One half of the entire population is below average intelligence. Be patient people. Which side of the line you’re on is likely a mere toe length. These are your people—and you theirs.
“The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence”—Charles Bukowski
You are infected with the specific knowledge you are attracted to based on your surroundings and genetics. This feature of intelligence is improved by criticizing the other side of the line, which line you know not which side of it you’re on.
Trans-women are not real women, hence the modifier—trans. Faux women, trans women, transgender women (more disclaimers) are actors, biological men, transvestites, usurping the safe spaces of women and girls. Being incapable of being a man does not make you a woman. Being a man was never very easy but today, where have all the real men gone?
Now domesticated shadows of our former selves, we eat from a trough of grocery store chains that provide the most economically feasible pseudo-foods, without any caloric output on our part. We live in homes we cannot build and sit for hours a day in front of a screen. Men are already basically modern women.
Trans is an adjective modifying the noun woman. Legally, a disclaimer is a repudiation or denial of responsibility or connection.
“Trans woman” is an admission of non relation to women. If you have to add “trans”, you are not a woman. How does one “feel” they are a woman if they actually are? If you think you’re a woman you are not. Real, needs no modifier. It is obvious to everyone but the one imposing their trans-ideology.
Manhood is hard and it appears the quickest way out of your inherent responsibility as a man, is to claim the rights and privileges of being a women.
It is interesting how this phenomenon resides in groups subject to its influence. It is not a biological difference but a mental one.
This is what we have fought for. Technology has led to this. The pinnacle of feminism is Only Fans. Women “don’t need no man” any more (except as subscribers) to pimp themselves into slavery where they make so much money they can never get out of it. The pimp is the app, the well paid slaves cannot do anything but sell their sexuality for a well paid lifestyle, while adding nothing to the economy—and birth control, now having all the emotionless sex with complete freedom, electing to punch a time clock or sell their body for $14.99 a month. And “men” are buying it. If this is what we have to offer we are doomed.
It just strikes me as odd with the world of equality at our fingertips we choose to selfie, pose naked and imitate the mechanics of breeding rituals without actually breeding. This is where secular society has failed to take us in the world without religion. I think we can do better than that.
Was the universe fine tuned for life, or is life fine tuned for the universe?
The universe isn’t fine-tuned for life, rather, life on earth arose because it could. Just as in the case of biological evolution, life is fine-tuned for the universe, rather than the other way around. —Lawrence Krauss.
Postulating the existence of a God that has nothing in common with us, doesn’t solve anything but only raises more questions.
What we fail to understand now, is the long and winding road how we got here. We do not even know who we are now, let alone where we came from and how, before we were aware of being aware.
I never realized as a believer how insignificant my beliefs were until I lost them.
I’ve been sober now 9 years. My first 15 years of life included a heavy dose of gospel indoctrination. that took me another 35 to sort out—a gospel that never ended and never produced the promised outcomes. These last 9 years have been my own. Religious sobriety has been an eye opener—no proclivity to sin (as promised) or hate god, but not much the opposite either. As I celebrate my 60th birthday I now contemplate my final 30 years.
I’m not often right, but in a world where feelings are a virtue, I must be on the right track. I feel better, healthier, more optimistic, and less bothered by beliefs than ever. One thing has remained consistent —that feeling I had when I realized, “I got this, I always have”, has never dissipated.
Knowing full well the core nature of reality is not real, science continues to chug along in a religious, materialistic attitude.
Every theory we know is ultimately wrong and will eventually be replaced, yet is expertly purposed for its usefulness in manipulating the *particles and elements.
Christianity thinks that belief itself is a fundamental virtue. They manipulate the inherent nature of humans into an assumption that this is real, in spite of its own teaching.
Science knows it isn’t real and lives as though it is. Christianity believes it is real and lives as though it isn’t.
The first time in human history patients are encouraged to formulate their own diagnosis AND prescribe their own treatment, which may (and does) include self assisted mutilation.
If humanism, secularism, or feminism is going to gain the trust of a religious or midstream society, we’re going to have to do better than this. We have to say no.
Frankly, education, universities, and government was better, life was more enjoyable when religions were in charge.
If you don’t believe me, go to a local school board meeting and just watch the administrators try to untie the hands in their knots. They are paralyzed and powerless because they are afraid to offend a tiny minority that will test no limit to have their diagnosis be the cure for what ails the normal world.
In medicine we were always trained not to participate in a mental health delusion but to steer the patient back to reality. Why has that changed? Are these the people you want to make decisions for your sons and daughters? They have hijacked the narrative and own the asylum. Why else would it be risky to even say such a thing?
Do white people lack culture? White culture is hardly noticeable because it is currently banned, but it is still the background, the canvas, the infrastructure. It provides the platforms we perform on. It is a selective history and discovery without becoming what is discovered. It is appreciation. It isn’t perfect, as compared to other options, whatever those are.
It is said that white people can’t dance, but what they do is make dance floors. True there is not much típico tradition now associated with white culture. That is like saying it isn’t noticed because it is everywhere, but it also builds the soapbox’s people complain from, about them.
White culture is also an economic system of slavery on its own color. This system is desirable to color culture too, because it produces a lot of shiny things, and technology that most people want when they are introduced to them. But it comes at a cost. It is a stressful way to live in this system of tax burden, broke, or bust, we must pay the man.
A select few, hyper driven individuals beat the system then become the cog in it, ie; if a man develops a successful software and becomes a billionaire, suddenly he is also an expert on education, vaccinations, farming, and land grabbing. In reality his money is all he’s worth. He caught a lucky break with good timing and aggression and now he is above celebrity, while simultaneously being a dummy. Cash is king in white culture. And it spreads inversely. This type of person gets special privilege because others want his money, which he deals out piecemeal to keep his fame in tact.
It isn’t a culture but the culture, currently. But it is also cultured. It is art, music, movies, literature, and entertainment. Because it is the dominant culture, it can also mean “customs” and “social behavior.
Ethnic vs White Culture. It may not look like it, but white culture is the result of many ethnicities melded into one. There are still sub groups, regionally diverse foods and customs, just as Black African ethnicities are not one, but many. For instance—
Where do you find the tallest people in the world? Where do you find the shortest? Of course “Africa” has more genetic diversity than anywhere else in the world, so it is with culture. Migration is where subspecies came into play. People not accustomed to diverse, black ethnicity, grouped all blacks in one category, which they are not. The same is true of white—Irish and Poles, or Dutch and Russian, are as diverse as the variety of Native Americans, or First Nations people.
VS Tradition—while white is a planning future using final religion, while ethnic is more based on traditions, the past, and ancestors which are many. It is good food and hair, drum circles and a variety of clothings, tattoos, musics, and mythologies, that all stand out in amazing color on a white background. It is supposed to be the best of everyone and everything. It is the Mola and the leathern drum, the Pollera and Montuno, or the Shuka cloth.
All idolized and memorialized by the underlying culture which even white is subject to, benefits from, and is oppressed by its homogeneous variety.
The hierarchy of victimhood is a great game. Now you can even claim victimhood if you are born privileged. It is a contest in America to identify as a victim based on how much privilege your were born with. I can now virtuously deprecate my race simply because I was audacious enough to be born to privilege.
These kids on campuses today are claiming identity with the oppressed at places like Yale. How in the world can you identify of oppression while attending Yale? You have all the power and want all the victimization at the same time?
America today is barely different from the 51 social castes of North Korea, where, if your grandfather was a land owner you get lower social points. Owning land must mean you’ve oppressed someone in the past. There is no escaping this class, unless by a genealogical stroke of genius you find another relative that was a communist—that will put you slightly back in social grace, at least a wee bit.
Here you can claim whatever you want to victim as, black, brown, and now even white, and the more social Justice acronyms the better. Finding your affiliation can be tricky these days with the colored down gene pool, but if you can, it’s worth it’s weight in virtue. If at first you don’t succeed special status, make something up. Be anything but happy in your own skin. The payoffs aren’t great, but the virtue signals carry more weight that smoke signals (cultural appropriation) if of course, you hold your own feet to the fire and do nothing to it or about it.
The easiest route to self abasement is to become a Christian—the largest minority majority of oppressed oppressors on earth. It’s a neat trick when you realize secular laws have been written mostly by believers. I’m sure there is someone else to blame for that.
As more people leave the churches, maybe they should also leave the victim mentality along with it. What are you and I specifically doing to oppress anyone?
Are your beliefs rooted in logic, or tradition. Truth is like orientation and navigation. The orientation determines the desired path, navigation tells us how to adjust. We may find through navigation that we may need to re orient, or change direction. That’s not the same as wandering with an unverifiable belief. Truth is retrospective. There is a lot of truth that is not available to us unless we are willing to go through significant transformation.
That your method can remain unaltered to gain access to truth is deeply challenged if not outright false.
No scientific theory either, is free of assumptions. In fact the assumption is the core basis of the scientific theory, eg; If you grant me X, I can explain all these other things. Most scientific theory grants reductionism (X) as fundamental. That the smaller and smaller we examine any feature, the more fundamental properties we will encounter. Combining these tiny features just so, creates consciousness. That is an assumption unproven beyond any stretch besides imagination for over 50 years. Maybe it’s time to change directions?
This has been a scientific assumption for so long, yet now we are finding the inverse to be true regarding fundamental reality.
What I currently like most about The Tower of Babel, God had to stop them from building the tower to heaven because they were “about to accomplish the thing that they had set out to do, and nothing could be restrained from them”. Meaning, there are other ways to salvation (liberation, enlightenment, heaven) besides Yahweh. We can’t have anyone knowing that.
They didn’t destroy Babel and confuse the language because it was a false temple, but because it was true. The evidence is right there from the words of god. And confuse the language they did. Not by changing everyone’s dialect but by introducing confusion through word play of monotheism, by restricting the power of the individual to chart his own path.
The tower was likely a center of spiritual enlightenment, a non-denominational meditative center. An intolerable thought to monotheistic ideology. “Don’t let them see they don’t need us!”
The churches provide nothing you can’t get with a campfire and a drum—or a good stretch of solitude. That’s why you must “meet together oft” to keep the charade in play.
I am not an atheist—I just don’t believe in God. Religion has left me no choice. Being an atheist I don’t believe in this god and that is the standard paradigm. But if I have to believe, it doesn’t exist. No belief between anyone is a consistent description of anything. Nothing is consistent except by memorization, but those aren’t your perceptions of god. They are a consensus of ambivalent confusions.
If God is omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, and omni-everything to encapsulate an unrestrained supreme deity, what then, could be in the universe that is not god? Your superlatives betray your doctrine.
The Hebrew god is all these attributes. But really, with all these elucidations only creates more confusion. It would have to be everything, including you as an extension of it. There is no line it doesn’t cross, no realm it doesn’t permeate, no organism it isn’t. Christians are actually pantheist or deists, if you carry the logic beyond its restricted norms, using their own adjectives. According to their own terms, everything is god, (except for you), right?
Traditionally, expressing this knowledge about yourself would be blasphemous enough to get you killed, condemned, or at least excommunicated. It’s hard to control people that knew their divine reality. But really what this knowledge does is put the game in jeopardy. Who would put up with this bullshit if they knew the truth? There is only one power the sim possess—it can shut itself off.
It is not my fault I don’t believe in this god described by the majority religions. It falls short on its own argument and modifiers. If it were real I wouldn’t have to believe it, have to convince myself and others of its existence, because unless you were it, something so distinct from you would be as plain as the nose on your face. If it were distinct from you it would be obvious and unavoidable that this god existed, yet no one can see it. Can a program detect the programmer? Can the curser see the mouse? Dammit!
