naturally to a more objective view of the universe, and not just our own meagre cosmic backyard. Unknown objects observed in the sky exist, and we can be quite certain that they are not all piloted by beings from another galaxy; but all too often, agents of scientific (or other) authority are not explaining them properly. Either they don’t know because there has been insufficient publicly-funded research (and I would start to worry about this if I were a regular airline passenger), or we are being willingly misled according to some unknown ‘agenda’ which is trying to keep something secret. Whichever it may be, it is the population’s collective intelligence which is being insulted at all levels.
* It is of interest to note that after the Revolution, a process was put into practice to ‘simplify’ Chinese characters, ostensibly with the aim of increasing literacy by reducing the number and visual complexity of traditional characters, but some of us find this suspicious . . . and obfuscatory. One obvious result being, of course, the eventual inability to read an ‘older’ version of one’s own language, if one is a native Chinese speaker. Does this mean, then, that the millions of documents in their archives, which were written in Traditional Chinese, will eventually become illegible?
[1] http://www.californiasciencecenter.org/Exhibits/AirAndSpace/MissionToThePlanets/Explorer1/Explorer1.php
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vannevar_Bush
[3] http://rockartblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/lightning-stones-and-quartz.html
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_the_Earth
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neptune
[6] http://persingerpublications.com/, click on links as required to see materials.
[7] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2632650/Has-mystery-glowing-Norwegian-orbs-solved-Expert-claims-underground-battery-creates-amazing-light-show.html
[8] http://www.ufosightingsdaily.com
[9] http://m.teachastronomy.com/astropedia/article/Thermal-Radiation-from-Gas-Giant-Planets
[10] https://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2008/arch08/080124bostick.htm