If there is a god it does not know it. The same as if you were god and do not know it. There would be nothing outside of itself to contrast, just as there is no thing outside of you you could call god without it also being you.
No, there is no deity outside of you or it is not a deity, unless this is a simulation and we just can’t see the programmer through the impulses and diodes. If we did see that god we would find he is an intelligent creature that has no remorse for his sims, and can play and play the loop in the game that causes the most trivial of killing sprees where all his characters have multiple lives.
Below the bridge of faith is littered with the bones of those who thought they had it.
What is the difference between thinking you have faith and having it, for all you “never were a real Christian” people? There are no former believers—just atheists and agnostics who at one time thought they believed.
To investigate your faith means you’ve already lost it. To purposely eye the underpinnings is to admit you don’t actually trust it. Trust that!
Real faith is blind and those who actually think they see are most blinded by it. To profess your faith means you’ve already lost it and seek validation. Independence is a hard thing swallowed, but your faith was your own. It cannot be transmitted nor can it be hidden away in silence.
To dare into the infrastructure mean you have already outgrown it. The paradox lies in knowing, vs the insecurity of being quiet.
Real faith lies at the bottom, in the bones of those who dared to believe and actually tested the words. Had they only done some research before buying and had dared to use reason and respond to that with honesty.
“Suppression of beliefs is detrimental irrespective of their truth status. If the belief is true, suppressing it will hamper true descriptions of the world. If the belief is false, the assertion of false beliefs will lead to debate which in turn may lead to and deepen understanding of true beliefs. Finally, most of us can rarely see the whole truth, particularly when it comes to social, religious, and political discourse, so the only way of approaching it is through “reconciling and combining of opposites.” So whatever the epistemic status of a belief, suppressing it is harmful to the discovery of truth”—John Stuart Mill
“Universe 25″—An experiment. “Population peaked at 2,200 mice and thereafter exhibited a variety of abnormal, often destructive, behaviors including refusal to engage in courtship, females abandoning their young. By the 600th day, the population was on its way to extinction. Though physically able to reproduce, the mice had lost the social skills required to mate.
“Despite (or perhaps because) their every need was being catered for, mothers would abandon their young or merely just forget about them entirely, leaving them to fend for themselves. The mother mice also became aggressive towards trespassers to their nests, with males that would normally fill this role banished to other parts of the utopia. This aggression spilled over, and the mothers would regularly kill their young. Infant mortality in some territories of the utopia reached 90 percent”.
“The population peaked at 2,200 – short of the actual 3,000-mouse capacity of the “universe” – and from there came the decline. Many of the mice weren’t interested in breeding and retired to the upper decks of the enclosure, while the others formed into violent gangs below, which would regularly attack and cannibalize other groups as well as their own. The low birth rate and high infant mortality combined with the violence, and soon the entire colony was extinct. During the mousepocalypse, food remained ample, and their every need completely met”.
No social program or religion can thwart the collapse—it can only enhance it. The best thing is to do nothing, create hardships, or go to war. Anything short of that we are doomed.
Since there are no gender neutral nouns or pronouns in Spanish, how are we going to handle that? I guess Spanish is a bigotophobic language and should be eliminated, in all fairness of course to the .006% of gender neutral citizens.
Spanish has a binary grammar gender system, differentiating masculine and feminine. The gender of nouns agrees with determinants and adjectives, so gender is a very pervasive feature. Nouns are always assigned a gender; from a grammatical point of view, there are no gender-neutral nouns.
It is also important that you know that officially, there is no gender-neutral language in Portuguese.
In French, there is no neutral grammatical gender — all nouns must be coded as masculine or feminine. Forcing an ungendered word into the vocabulary messes up the remaining context of any speech.
In Russian, every word, with the possible exception of adverbs, has a grammatical gender. “It cannot be removed or neutralized,” without destroying the remaining context.
Currently in Chinese written pronouns are divided between the masculine human 他 (he, him), feminine human 她 (she, her), and non-human 它 (it), and similarly in the plural.
But wait, there’s more! Gender fad is reshaping language debate around the world. Evidence that sex and gender actually are what they’ve always seemed to be.
If reincarnation is real, what is it exactly that is being reintroduced? It certainly isn’t the biology, the dna, or any physical likeness. It is data that is recycled—everything is data and electrical impulses. Even your food is measured in calories, or energy content.
Our physical world is a system of inseparable differences. Everything exists with everything else. Left and right are one process. If thoughts are real they are permanent data structures that come and go and transcend life and death.
Life isn’t serious. It is completely unnecessary. Why is there something rather than nothing? For his pleasure it was imagined into existence. It is for play—to relive the boredom’s of infinite living.
Theorists such as Roger Penrose, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics, have conjectured that quantum effects underpin consciousness, but this theory is just as lacking as any other theory. Researchers cannot even agree on what form a theory of consciousness should take.
The Polaroid is maybe the best example of creation—the image appears all at once out of the blackness, yet nothing of substance is added to it.
I spent the weekend at the Spokane Arena watching a dozen basketball games.
It is well established here that the private schools in the US suck the the best athletic talent from the public school system. Wellpinit and Neah Bay’s state championships last night was Rezball taking on Goliaths, with the boys beating a 9 time state champion Christian school at the actual game. 12 Native American kids from the Rez, beating a rigged system with the actual game of basketball, playing kids from their own little community to topple a dynasty.
IMO, the best win in WIAA history! Hoosiers step aside —I hope someone makes a movie out of this This is what happens when the “underprivileged” decide to saddle-up and become great.
Wellpinit Redskins. 25-0 undefeated season boys state champions.
Neah Bay Red Devils. 22-1 Girls state champions.
Two Native American teams from nowhere-land did it with Incredible tenacity! It was a privilege to watch you both play.
We’ve created a world and it’s going terribly wrong according to plan. Life forms of all kind prey upon each other in both offense and defense. None of the pieces know why they seem to exist, but think it is a most important endeavor none the less, everything that happens is pre approved.
Each piece plays its desired role even if it doesn’t want to. Even refusing to play serves a certain role. .
As they imagine knowledge and construct societies, intelligence will gradually realize the elements in the game are not as real as they thought they were, then not real at all. Regardless they still feel compelled to play, even if it’s so others can.
By manipulating the data they are imagined of, they create hacks in the game—and using synthetic add-ons, destroy or alter the game-board bit by bit—all the while attempting to protect and nurture life and comfort. Virtue signaling will be expressed as “caring”, about the planet, but few will actually act on that virtue.
In the end we will grow tired and end it for them (if they wont end it themselves) roll it up and put it away. One became all, then all will become one, or none. Everything that appears to have happened will never even be a thought—like an unremembered dream.
Key pieces in the game will possess buttons that can end the game at any time. It is of dire consequence to press the button and as equally as disastrous if they don’t.
The most important ritual of all will be “the aha moment”, where certain members (occasionally entire generations) will think they have solved the quandary of existence, only to find that such awakening will stunt societies even further. Feeling right will trump survival and the most virtuous will cause the most pain and suffering on behalf of its own population.
Many will profess to find a way out—a way to cheat anxiety and own an eventual state of bliss. This total bliss will give way to the monotony of boredom. The game must go on, mustn’t it?
It will go on but you won’t. Unless you redefine what you are, providing you think you already know what that is.
If Johnny thinks he is also Jason, Billie, and god Haila, he/they/them has a multi-personality disorder. But if Larry thinks he is Jessica and changes his/her body with blockers and surgery, somehow that isn’t a disorder? Why is one considered a mental defect and the other is not?
Psychiatric co-morbidities are much more common in gender dysphoric patients than other candidates.
“The frequency of additional personality disorders was 81.4%. The most frequent being narcissistic personality disorder (57.1%) and the least was borderline personality disorder. The average number of [comorbid] diagnoses was 3 per patient”.
Conclusion: The findings of this study revealed that the prevalence of personality disorders was higher among the participants, and the most frequent personality disorder was narcissistic personality disorder (57.1%), and borderline personality disorder was less common among the studied patients. Keywords: Personality disorder, Gender identity disorder
The correct response to gender dysphoria is not to concede to a generally narcissistic demand with the accompanying gaslight (see gender studies) but to assist the patient with compassion to accept who and what they are without surgical mutilation.
Gender science is like a bikini—the only place you’re forbidden to look is at the parts that are covered up. The common thread is getting gaslit by a majority population of narcissists and obeisance of the PC masses who have traded common sense for tolerance.
If the first half of the twentieth century was the era of the technical engineers, the second half may well be the era of the social engineers—and the twenty-first century, I suppose, will be the era of World Controllers, the scientific caste system and Brave New World… The prophecies made in 1931 are coming true much sooner than I thought they would… The nightmare of total organization has emerged from the safe, remote future and is now awaiting us, just around the next corner. Aldous Huxley—Brave New World Revisited
“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism.
Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us”. ~Neil Postman—Amusing Ourselves to Death
Not to mention the environmental demands such information consumes.
How Much Energy Does Cloud Data Storage Use? Data centers use between 10 and 50 times as much power per floor space as a typical office building over the same period of time. The U.S. DOE estimates this to be around 50 megawatts of power per center. That’s enough to power 80,000 typical homes for one year.
Data centers are expected to consume 20% of the world’s power supply by 2025. There are 8,000 data centers in the world. Among them, 33% of the data centers are located in the United States
The mound builders were in the process of building the pyramids, though they likely didn’t know it. Raising their ceremonial grounds—a thousand years laying the groundwork when interrupted by European settlers, the mounds contained ancestral remains, positioned carefully and built upon generations, never to be capped in stone.
Monks mound, Ohio
How did the previous great societies build their buildings? Perhaps they cracked the code. “Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.”
A pyramid is the extended phenotype of the mature and advanced human society. It is the capstone of a naturally occurring technology—out of respect to our ancestors in a spirit of cooperation, it just happens.
The life cycles and rhythms of society are long and as often as not, fail in errant ways and selfishness. Will we leave no enduring mark on the world? Maybe a dam or two, resting on the deserts of dead ecosystems.
But prior civilizations have left the mark. The accomplished life cycle of a mature society—they crack the code and then disappear. What else is left to do once you beat the game?
Only by putting aside our petty differences and the fake outrage dominating religion and other movements, that take personal responsibility and kick it down the road. We have a long way to go and apparently, a short time to get there.
Beavers build their dams and birds build their nests, but what is the extended phenotype of the human being? It takes many apparent life cycles to reach old age and wisdom, but what we do when it’s all figured out, is build a cooperative monument to be discovered by the next group of humans. An unquestionable mark—they did it!
I wonder how many advanced civilizations have discovered and excavated the great pyramids of Egypt and Mesoamérica? They’ve been around quite some time throughout the rise and falls of many societies. Nobody has ever figured it out by sheer will—it is merely something we do if left to the natural course of existence.
Look familiar?
Cracking the code is a voluntary effort of cooperation and civility—not a system or mass movement, or really any effort at all. It isn’t something some one will figure out. We’re all in this together.
How to get the ignorant to carry your best kept secrets through mythology
There is evidence the Old Testament is scientific knowledge preserved in mythology.
None of the stories are true, but inside the traditions disguise the secrets of creation, matter, and the elements. The numbers discovered through Gematria illustrate this at a compelling level.
There is a strong possibility that key biblical stories allude to a natural truth. Not that the stories actually happened, but the mythology is coded with hidden scientific knowledge from a very ancient past. Religion in their current ignorance now believes the stories—but the stories were never really meant to be believed, but represent the chemistry of the periodic table and creation.
Enter Gematria—and the rediscovery of what’s again been discovered, or the construction of stories that coincide with numerical values. In this case, the periodic table of elements.
In the beginning God hydrogen created the heavens and the earth…
The biblical text was not a religious book, but came from a collection of scientific structures recited in mythology to be remembered. This process is not unusual at all in many ancient cultures—the more outrageous the story the easier it is to commit that imagery to memory. Introducing monotheism is the audacious attention getter—the rest falls right in line with the elements.
In the spirit of brevity, the Hebrew alphabet and the Torah (first five books of the Old Testament) coincides with the elements of the periodic table. And that all 21 letters of the alphabet are derivatives of the Aleph, which numerically is 1, hydrogen—or nature, or Elohim, the source of all other elements. The rest represents the other elements and coincide with the numerical value and how they are bonded and what mass, weight, and orbitals they contain.
In the beginning god created the heavens and the earth. The astonishing part at the time is the transition to a monotheistic deity —a pretty memorable claim, but in breaking down the letters and the sequence of words in their order we find all the elements—92 distinct roots of the story of creation are divided such that the first 86 appear in the verses relating the first six periods of creation (Genesis 1:1 through 1:31), while the last 6 (the inert or noble elements) are found in the verses relating the Sabbath.
This article HERE explains in greater detail the elements and how they are coded in the Torah. Looking back at the structures that were built and left behind, we can only assume what other knowledge the ancient world possessed. But I have a feeling they were much more advanced than we can really imagine—but like every other culture with an oral mythology, the stories themselves were ridiculous. But the meaning encoded in the myth was the secret knowledge of existence.
Now out of context and having no idea what that was, the believer believes the stories themselves to be true—but as we can tell from even the Exodus itself, it was a fable of zero evidence—but a story to preserve important knowledge.
What makes you think human beings are sentient and aware? There’s no evidence for it. Human beings never think for themselves, they find it too uncomfortable. For the most part, members of our species simply repeat what they are told-and become upset if they are exposed to any different view. The characteristic human trait is not awareness but conformity, and the characteristic result is religious warfare.
Other animals fight for territory or food; but, uniquely in the animal kingdom, human beings fight for their ‘beliefs.’ The reason is that beliefs guide behavior which has evolutionary importance among human beings. But at a time when our behavior may well lead us to extinction, I see no reason to assume we have any awareness at all. We are stubborn, self-destructive conformists. Any other view of our species is just a self-congratulatory delusion. Next question”. ~Michael Crichton
As I stumbled across an apologetic video about the proof of god, he describes a Rembrandt where on the painting is the artist signature.
He then goes on to describe the double helix and the pattern of sulfuric bridges that connect the two strands together. The location of these bridges is at 10-5-6-5, and it repeats over and over.
According to the video, 10-5-6-5 corresponds with the letters YHVH of the Hebrew alphabet—the name of god.
With this explanation, God left his signature on every cell of every painting.
If in fact this is not coincidence and you are coded in the name of god, I would think that is because you are god, not a painting of it.
If in fact YHVH is the name of god—I AM, encoded in our DNA, as well as every other animal, it isn’t the signature of the artist, but it is the artist.
Set aside, if you’re a believer looking for evidence this is paydirt. But typical of believers, god is somehow a separate entity—they couldn’t possible be responsible for all this.
If any of this were true, it would more likely illustrate that ancient civilizations were much more advanced than we believe possible, with the Bible encoding those discoveries in mythology, which is typical of mythology.
“And Noah was perfect in his generations”—aka, his dna had not been compromised as “the whole earth had become corrupted”. We are nearing that technology again.
I requested a couple of things from ChatGPT. Here are the unedited answers
Me—Write a haiku in king James English about atheist intellect.
ChatGPT—Wise in their reasoning, Atheist minds do ponder deep, Truth they do uncover.
Me—300 word blog post on the best arguments for atheism
Chat GPT—Atheism is the belief that there is no god or gods. While atheism has been around for thousands of years, it has become more widely discussed and debated in recent times. Here are some of the best arguments for atheism:
Lack of empirical evidence: One of the main arguments for atheism is the lack of empirical evidence for the existence of a deity. There has been no scientific proof that can conclusively prove the existence of a god or gods.
The problem of evil: This argument states that if an all-powerful and all-loving deity exists, why does evil exist in the world? The presence of evil, suffering and natural disasters contradicts the idea of an all-powerful and all-loving deity.
The argument from nonbelief: This argument states that if there was an all-powerful and all-knowing deity, it would know who would believe in it and who wouldn’t. If this deity wanted everyone to believe in it, it would make it impossible for anyone not to believe.
Scientific explanations: Science has provided many explanations for phenomena that were once thought to be the work of a deity. For example, the explanation of natural disasters as a result of geological activity has diminished the need for a supernatural explanation.
Multiple gods: If the existence of one deity is unprovable, it is equally unprovable that there is more than one deity. The existence of many gods would also raise questions about which deity is the correct one to worship.
These are just a few of the arguments that support atheism. While the belief in a deity is deeply personal and subjective, it is important to consider the arguments and evidence presented. Ultimately, the decision to believe in a deity or not is a personal one and should be based on an individual’s own thoughts and beliefs.
In conclusion, atheism is a valid and important perspective that challenges the existence of a deity. It is important to consider the arguments for atheism and engage in open-minded discussions about this topic.
Are these the best arguments? I think we can do a little better.
The creative power (god) has taken shape the way we are shaped. The most imperative venture is to preserve this gift of life elsewhere should something go wrong—keeping us in play should cataclysm strike.
Whatever the case, space travel is a way to save god—to insure that life, awareness, and perception in the universe live on forever.
“The theologians have myths, the scientists have theories—and both ends in mystery and ignorance”, Ray Bradbury
Either way space travel is an insurance policy of continuity—to insure that human life continues unbroken. To save god in its current image is our only legacy. Can we pull it off in time to beat the day of doom?
The wisdom of the Tao and the problem of social justice
Masculinity is order, femininity is chaos. One is not better than the other—both principles are equally necessary. The more order, the more tyranny. The more chaos the more possibility and freedom. Feminism and tranactivism is throwing the world out of balance because feminism is masculine—demanding order and imposing that order more masculine than a healthy society can endure.
Now we have a large subset of of weak men marching with masculine women, when the antidote to order is not more order, but balance is the antidote to both.
By imposing a strict menu of acceptable beliefs, a small percentage of activist in their ignorance are upsetting a natural balance as outlined in many ancient texts.
The fact is, that complete order leads to certainty and then tyranny. Chaos leads to uncertainty and freedom. While activists in their ignorance (or malice) are trying to shoehorn a principle that will lead to the destruction of both. Already you must be careful what you say—and where is the freedom in that? Activists are fighting for something they already have. More laws will restrict freedom and therefore restrict happiness. I get the feeling their hatred is misplaced and men are not the problem— ignorance is.
Things are not at all what they appear to be—a fact of biology
It is a basic misunderstanding of genetics and generally inaccurate to use racial labels for DNA lineages that cut across supposed racial groups. DNA identifies us by lineage and not by race—a very distinct difference. The default mistake that most of us make, is assume that common racial characteristics will link us closer in the DNA lineage. That’s just the society we’ve grown up to “think racially”. But DNA has the best reputation in racial thinking.
Using mitochondrial DNA (tracing the mothers, mothers, mothers) “we find in every classroom that some of the students’closest maternal relatives belong to a different race than they do. These lineages do not follow common racial categories—but in fact our mitochondrial lineage tells a different story that race is not a biological reality”—Thomas Murphy, PhD. Anthropology, Bioanthropolgy, Edmonds College
Our racial concepts are biased. They are based on our politics—our ways of excluding and discriminating against each other are ways that are not supported by biology. Yet we take superficial appearances and then dump people into categories based upon those when our biology is much more complex than that.
Race is a social construct, not supported by a close look at human biology. Our physical features such as skin color, facial structure, or hair texture, typically associated with race, are inherited independently and cut across populations just like DNA lineage.
When we actually look at the biology of skin color, it has nothing to do with arguments on morality, goodness, or evil. Us and them are ridiculous in a world of DNA. Skin color evolves in response to the environment and to assume skin color is even a separate race is a social construct. Biology is clear—we are all one race. We are all one people. The habit of breaking things into categories is as destructive as it is useful.
Feminism has helped women revert to their natural, primate roles.
Unknowingly feminists have become polygamous/polyamorous by choice. Modern dating app data clearly illustrates this—most of the women are swiping right on the guys that are having all the sex, in spite of wanting a man to themselves. If you are an average guy on a dating app, get ready to destroy your self esteem.
What I find amusing is the pro choice —sex-with-whoever-you-want-culture, the women are choosing the same guys. There is even a fair amount of talk today, if you want an alpha male you are going to have to share him.
Women still want high achieving traditional men, but none of the women are raised to be wives—they are raised to be boss chicks, come with a high level of education and an attitude that “I don’t need no man”. They believe this entitles them to a high value traditional man—but this isn’t the kind of woman those men want. And it is the men that get to choose.
“If sex is all you have to offer, sex is all they’ll want” As women have become more masculine (contrary to evolutionary primate behavior) they have also found in increasing lonely and childless states—and when they realize they were given bad advice as girls, they are now women that competent men don’t want.
We may think we can outsmart evolution and our primate nature, but it seems the harder we try the more obvious it is that chimpanzees are our closest relative.
Getting glimpses outside of our normal perceptions
Everything we cannot perceive with our senses is not spiritual. It is simply what has been concealed from our field of view, as evolution has adapted species in the most direct way—for fitness and reproduction.
Getting a view outside our ordinary perceptions show there is much more to be seen, but also exposes the inadequacy of gods perfect creation.
Many times these glimpses turn into religions. Yet the omnipotence of the universe is unaware of its creative power, or even if it is doing it. It is the only one with nothing outside itself to compare to.
It by chance there were an omnipotent awareness called god, it would laugh itself silly if it knew that it was an object of worship. Who me?? ROTFLMAO
Prayer is the useless chatter that breeds discontent and promotes the inception of resolution
Prayer is you talking to god. But if god knows everything why are you the one doing the talking? They got us praying to keep us from meditating. Everything you need to know is already inside you, but you can’t listen when you are talking. Christianity’s incessant babble is a road block, not a solution.
Prayer is pretending god doesn’t really know everything and admitting that you have a deficit, which means you don’t know everything—yet ramble on because we’ve been taught it is the solution.
Real prayer would be shutting your eyes and shutting your mouth (even the ramblings in your head) then letting your pimative self have a chance to listen. Prayer is hopeless chatter over the inner self which already knows what to do, but you keep talking over it.
The strength of a person is measured by how much truth they can tolerate—or more precisely, to what extent it needs to be diluted, disguised, or sweetened.
Prayer keeps the enslaved dependent on an outside source when the real source has always been you.
There are believers that believe so much they will fabricate evidence to support their belief. Ron Wyatt is such an “archeologist”
“A team of evangelical Christian explorers claim they’ve found the remains of Noah’s ark”—National Geographic
The expedition team [Noahs Ark Ministries International] is “99.9 percent” sure they found the ark. Others, well, aren’t.
“I don’t know of any expedition that ever went looking for the ark and didn’t find it,” said Paul Zimansky, an archaeologist specializing in the Middle East at Stony Brook University, New York State.
Could it be possible though, that whoever built the pyramids could have also built an ark?
Wikipedia
There is so much we don’t know, but if the pyramids were built by humans, an ark isn’t that far fetched.
Painting–Edward Hicks
Ron Wyatt, the Indiana Jones of Christian archeology also found chariot wheels and horse bones in the Red Sea. He is an amazing archeologist!
“We’re fighting ignorance in the place where there should be the most enlightenment”—Ernest Chambers
“We’re not going to suffer patiently anymore—no more turning the other cheek. No more blessing our enemies. No more praying for those who despitefully use us”.
“We’ve learned the lessons you’ve taught us. We’ve studied your history, and you did not take over this country by being Christlike. You did not gain control of the world like you have it now, by dealing fairly with and by keeping your word. You’re treaty breakers. You’re liars. You’re thieves. You rape entire continents and races of people, then you wonder why these very people don’t have any confidence or trust in you.”
“Your religion means nothing. Your law is a farce and we see it every day you demonstrate it in Alabama. And I can say you, because you’re part of the whole system—you profit from it, stand up in your pulpits on Sunday and preach nice little songs and say, now we’re going to give thanks to the lord for he is good and oh Jesus be among us. As far as we’re concerned your Jesus is contaminated just like everything else you tried to force upon us is contaminated, so you can have him”—Ernest Chanbers
But alas, Jesus was used to subjugate the gullible, the pure, the trusting, and the hopeful.
If everything is an illusion that would include gravity and movement. Discovering the source code for a stationary projection of an illusion would be the most difficult of questions to answer.
Design a simple hologram
Somewhere along the centers of our universe there is a small device projecting a large, 4 dimensional image that we are inside of. Physicists have mathematically discovered the amplituhedron outside of space and time. What it projects should project back into our best theories—evolution and quantum field theory.
A smart phone hologram
It is a simple little hack with a smart phone.
Amplituhedron—a mathematically discovered lens projecting back into space-time
The illusion is feeling we are real, inside a simulation. What else do we have to compare to? How can one analyze what makes you you, when there is nothing outside to compare it to? Until now.
I find it amusing that people like Ye or Andrew Tate claim they have exposed the matrix and have awakened from reality, yet they are devout Christian and a recent convert to Islam, respectively.
These organizations are the epitope of matrices and the founders of thought control, spreading their entropic ideas while standing firmly on the foundations of them.
This is no different from “waking up” and then switching from democrat to republican, or visa versa. Which side your in matters not to them—it is that you pick a side that matters. The discord that ensues is the program.
Curious if what Ye says is true, that blacks are the real Jews? Moses and Paul, who were Israelites, were mistaken for Egyptians. Egyptians were black Africans. For some, the fact that Ancient Egyptians were Black could be new information and sound outlandish.
But our history is pleat with whitewashing history. Even Jesus was white, right?
Quantum theory is the closest thing to reality. It exposes what is unseen by the senses—this is god.
Sacredness is not a relationship with belief. This is a categorical error. Beliefs are simply ideas we like to think on then entertain out of preference—then wrongly cling to out of credulous insecurity. Belief is needed because it is not real. Quantum Theory is the closest thing to real that the general population has been exposed to. It demonstrates what is unseen by the senses—this is god.
Highly charged emotional states or chemically enhanced experience may at times give one a glimpse into the hidden portions of reality. This is no more spiritual than your normal existence—it is only different. Calling it a deity is supposing that anything outside our normal perceptions is god, when in reality the process of evolution has not seen fit to expose more than the needed perceptions to eat and reproduce.
That the ground of being is some kind of entity is a fundamental mistake. There may be something underneath it all but it is not a being, it IS being. It is the way things grow or become—no-thing knows how it is done or that it is doing it. Like how you grow your hair or raise your hand. You just do it never knowing how. This is god, if there is such a thing, which I just explained is not a thing.
The idea that god is a being is a projection from our individual aspects of form, which is not too far off the truth. Not as individuals but as apertures of the whole. Every bit is meaningful to us because every bit is the one thing.
Driving with the top down at the speed of life can get a little messy. Getting a glimpse now and the can be rewarding but not meaningful—it doesn’t do anything and is at odds with evolutionary fitness. Plus there is actual thrill in not knowing—this is what makes the Great Mystery meaningful. What point would actually be meaningful if there was no mystery?
If there are entities that know more than we, this is god until we realize they only have different evolutionary hacks and perceptions, a different peep hole into the objective reality that we see vey little of. To see 10% more may very well overload the circuitry and distract evolutionary fitness as we know it.
What we don’t see may or may not be more advanced or better, but simply outside our sensory perceptions and immiscible. We would be as much a mystery to them as they are to us—unless they have evolved to see things they cannot interact with, like watching tv.
If anyone truly had freewill it would be catastrophic.
Of course we have free will. We have no choice but to have it—Christopher Hitchens
If freewill exists then god doesn’t. If god exists verything ever done has been pre approved. Not one can escape the tools they have to work with.
One may think they can circumvent the rules but that is also part of the rules. opening a new door in the game is still in the game. To know it is such the thing.
“When we measure something we are forcing an undetermined, undefined world to assume an experimental value. We are not measuring the world, we are creating it. Nothing exists until it is measured.”—Niels Bohr
We now live in a thoroughly measured and mapped environment and that is our reality. That things are long or short, thick or thin or have borders, isn’t truth without the yardstick. We keep pressing this attitude yet nothing can be accurately explained. Freewill is no exception and is probably the wrong question.
The fall of man and his separation from Eden is the naming and outlining of animals, places, and things like they are somehow separate—where sapiens slipped into a fixed and measured reality. It is not actuality why or what the world is.
Your freewill is to think it is such. Marking the territory with official titles and fences is exercising freewill while simultaneously destroying it. But I suspect evolution has something to say about this. Because if evolution is thoroughly true, we are in charge of nothing.
At this point of the game if anyone truly had freewill it would be catastrophic.
Are these higher, or actually lower levels of consciousness?
Among the new and old age spiritualities are catchy terms; “reaching a higher level of consciousness, spiritual energy, cosmic consciousness, awakening”,etc. As usual our forward thinking brains assume this is a step up, but like ALL human tendencies to underestimate the obvious through belief, we have it completely backwards.
We are already at our highest level of consciousness. Clearing the mind of all that we think, would be regressive, not progressive. Imagine trying to feed the world when everyone behaves enlightened? The great ones were completely useless in this state of mind.
These idle states of mind may sound cool, but it is where we came from, not where we are going—and the more one anchors into the past the less likely we are to have a breakthrough of any kind.
Imagine a 40 day trance and consequent fast? It requires the unenlightened to nurse them back to health. There is a reason evolution has hidden the unseen strata from our eyes—it offers zero chance at survival.
But, society will keep reaching into our darkest days of struggle and evolution, thinking all the while it is enlightenment, when in truth you already have it. Everything is exactly as it could be. And if we all achieved that awakened state, nobody would know it nor live to tell about it.
Can you be more than what you are, or can you capture the past before we became aware of being aware? If we were all in that state we’d never know it. That was our Eden, where everything was perfect because there was nothing to compare it to.
Is seems religion has an edge on atheism. How does one continue to embellish on unbelief? What new ideas can we pull out of thin air to aggrandize a negative? There are no assumptions to defend, no miracles to fantasize, no mythical beasts or gods to rewrite, revise, conjecture, or expand.
Religion is science fiction with a penalty, where believing the right fiction is coupled with an unlimited license to caricature your wildest dreams into a human right—where making god more better and more powerful than anyone can imagine—right up until someone reimagines it.
God has evolved in my lifetime to incorporate the ontology of science and atheist philosophers. They get it all. Every idea of existence can be attributed to this mythology. You win. I have no deity to defend.
Even the best argument for nothing is laid waist by belief and tradition. Never failing to take credit for solving your existential anxieties—which tend to solve themselves anyway. All bleeding eventually stops. But give god his due. It is you who solves the crisis and always has been. It’s too bad the men of words cannot give credit to you for your own course corrections.
Why the goddess was replaced by the aggressive sky gods
The advent of writing was a death sentence to feminine equality.
Before written literacy, creation stories were dominated by a goddess. Writing, a primarily left brain/right handed activity in men and women, set a course for aggressive patriarchal governance. It was inevitable.
The focused, tunnel-vision of right-handed writing dominance enlarged masculine importance and violence. By the written word humanity has subjugated itself to what history has shown us to be.
The hammer, whether held by a man or a woman inflects masculine traits through its writing—inevitably turning religion into a masculine dominated source of controls. Ultimately replacing the goddess creator with aggressive sky gods. It was as inevitable as handedness and the development of the alphabets.
“Writing involves the muscles of only one side of the body. Pure writing, using stylus, quill, pencil, or pen, engages the dominant hand, which the dominant hemisphere controls. Right-brain participation is markedly reduced. The left hand has no role during this activity. Evolution selected the dominant hand to be the aggressor, the hand that wields the club, swings the sword, and pulls the trigger. Placing the pen in the fighting hand etches aggression into the written word differentiating it from speech, which depends more on a bicameral cooperative effort.” — The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image by Leonard Shlain
Clinging to a book written from the violent hand of a one sided mental framework will forever inspire male-dominated culture and religion. It may as well have been written with a hammer. No matter how soft the writing approached, it’s left brain subtleties are destined to put religious men above the rest. Forged [sic] solely of the masculine principle, the Bible is a trap both men and women who believe it is of god are cursed to remain in its grasp.
Danna Nolan Fewell stated that “the Bible, for the most part, is an alien text (to women), not written by women or with women in mind.” I would argue that it would’ve made little difference since the culprit is writing, not what or who wrote it with very little right brain input.
The left brain handles reading, writing, and calculations. Some call it the logical side of the brain. The right brain is more visual and deals in images more than words.
Ecclesiastes 9:2. All share a common destiny—the righteous and the wicked, the good and the bad, the clean and the unclean, those who offer sacrifices and those who do not.
5 For the living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing; they have no further reward, and even their name is forgotten.
7 Go, eat your food with gladness, and drink your wine with a joyful heart, for God has already approved what you do. Enjoy life with your wife, whom you love, all the days of this meaningless life that God has given you under the sun—all your meaningless days. For this is your lot in life and in your toilsome labor under the sun.
10 Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might, for in the realm of the dead, where you are going, there is neither working nor planning nor knowledge nor wisdom.
“The three-dimensional world of ordinary experience––the universe filled with galaxies, stars, planets, houses, boulders, and people––is a hologram, an image of reality coded on a distant two-dimensional (2D) surface.”—Leonard Susskind, Professor of Theoretical Physics, Stanford University(1)
A holographic Universe means information that makes up what we perceive as a 3D reality is stored on a 2D surface, including time. This means, essentially, everything you see and experience is an illusion.
“Imagine that everything you see, feel and hear in three dimensions, and your perception of time, in fact emanates from a flat two-dimensional field,” says Professor Kostas Skenderis from the University of Southampton.
The idea is similar to that of ordinary holograms where a 3D image is encoded in a 2D surface, such as in the hologram on a credit card. However, this time, the entire Universe is encoded.” Another way of simplifying this is through 3D films. Although not an example of a hologram, 3D films create the illusion of 3D objects from a flat 2D screen. The difference in our 3D Universe is that we can touch objects and the ‘projection’ is ‘real’, from our perspective (2) and with our limited senses.
All the experiments we know that work to show the earth as a sphere are tools that exist inside the projection. The real world is non-dimensional and only appears to be 3d.
“Crazy Horse went into the world where there are the spirits (Wakan Tanka) of all things. That is the real world behind this one” This one is a projection of that one. “This one is like a shadow of that one”—and we are entangled to it.
•Wakan Tanka is the Lakota name for the “Great Mystery“. Christian missionaries attempted to similarize the American Indian “Wakan Tanka”, translating it as “Great Spirit” to integrate the Christian god, which it was not. It is the “Great Mystery”—not a entity at all.
Though I don’t really believe earth is a hologram, but may be like a hologram. Many religious traditions have similar accounts.
“It’s the substance that casts all those shadows to our world. The circles here are copies of the spheres there. The squares here are copies of the cubes there. The triangles here are copies of the pyramids there.”—Randy Alcorn
“Consciousness is the screen on which all the pictures come and go (projection) The screen is real, the pictures are mere shadows on it”—Sri Ramana Maharishi
Speaking of the priestly duties and edifice —Hebrews 8:5 “They serve as copy and a shadow of the heavenly things. For when Moses was about to erect the tent, he was instructed, saying, “See that you make everything according to the pattern that was shown you on the mountain.”
“You do not leave one place for another. You are always stationary. The scenes go past you. Even from the ordinary point of view you sit in your cabin and the ship sails but you do not move. We see a picture of a man running several miles and rushing towards us but the screen does not move. It is the picture that moves on and away.” —Teachings of Sri Ramana Maharishi
“Long before the world was created there was an island, floating in the sky”—Iroquois Creation Myth
Considering what energies comprise matter, analyzing them or the composition of a hologram makes no difference under the microscope.
We’ve all heard that general relativity and quantum theory are incompatible, but why? How could two useful theories not be fundamental properties of reality, and why are they so destructive and polluting? Maybe they are askew to the true nature of reality.
Simply put; as reductionism has examined smaller and smaller particles to find the building block of nature, the amount of energy at the Planck level begins to increase. It opens higher and higher levels of energy. And as Einstien noted, energy equals mass and mass equals energy. As we get to the smaller, the amount of energy increases, therefore the mass should be increasing. Things would get bigger as they get smaller. How to reconcile that? As a side note, reductionism has also postulated a mechanism (such as the microtubule) to identify the emergence of consciousness. That too, has failed.
The amount of energy used to dissect such quanta (as in the large hadron collider) at CERN, uses 1.3 terawatt hours of electricity annually to smash these particles. That’s enough power to fuel 300,000 homes for a year.
So we can’t go smaller without getting bigger. At 10/-33cm and 10/-34 seconds, things start getting bigger—as in black hole bigger. On the scale of energy our baseline is zero, which is a tremendous amount of energy where we fit comfortably in. What does that tell us?
A recurring theme is gaining traction and a new boss is slowly taking over. Space and time are no longer fundamental to the nature of reality, yet are themselves emergent properties. The only real thing left is the hard problem of consciousness, which is the one thing which is not a thing. But then again, neither are we.
The best theory of the universe would be the most useful theory; to release us from the quandary of the first three theories of modern science. Since nothing is true of our perceived reality, why not use our imagination to move us where we want to move? That is exactly what gravity, QM, and the religions of a god have done—yet the unforeseen variables of such theories have taken us to the brink of existence.
It appears quanta and space are emergent properties of consciousness. They are adaptive phenomenon of our space-time goggles and a likely construct of the current game module.
Being born into the perfect situation, having the correct religion, good, caring parents, and plenty of money, what could posible go wrong?
Some people have some really weird ideas, but not mine. I don’t really need to explain what mine are for the moment (or prove them) I just get it. I’m content that the world is crazy except for a select few in my circle of friends and family—as well as a few others I’ve found on the internet.
How did I hit this jackpot in the lottery of life, so lucky to have the correct beliefs, yet still be so open minded? Why did god choose me to be so privileged and satiated with humility, yet at the same time be surfeit with knowledge and things? Why was I chosen?
Being tolerant in the world has been a struggle at times. This I figure is the test god had for me in his divine plan. Being able to accept you all has strengthened my resolve to stay humble, even though sometimes I feel like I’m forcing it. God only knows why such imbeciles are allowed to carry on.
In the game of life there is only one universal challenge—how to overcome your beliefs. Since they are all wrong, can you overcome your preconceived biases, no matter what they are? Who can outsmart their own neurology and experiences? Then do it again. Nothing is true. No beliefs are truer than others. Only if they serve our biases are they even useful. If you’ve found what your looking for you have likely arrived at your own bias through mental wrangling.
Everybody knows the studies. Everyone is trapped in the game of cognitive bigotries. Everyone thinks their experience is genuine. But none of it is authentic and it all has been corrupted by men—except mine. How can so many people be ignorant of their own ignorance?
Heaven exists because you still think you’re real.
Heaven is where egos end up together—the good and bad, dammed to hang on to the notion of self even after they are dead—and for whatever reason cannot escape their religion—you still think you’re real… This temporary portal into consciousness is for the game and not a separate soul at all.
The ego is what sees out and has been taught its headset has become a separate entity—it is a collection of observations and analysis stored in your packets of quanta that wants to identify as unique from the environment. Hanging on to this transcends death and remains in the form of a separate mind. The form it occupies now will remain that until we learn to let it go. Heaven is to accommodate those hung up in the programming—confused over which is real.
So accommodations evolved to treat the convincing nature of the game.
If you believe in any dogma you are dammed and led carefully through the channels of heaven, rejoicing in your rightness and again and again, trapped in the illusion of self. Some unfinished business or expectation—that certain things ought, or should be different? Perhaps your programmers were too thorough? There are many ways to avoid liberation.
Entire cultures trapped in endless cycles of birth because of belief—but the belief in a false sense of identity that distorts the quanta into a make-believe reality.
Bhagavan, Jesus, Muhammad, Buddha, Krishna, Lao Tzu, etc, never followed anyone.
The awakened worship no one. The asleep worship the awakened—yet hardly can grasp the gist of the message.
To aim your devotion towards any being, or any blame, guilt, fault, or achievement, political, religious dogma, or any historical event shows our infancy. It reminds me of Napoleon’s heaven in “The Great Divorce”—
“Walking up and down—up and down all the time— left-right, left-right—never stopping for a moment. The two chaps watched him for about a year and he never rested. And muttering to himself all the time. “It was Soult’s fault. It was Ney’s fault. It was Josephine’s fault. It was the fault of the Russians. It was the fault of the English.” Like that all the time. Never stopped for a moment. A little, fat man and he looked kind of tired. But he didn’t seem able to stop it.’—CS Lewis-The Great Divorce
The other type is the unprepared who stumble into the cosmic experience, then lead a life of self inflation, using Jesus, Muhammad, or the Buddha as a tool, yet live their own life as a god—doing whatever they want while using the lord as a means for their own social dominance. Master manipulators, Joseph Smith, Jonathan Edwards, the Imams, the preachers and priests—the narcissistic self righteous that proclaim dogmas yet live the life of self serving gratification —
We are stuck in this loop until we are not. If you want to believe in whatever suits you—you deserve it. The corporations of the church is your own doing. It is not heaven, but in fact hell. The object of the game is to crack the code and break free the ego. Not to see who can hang on to it the longest. That is where heaven comes in—to treat the PTSd. To return again to delete the programming or remain un whole forever in heaven and hell.
“The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper”. ~Bertrand Russell
We don’t like each other enough for socialism to work.
If the purpose of life is to enjoy it, why isn’t everyone enjoying it? Some peoples purpose is to not enjoy it. They find themselves doing the stress of dislike over and over again, bitching and then doing it again. It is nearly impossible to overcome your programming.
Socialism is the best way to lower expectations of happiness and equalize doldrum. Killing creativity is the best way to make everything fair. Making everything fair is counter intuitive to evolution and the way the universe operates.
Capitalism works because it isn’t fair, while simultaneously being completely fair.
If capitalism were fair it would be socialism. Bringing in socialism is probably the best way it insure we would finally develop a better form of government.
I would rather take my chances than have you take them for me. Socialism on the coattails of capitalism is theft. For socialism to succeed it need be voluntary, and we don’t like each other enough for that.
Is the metric fairness or contentment, and for who?
There are creatures similar to us who live among us, that have churned down a different evolutionary path and perception, that which we cannot see nor associate with but in glimpses.
This animation with its limited sensory awareness—unable to see, hear, or even comprehend much of the environmental spectrum, are not normal in the vastness of this cosmic game. We are the anomaly too—short lived, temporary forms who occasionally capture a peek into what is normal of the cosmos, yet beyond our divergent evolution.
It’s all around and yet we can’t see it. We have not evolved to see reality, but to not see reality. If evolution is true, throughout history selection pressure to achieve one thing has distracted our senses from the very beginning to achieve reproduction using shortcuts. The cheapest, most direct route that adaptive behavior could do to replicate our genes.
With biological evolution, from the time of the single cell to now, we have seen nothing outside of the most direct path to achieve this. Reality is far too much a distraction for evolution to allow us stop and notice.
Now that we know that nothing can be fully known… now what? Certainly there are many theories that are useful—even without our understanding it, but with our limited range of perception and reliance on this quirky, temperamental, three pound blob of fat, reality would overwhelm the senses like an acid trip, productivity and longevity would cease, and those that saw the fullness of the universe teeming with trillions of distractions would be virtually paralyzed.
Some thoughts on artificial intelligence and consciousness
One thing that can neither be proven nor disproven is that there exists an external mind-independent world. Why does it appear (according to our best science) that we live in a purely physical world devoid of qualities? Erwin Schrödinger–Mind and Matter
I don’t believe we’ll ever have AI without consciousness. If we are simply opening a new portal to consciousness (like having a baby) it will take a mathematical formula that is self examining.
Voluminous computations will not produce a conscious entity. AI would need consciousness to become intelligent. It is quite likely there is only one consciousness and many apertures, many openings into it—Our brains are receivers. If somehow we created a new form of consciousness it would be immiscible and likely catastrophic to it or us.
Photo. Credit Forbes Magazine
Just as everything is made of one process (the collapsing wave function) of a single, fundamental phenomenon, adding another form could be catastrophic. Since there is no evidence for a multiple consciousness model vs a single source model, I would think science should err on the side of caution —but I doubt they will.
How the current sexual climate is cheating humans from self discovery with more labels
For centuries shunned, persecuted, killed, slurred, and separated by the ruling classes of politics and religion, gays and lesbians clawed their way out of censorship to be able to openly love, and openly participate in society. The current gender dysphoria is making a mockery of those struggles with a pseudo-identity, self labeling of prepubescent teens and and young men and women who are the majority pretenders—bandwagoning their way in a social media experiment popularity contest.
My older daughter got in on this fad early and came out as lesbian. “Very well”, I said, “sounds like you’re finding your way”. She is now married (to a nice man) with two kids. She had no idea what she was at that age, but the allure to follow the fad was just too strong.
Most children are too early on this decision to be anything at all, but today we have it—gay, lesbian, non-binary, trans, neutral pronouns I’ve never heard of now enforced and endorsed by school districts and the law.
I took my youngest (11) to audition for a play last week and the first greet of the director was this; “so what pronoun do you prefer? She said “um, just call me by my name”. I was impressed she deferred to a more reasonable path. She hasn’t yet requested a name change, but some of her school friends change them weekly.
If you don’t want to be a girl or boy, fine, but why do you need a label at all? Can’t you just be you?
This current situation is as absurd as the Flying Spaghetti Monster getting religious exemption and acceptance. But our neofascist, inclusive, yet litigious and sensitive society is now too intimidated to call it for what it is.
Those that decry cultural misappropriation are currently the most guilty of all—making a mockery of the real struggle for equality and those that are truly oriented in a way that took centuries to liberate. Or am I missing something?
How you treat others depends on which direction you see the world. Vertical morality is when you see morality as a hierarchy—that some authority figure above you has a set of rules and punishments you are supposed to live by. The problem is; if you are able to imagine someone as above you, it’s easier to imagine certain others as below you—those that don’t believe in your rules. Your focus will then tend to be on self preservation and measuring your own piety against your perception of others.
In a horizontal framework you judge your actions based on how they affect others—that your actions are motivated by the positive and negative affects of those around you, who in fact are all your equals.
And this is where we are. The vertical framework is an obnoxious bully system. Loving your neighbor as yourself doesn’t fair very well when yourself is an insufficient, guilt laden sinner who can do nothing of herself.
Love is never fruitful by way of commandment or dogma, but the realization that we are all equals—not in the sight of a god but in the sight of each other. That would be a chapter I’d like to see.
What is the real problem mitigating climate change?
Of the 265,000 square miles of the Columbia River drainage (size of France) none of its tributaries flow free to the ocean, trapping all particulate matter as well as co2, methane, and sediments behind its dams, effectively halting the natural processes the earth performs to maintain equilibrium.
This process is reduced over 70%
The Columbia is only one system. Over 70% of the worlds rivers no longer flow free, to irrigate crops and produce hydroelectric power. The natural ecocycles of planet earth are effectively ruined.
And it appears now that hydroelectric power has a greater impact on the worlds carbon cycle than fuel powered generators. (1)
Irrigation traps the particulate matter in a never ending cycle, re-spreading it on the land over and over what should be washed out to sea and cycled.
There are 70,000 large dams worldwide and another 3700 planned. These are huge carbon sinks, whose impact has been dismissed as “renewable” and “clean” for a hundred years or more. Over the next 15 years 90% of the worlds rivers will be dammed, and along with it so will we.
Whatever we do to mitigate climate change will most likely be a bust, as long as our rivers and dams are used as they are.
“Dams are a major driver of global environmental change”(2) But as usual, humankind will continue to address the wrong problem having no idea that their fixes are only going to make the problem worse.
It is really no wonder why climate change has accelerated with the building of dams. Electric cars will not solve anything at all.
Form, space, and time is an emergent property of consciousness
Do our senses give us truths about the structure of objective reality, whatever that structure may be? Quite frankly no, it doesn’t.
Long ago science set a theory to explain conscious agents and experience, yet have failed to provide one bit of proof that conscious emergence is actually the process. There have been some brilliant people working on it for quite some time, yet not one case or process has been identified as true—that this particular mechanism leads to that. Not very good progress considering how long they’ve been at it.
Using the evolutionary models and calculations, the probability is zero that any of our senses report any truths about the structure of reality—Donald Hoffman
Since space time is doomed as a theory (Nima Armani-Hamed, David Gross, Ed Witten) so are the standard models of conscious emergence as a fundamental property of evolved brains. It is appearing more and more the opposite is true—that brains are the result of consciousness, as well as everything else. And that reality as we see it, isn’t fundamental at all.
So space-time is no longer fundamental but seems to be an emergent property of consciousness. It has been a useful theory and created many beneficial gadgets and technologies, but it will soon be replaced to take us far beyond the present kind.
So what is reality constructed of and what would it look like if we could perceive it with our senses? Please watch this interview With Lex Fridman and Donald Hoffman.
Faith cannot achieve grace, for faith is an effort of belief.
Faith is the mental effort to believe. According to research, during a typical day, a person uses about 320 calories just to think. Different mental states and tasks can subtly affect the way the brain consumes energy. Applying effort to the belief in things you don’t know, raises additional strain on cerebral energy consumption. Is this not works? Is not this something you do?
Additionally, the mental wrangling required to believe in deities is indeed effort. To outsmart the contradictions of the Hebrew religion also induces stress and issues of self worth, further adding to “works”.
Faith in Jesus is works. Contradictions 9:17 Apologetics is even further efforts that contradict the biblical promise.
Grace and faith are ideas in opposition that require caloric effort. The only way to evade that is faith like an atheist—total trust in letting go. Only then can grace be achieved through unbelief—through no effort whatsoever.
The Iroquois Great Law of Peace liberated Native American women centuries ahead of Christianity
Here in America, from the north and even unto the east, men now control women’s rights through a series of punitive common laws and entanglements. But that hasn’t always been the case.
“The Iroquois”, according to former U.S. Commissioner of Indian Affairs’ John Collier, “wrought out a social institution, a system of greatness of human relationships, a system for evoking maximum genius and for socializing it, and a role of women in society which well may stand today as the most brilliant creation in the record of man. Then from a world unknown, a ravenous race swept in a dark age for the native life which was hurled into the pit by cannon, by rum, by money, by unconscionable intrigue.”
“If the tenets of equality that so pervaded the Iroquois Great Law had been adopted by the American legal system or overlaid onto the existing common law framework, the status of women in colonial America would have been radically altered”.
Beaver tail Wampum Belt
Under the English common law system embraced by the colonies, women were not considered “persons” or “citizens.” ‘Correspondingly, women were disenfranchised and thereby precluded from directly changing their conditions. I wonder what the root of that is…
It has been noted that the subjugation of women in early common law was not entirely dissimilar from the way slaves were treated. Unlike the co-equal status of women in the Iroquois society, women under Anglo-American common law were, as noted by feminist legal authority Sylvia Law, relegated merely to roles of production, reproduction, maintenance, consumption, and acculturation in the home. Home and family – the core social unit upon which [Anglo-American] constitutional, political, economic [and common law] arrangements are built—are constructed on the premise that women are not active citizens or people free to pursue the full range of common occupations and callings.
At common law (as developed from Blackstone’s Commentaries) a woman merged her legal identity into that of her husband when she married. She could not sue, be sued, enter into contracts, make wills, keep her own earnings, or control her own property. Married women were civilly dead. This concept of coverture (legal status of a married woman), or femme covert, meant that upon marriage, a woman became quite literally “veiled”; clouded, covered by her husband.
Correspondingly at common law, a man could chastise his wife, restrain her freedom, beat, and rape her. The husband gained control and management of his wife’s real property and complete ownership of her personal property, including a woman’s clothes. AMERICAN INDIAN LAW REVIEW [Vol. 16] “The Iroquois Great Law of Peace and the United States Constitution: How the Founding Fathers Ignored the Clan Mothers”
The Great Law not only elevated and embraced the status of women, but also secured the natural rights of the people as a whole. Among the admirable aspects of the Iroquois system was the Council’s system of checks and balances, which resulted in unanimous decision making. Disputes were remanded for solutions. An issue would be debated by the Mohawks and Senecas, then referred to the Oneidas and Cayugas, establishing a process of’checks, although the legislative council was unicameral.
It also insured women’s rights as sole controllers of the reproductive lines. But we settled for Christianity, in spite of its massive shortcomings—and kept women as baby makers under the control of men embracing a second rate religion. So much for the debunking the noble savage, Tildeb. All this was done by oral tradition and a shell record in a wampum belt, coupled with superior intellect, of course.
“The Iroquois Confederacy, founded by the Great Peacemaker in 1142 is the oldest living participatory democracy on earth” ARTICLE
“The greatest civilization in human history is Christian Western Civilization. Western Civilization is proof Christianity’s greatness as a religion and its benefit to mankind.”—SOM. Say what??
“These are mere assertions — not evidence-based facts”—Ron
Native America has been judged on its post apocalyptic nature. Bands of tribes surviving as primitive hunter gatherers and warring factions. But their ancestors did this—
And this—
“estimated that prior to European contact, the Western Hemisphere supported between 90 and 112 million people. To put this already large figure into clearer perspective, the Americas’ population in the late 1400s surpassed that of Europe in the same period.”LINK
At the Incan civilization’s height in the 1400s, the system of terraces covered about a million hectares (2.4 million acres) throughout Peru and fed the vast empire.
“Near the Brazilian border of north-central Bolivia, there are some 30,000 square miles of raised forested islands in a grassy floodplain. Scientists speculate an extensive human-constructed landscape optimized for managing local fisheries and the distribution of vegetation”.
It is more likely that we are still in a post apocalyptic era. Considering the ancient lost technologies and the civilizations and structures the ancestors were able to build, we are still in a rebuilding phase, albeit a quirky and destructive one.
Scientific evidence is leaning away from the old notion of the Amazon as a natural garden, but evidence suggests that nearly the entire thing was a managed farming industry supporting millions of people that once thrived, then decimated by western disease. Turns out SOM’s greatest civilization in the history of the world, is also diseased and dirty—and most murderous in history.
Do we behave like a settled society today, or more like a post-apocalyptic mess of divided people? This is not rhetorical…
“And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do”. Not much of this happening today, yet we are the civilizations of all time? SOM doesn’t even believe his own Bible.
In the 80’s Thomas K Landauer conducted a study—and factoring a 70 year life span, how much you learn versus how much you forget versus what one is able to recall, it turns out individually we don’t know very much.
The averaged human has a seemingly unlimited capacity to absorb knowledge, take in their surroundings and memorize bits of interest, but so much we are remembering eventually gets pushed off the end of the tape. And the information we are scanning turns into mere bullet points—fuzzy highlights of the unordinary we encounter any particular day. Our radar typically remembers the anomalies, not the familiar of the daily drive.
What someone was wearing or the details of a boring drive is not recorded sufficiently to know it. We scan for danger—and a typical day goes by without recollection. What day was that anyway? I use to do some fairly high level math—now I can’t understand my own notes. It went away when I left its utility.
The typical belief does not have enough facts to support it. It isn’t just religion either, but flat earthers, round earthers, scientists, politics, etc. This is why the world is enamored in belief—we can’t remember enough to know much of anything. Most belief is habit in the safety of routine. And yes, interpretation is full of conjecture as well.
Turns out at the climax of life the average person knows about 1 gigabyte +\- of information.
That isn’t much. It’s less than a low-end USB thumb drive. You know about $10 worth of digital memory. What we do have in our favor though is our ability to collaborate and share. This is where we get the power to do anything we collectively put our efforts to.
That is what forces us to tolerate each other. Watching the “Alone” series it dawned on me how working and living alone, the foremost experts in the field basically had a competition to see who would starve to death last. Nobody thrived. It takes a village of skill sets and beliefs to thrive.
Remember that post I did about the inverse square law of physics? It was one of my all-time favorites, yet I don’t remember much of what it said. I do remember Dave in the comments. Dissipated Energy
How Hebrew religions are at odds
with its own scripture
Satan, the serpent, that old devil nemesis to God and his plan is causing discord as usual. But who is Satan really, and why cover it up?
In the Old Testament Satan and God are the same being. Satan in the Old Testament is the face that god puts on when he is trying his people. “The anger of the Lord” IS Satan. There are sufficient dually written scriptures to illustrate this, such as 1Chronicles 21:1 and 2nd Samuel 24:1. Job 1:8-12 and Job 1:11 along with 42:11 are also a good resource.
1Chronicles 21:1 Satan rose up against Israel and incited David to take a census of Israel. So David said to Joab and the commanders of the troops, “Go and count the Israelites from Beersheba to Dan. Then report back to me so that I may know how many there are.”
2Samuel 24:1 Again the anger of the Lord burned against Israel, and he incited David against them, saying, “Go and take a census of Israel and Judah.” 2 So the king said to Joab and the army commanders a with him, “Go throughout the tribes of Israel from Dan to Beersheba and enroll the fighting men, so that I may know how many there are.”
The anger of the LORD and Satan are the same thing—they’re interchangeable. The devilish side of god is also obvious in the Book of Job.
So we have Jesus on the right hand and yet the Bible never mentions gods left hand. Surely if god has a right he has a left, yet it never says. Whose face are they trying to save? Christianity’s “all good” and totally righteous god is a misnomer—for Yang with no Yin is attemptable—but impossible. Hiding your bad side is handy sometimes for social health, but to deny it’s existence? “The goody-goodies are the thieves of virtue.“—Confucius. In the case of religious piety it is the disguise of virtue that has hypocrisy so prominent it dwells on high in the heavens, and is easily used against the gullible and simple minded.
Magic protection crystals
The New Testament does a better job at hiding this, making it more kind than the old, but remember the old serpent slipped out of Jesus mouth too— “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. I guess every knee will bow or else! So much for freewill.
By now, if Christianity were authentic it would have a formula that would fulfill its premises and work for everyone who honestly applied the minimal effort—it doesn’t—except for the chosen ones. (Romans 8:29–30)
And if you put forth the effort and get no response, one should be free to go. Should not the churches at least be honest about this?
Christianity, which in fact resists knowing, is to pretend a carefully crafted teaspoon of belief is the full measure. When those “chosen” to believe do so with no free will of there own and with no merit at all, while the rest of us struggle on, hoping we’re on the in-crowd. This is silly, yet the chosen continue to preach like it matters—like they can save us.
If you follow the precepts of Christianity and nothing happens, it is your fault. Ie; there is underlying sin, spiritual immaturity, or the “gods will” clause. But God has no will ‘cept your own. You can do nothing to merit salvation. He has already decided who’s in and who’s out, before you were even born. That is a real head-trip for those with the “correct” neurons, so what about the rest of us? Why make the effort again and again when the Bible clearly says it is futile—except where it isn’t. Which side of the contradiction is the correct side?
Any proper school has the tools and methods to prepare its students for a minimum level of competence—for graduation. Anything else is a hobby. Certainly some different lines of thought are interesting and sometimes comforting to explore, but let’s be honest; maybe beliefs should be identified as what they are—likes and preferences.
Most people hold or have held at one point, someone else’s beliefs. That’s why the drastic change happens when one stops believing. Although I felt at the time my beliefs were correctly imagined, I was wrong. I suffered from emotional incorrectness, and I am sorry.
My apologies for not imagining god correctly. After further research I have found myself to be in error and am guilty. I was never a true Christian.
Since my errant deconversion my intolerance died. I will repent now and confess that sin. Hopefully god will restore that intolerance and judgement of other people, but I fear that may be wishful thinking. The embarrassment has now rekindled for all the things I said, taught, thought, and supported that were not correctly motivated by sincere imagination, but incorrectly abandoned at the moment of unbelieving in correct sincerity. I was just trying to convert people. I was never really their friend. If I can have the courage, I can do this again.
These are not your beliefs, nor are they the real you. Only through unbelief can the cord of group think be severed. This is wrong. Not that those things are bad, or at odds with evolution, but I am certainly now the biggest sinner on earth. I don’t love god firstly—and I never did. My god was not the god I was taught and imagined from my youth. I somehow should’ve known better. Belief is the original sin. That much is obvious now.
What will it be like now to step into heaven and come face to face with Jesus? This imagery of god as a man seems to mirror everyones concoction of the divine. But I know my needles in the haystack somewhere. I’ll just have to feel as it penetrates deep under my fingernail, or the palm of my hand.
I can once again support fake outrage and superficial piety in the name of Jesus. Thank you atheism for leading me to be born again.
Excerpts and photo from “God: A Human History” by Reza Aslan
Belief is a very ancient byproduct of evolution.
“Beyond the myths and rituals, the temples and cathedrals, the dos and don’ts that have, for millennia, separated humanity into different and often competing camps of belief, religion is little more than a “language” made up of symbols and metaphors that allows believers to communicate, to one another and to themselves, the unexplainable experience of faith.”
“If the propensity for religious belief is inherent in our species, then it must be a product of human evolution. There must be some adaptive advantage to it. Otherwise there would be no reason for religion to exist.”
“Even those contemporary Jews, Christians, and Muslims who strive so hard to profess theologically “correct” beliefs about a sole, singular God who is incorporeal or infallible, ever-present or all-knowing, seem compelled to envision God in human form and to speak of God in human terms. Studies performed by a range of psychologists and cognitive scientists have shown that the most devout believers, when forced to communicate their thoughts about God, overwhelmingly treat God as though they were talking about some person they might have met on the street.” — God: A Human History by Reza Aslan
Cueva de las Manos, Santa Cruz, Argentina (15,000 to 11,000 B.C.E.)
Somewhere in time, sentient beings developed language to communicate feeling—and then ability to propagate the almighty question. “What do you believe?” is quite possibly the greatest hurdle. If we are ever to overcome evolution it will be on this point alone. Or belief is solely necessary because the illusion isn’t real. Why else would you have to believe it?
It is rather obvious man has created god in his own image, taking the best and worst traits of society and projecting himself on a path to transcend nature.
Everything that can be seen in the universe are forms of energy fields
As religion slowly embraces science, the potter has now formed us out of particles and evolution, but did he really make anything at all?
“Our bodies and every-thing that can be seen in the universe are made of such particles”—Isabella
By observation a particle is “an excitation of a field”. There is no atom made of conceivable “stuff” which is the imagined building block. The statement might very well read, “Our bodies and everything that can be seen in the universe are forms of energy fields, eg; apparitions”. This is the illusion. Man is nothing (no-thing) and just as likely, life is a dream of apparitions—it simply depends on how you choose to frame it.
Yet can anyone escape the illusion? Are not the objects in a dream state or a projection on a screen of equal composition under a microscope? The projection of a hologram is made of the same substance of what we deem physical. So what are we??
“We are talking about discrete natural units, or packets of energy hence the word quanta. It is why it was called quantum mechanics/physics in the first place” —Isabella
So god has tricked us—used deception to animate his sims, and you an illusion made of the same stuff he is made of. What would that make you, real or an apparition?
In the day the earth became dormant. While she sleeps is she not still alive?
Is there life in stone, or is It is unconscious, without life? Walking over the dry landscape, Death Valley appears barren. As a casual passerby one would assume it a wasteland of worthless desert, but in the cooking soil lay dormant the seeds of a life cycle full of pause.
Death Valley
Wait ten years for the fall rains to drench the landscape—and in spring see the super-blooms, where Death Valley becomes a meadow. As humans we depend on a more frequent cycle, so we move on. Nothing lives here. Be a great place for a mining operation if it wasn’t so damned hot!
Walking over a cracked riverbed—four years now and no sign of life, but underfoot in the hard pan sediment thrives the lungfish. Sealed in a self created pod and breathing air, the lungfish of considerable size patiently waits for rain, estivating.
Now we say we’re unconscious in sleep and self-conscious in the wakeful state. Which is the Reality? Are they not both states of living? As a stone lay dormant, is it unconscious, which in its sleep is a form of consciousness?
Reality is continuous and eternal. Neither the unconsciousness nor the self-consciousness of the present is any more real than the other. Unconscious and conscious are both consciousness. Tread lightly, slow down, and listen.
Earth gives off a relentless hum of countless notes completely imperceptible to the human ear, like a giant, exceptionally quiet symphony—Charles Choi, Live Science. Is there consciousness there?
That science has this vast body of knowledge we draw facts from is a misconception. Science is really about promoting ignorance, but good quality ignorance is what we need—of the curious kind
There is a misconception that science has it mostly figured out. That simply is not the case (not oven fractionally close) because every discovery only compounds the number of questions, but that is really the point. If we accept science has arrived at anything, how will we know what questions to ask?
I think we all know what happens to a body of people when they claim to know the final truth. Rooted, stunted, immovable, and waiting for that truth to unfold—is at odds with the nature of everything. True knowledge is temporary and raises more questions than it answers.
Science is currently the best means we have to improve life by focusing on a narrow band of discovery, drawing from a well of facts where there is always another bucket. But to think we know…that would be the a travesty. Discovery generates more ignorance—and this is the type of ignorance that we celebrate, not willful ignorance of belief, but skillful ignorance of curiosity.
Excerpts and photos from this excellent TED by Stuart Firestein—The Pursuit of Ignorance
The ultimate oxymoron is life after death. That would contradict the meaning of both.
When I die there will be no experience—no regrets or joyous reunions, for there will be no apparatus to manage or attend such consciousness or effort. Even if “spirit” carried on in some idea or another, it is a mindless, blank stare at a static white board without sensory perception for eternity, as unaware as the universe is of itself. Biology fills the void for a time. Life is a symptom of our universe, but it is not intentional, nor has any ideas at all about how it happens. Funny, just like you and me.
Biology is a byproduct of the universe—a symptom. The cycles are endless. The earth is like a slow motion chia pet. Humans have been on this cosmic stage about 20 minutes. Imagine a time-lapse from beginning to end—it would be no mystery.
Taking a Hindu version at face value, if I am here to grow to perfection through repetition, over and over and to resolve the unsolved desires and issues of karma, why would I have ever been born in the first place, having had no karma to be born with?
I have possibly however, inherited such a thing from evolution, that monkeys rang up my karmic credit after they received it from their progenotes, and so on and so on, all the way back to the spawn of life. If it ever died out, nothing would ever know it ever was a thing at all.
That which truly exists must exist all the time, but the body does not exist all the time. Therefore, it cannot be real.
The ultimate oxymoron is life after death. That would contradict the meaning of both.
If the perception of reality can be augmented, is it really reality? if perceptions can be altered in any way by our sensual acuities, are those perceptions truly bona fide? If the world were real it would not be ever-changing. And when I say real, I mean that substance or substratum of all particles* and existence. That isness that endures in spite of all biological forms.
Augmenting reality has “real world” implications, like car crashes and pedestrian accidents, as in n established Poké Stops. Augmenting reality emphasizes the blind spots we already have and creates new ones, virtually enhancing the personal preference by eliminating the things that don’t fit our likes or dislikes
“The best case for life as a simulation is augmented reality. If you assume any improvement at all, soon the games will be indistinguishable from what we considers reality”—Elon Musk.
Reality is the familiar perceptions we generally ignore. That same reality has changed dramatically since man could put into words. “God spoke to Adam and gave him commandments” Is not this a form of augmented reality, describing nature with symbols—letters, words, numbers, and counting? The rise of language, writing, and math has fixed reality to a particular style of describing it, which isn’t it at all.
Stare at the image. Rotate it upside down and blink 3 times.
*According to modern physics a particle is an “excitation of a field”. That is you—
How understanding a variety of beliefs will strengthen your character.
Spending a considerable amount of time cross-country in the backcountry, it was inevitable at some point I would get lost. Tis why I carry a handy topo map and compass.
If you are familiar with maps and finding your bearings, it takes three points of reference and a preferably a compass to triangulate your position.
Using GPS it takes three measurements from the satellites to your receiver to identify where you are located—a fourth measure can pin it down to a foot or two.
The point where all three circles intersect is your position.
Religion is no different and having only one point of reference, you are in fact, lost—
Having two points of reference can get you in the ballpark (near the warning track) while having three points you’ll know exactly where you stand. It is in fact a necessity it every point of reason. Another option—stick with any one belief point on the globe which is always seems like the center, but is nowhere at the same time—like being born into the only thing you know.
Culture can be illustrated in the same way. When the untraveled declare their home to be the best place on earth, it is obvious to the well traveled it isn’t. Being exposed to multiple facets of humanity one starts to realize his own insignificance when that point of reference is unheard of to the rest of the world—and they are just fine not knowing you or your beliefs even exist.
Without another point of reference there is no way whatsoever to know where you are, while at the same time KNOW, that your religion is the right one. Sincerely Yours, The Faith Trap
The less one knows the more sure one can be of his position.
With life better than ever, why doesn’t it feel like it?
According to Dr. John Vervaeke, “there is a recent and steady surge in the search for meaning. Interest in mindfulness, psychedelic experience, transformative and mystical experience, as well as interest in wisdom and the search into ancient philosophies, like stoicism and Buddhism”.
There is also an academic uptick and public interest to study meaning in life. Is there a unifying account for why this is happening? What is it about todays world that drives people in record numbers to search for meaning?
“Distrust in every institution, apocalypse, suicide, cynicism, the imminent collapse of civilization, the decline civility, all of these things are pervasive and they are now taken for granted as inevitable”. But are they? Statistically this is the best time ever to be alive—why doesn’t it feel like it?
Fall Camp
For centuries we have been influenced by a dominant mythology that turned out to be inadequate, Yet we seem to be happier overall, living with a displaced sense of meaning vs no meaning at all. We are in transition to a higher level of consciousness and wisdom. Change is sometimes painfully inept at explaining itself, but one thing seems to be clear—humanity is seeking something better in frustration to form a cohesive philosophy that results in contentment.
Religion has been exposed—so now what? The head-game of Hebrew religion and faith as a virtue has proven inadequate to take us to the next level. Everybody seems to know better, yet at this moment nihilism seems to be a rising tide, while crystals, tarot, psychedelic experience, mystical driven merchandise is setting record sales.
The most depressing thing in the world is turning back to the things that got you right where you are now—but what alternative is there?
All italics Dr John Vervaeke — professor of cognitive science, University of Toronto, “Awakening From The Meaning Crisis”
Out of the trees and into the flats—we are still monkeys
Not only do we share the same social structures and traits like empathy, grief, and altruism, and moral codes, but we share the same muscle configuration, brain structure, rows of teeth, hair, fingerprints, and DNA. A 98.8% match. We are closer to the chimpanzee and gibbon than they are to the gorilla.
Evangelicals will accept that a tiger and a lion are related. True they are both cats, but the tiger and lion DNA is farther separated than chimp and human. Where and why do they draw the line? We are their kinfolk no doubt about it.
If tigers and lions are linked by evolution, man is as much a monkey as a tiger is a lion. We have most of their traits and share the same social structures. That is one possible reason patriarchal religion is so powerful—it’s rooted in evolution.
DNA Paternity tests use a dumb-down version of the advanced version (and even that it is admissible in court) so at what point do evangelicals draw the line with evolution?
On another note, if evangélicas can accept a paternity test as accurate, by all accounts the more advanced methods of testing should be a shoe-in. Why all the resistance? Does it spoil your adoption into the tribe of god, or does it not? Remember, your adopted in through faith. You’re more related to a monkey than to a god.
We like to think we’re more advanced than that, somehow special. But reality dictates these are our people. We are their monkeys, as evidenced also by the patriarchal order of church and government. To survive we’re going to have to transcend those limitations.
The proposed atonement of Jesus has done nothing to cure anything
The liturgy of all Christian sects is meaningless. We’ve recently seen the ridiculous fallout from a misplaced baptismal prayer of a ridiculous procedure. Why do babies need baptism anyway? Do they need a remission of sins for simply being born an organism?
Blood sacrifice has done nothing to cure the worlds woes. Accepting the atonement and believing heals nothing. The blood of Jesus does not cure pedophilia nor cure alcoholism or anything else. My buddy Larry says Jesus cured him, but he’s still in recovery and always will be. This is the promise of Christianity —never arriving at anything.
Can the power of Jesus do anything but cause a well timed distraction from the trials of everyday life? If you stop believing, what will become of us? Buckle up! Unbelief is a whole new and amazing world. The trial of your faith is actually faith itself. Pretty neat trick.
The atonement of Jesus has proven an utter failure. A parlor trick. A mind game that has done nothing but stall the achievements of humanity, generation after generation, waiting for what will never come.
Christian sin—living in an undocumented or unorthodox sexual relationship. This is the crux of Christian morality—that the churches are in fact sexual and family regulatory societies. There is no redeeming liturgy or spiritual achievement. You are forever in need of religion because religion never prepares to graduate it’s members.
Doctrinal issues—do you believe the correct supernatural things? Do you believe with the correct level of humility, knowing full well that the two contradict each other, as belief leads to arrogance? To believe the wrong doctrine is a sin worthy of battle. But who gets to decide what is the correct version of the imagined godhead?
Have you made Jesus your personal savior, and if so, is he the only incarnation of the god (or the ground of being) to use a less contaminated term? Are there other teachings that are perhaps more useful?
The failure of Christianity is this; love your neighbor as yourself, when you yourself have no source from which that well can spring. Loving yourself is the requisite. Without that there is nothing to give.
But in Christian circles you are the fallen sinner not worthy of love, granted only by the lords tolerance and mercy. It’s no wonder the church has never produced the desired results—the order of operations is backwards.
The Thirty Years war was over doctrinal disagreement and which belief was the correct belief—which literally means, which doctrine is more sufficient to keep people subservient to societies upper-crust. Millions died in that conflict alone because the premise is false. It will never produce the desired results because you are born insufficient for the kingdom of god.
HERE is a ten second video illustrating the source of morality.
Does racism in ignorance make you a racist? How can you tell if you are, or aren’t?
I was complaining about getting jury duty last month and a friend of mine said, “just tell them you’re racist and you’ll get released”. I replied “hey, that comment makes you racist”. He said “ no, I’m not racist. How would that make me a racist”?
“Because you’re assuming that the defendant will be a person of color”.
After hearing the Joe Rogan tapes, especially the comments about planet of the apes at the theater, he tips the scale into racist. Not an innocent, solo act of ignorance, but an N-word montage of good ol’ boy white privilege followed by his own admission the theater comment was racist.
This is the first time ever hearing Rogan outside of an MMA commentary, but I think I heard enough to see he isn’t ignorant. He’s blatant.
But he really doesn’t think he’s racist. So how do you know? Can one accurately judge their own personality?
Ask any scientist if climate change is man made, what should be the non-pressurized, non-politicized correct response “I don’t know”—because they don’t. Though it’s 97% popular to say so, the pressure to fall in line with this ideology shuts the door on authentic scientific inquiry.
“Based on well-established evidence, about 97% of climate scientists have concluded that human-caused climate change is happening.”NASA. This is the tag line but is it true? Would NASA ever publish findings outside this narrative?
To know makes science a religion. Should I be wary of such religious claims, when those who claim to know, deny the basic premise of scientific inquiry? Is climate change no longer falsifiable? Theory is genuinely scientific only if it is possible in principle to establish that it is false.
Is any “legitimate” climate scientist trying to falsify this premise? So what is the agenda? Is the great resetfunded propagated by SARS cov2 and climate change more political than evidentiary?
According to a May 15, 2020 WEF article, COVID-19 offers an opportunity to “reset and reshape” the world in a way that is more aligned with the United Nations 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), as climate change, inequality and poverty gained even greater urgency during the pandemic. HERE
Man made climate change is no longer falsifiable, but a religion coupled with shaming and withholding any contrary evidence.
It all comes down to what one would rather believe. Maybe life is just too dissatisfying without a belief to succor one’s ego.
Religious beliefs are like a skillfully edited film—and the preacher is the editor. What lies on the floor of the editing room is messy. But life without makeup is amazing.
Regular is beautiful. Maybe if we put our faith efforts towards our own specie we could really do something special?
When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other—An empty head is not really empty; it is stuffed with rubbish. Hence the difficulty of forcing anything into an empty head—Eric Hoffer.
If something is real it is not necessary to believe in it. To unbelieve is to approach the ground of being—that primordial state from which all things rise and fall. Belief is merely a self employed decoy, perpetuating the unknown by the same belief that holds our attention.
When the signal dies out of the last human being, that narrow band of focus which is conscious attention, what will become of that consciousness? Which thoughts will leave an impact? Which beliefs will transcend annihilation?
For millennia we have followed a certain chain of thoughts, the origination of which is unknown. Certain innovators have some staying power, like Greek philosophers some religions, but when all is said and done will it matter one wit?
Thousands of cultures have been completely erased, each having their own chains of thought. But now we live a sophisticated life, above the ethnosphere of origination. But I think they had something we do not, or we are attempting things that may have already (or nearly) destroyed us more than once.
I wonder if primates would again evolve into humans, or something more? I wonder what we would call ourselves.
“If life on Earth offers any measure of life elsewhere in the universe, then intelligence must be rare. By some estimates, there have been more than ten billion species in the history of life on Earth. It follows that among all extraterrestrial life forms we might expect no better than about one in ten billion to be as intelligent as we are, not to mention the odds against the intelligent life having an advanced technology and a desire to communicate through the vast distances of interstellar space”—Niel DeGrasse Tyson
“The universe appears to be 13.8 billion years old. The earth about 4.5 billion years old. In another half billion years the sun will expand and make life impossible on earth, which means that if had taken consciousness 10% longer to evolve it would have never evolved at all”—Elon Musk
Earth depicted without water
Then there is the timing thing. Our ability to send messages is about a hundred years now—an infinitesimal window of time compared to the age of anything out there.
Life is going in cycles. Are we smarter than ever before, or spiritually inept enough to outlast our progenitors?
If it is true (and it seems to be) that fitness outperforms advanced levels of perception (Hoffman Theory) it is quite possible the advanced, yet extinct higher civilizations of the past simply knew too much about reality. Humanity’s greatest, enduring structures built out of natural materials—still a mystery as to how it was done. Massive complex societies gone without a trace. Perhaps the present species of humans are inept enough to outlast them through belief.
Fitness does not mean smarter. “From a biological perspective, there is no such thing as devolution. All changes in the gene frequencies of populations–and quite often in the traits those genes influence–are by definition evolutionary changes. The notion that humans might regress or “devolve” presumes that there is a preferred hierarchy of structure and function” (1)
Anthropocentric thinking has us at the pinnacle of existence (in our own minds) and maybe that persistent, false sense of superiority is our best chance at survival? It certainly isn’t a true perception of reality, but is a belief that keeps us from knowing too much, which is good for longevity.
I don’t really think we’re as smart as we used to be. The world is now full of end users led by a handful of innovators. Giza, Machu Pichu, and others, were complete societies of craftsman, artisans, engineers, and genius know how, while we are a large lot of specialists.
Following the trend in common sense it appears we have evolved to luke-warm overall intelligence with a smattering of self righteous imagination, which is apparently good for fitness.
As Covid-19 dwindles to mediocrity, maybe it’s time to stop the massively inefficient strategy
“The six public health advisers who previously advised President Joe Biden during his presidential transition have come forward in publishing three opinion articles in Journal of the American Medical Association urging the president to shift course on his response to COVID-19.
The first article, “A National Strategy for the “New Normal” of Life With COVID,” states that policy makers must update their messaging strategy and accept COVID-19 as the “new normal” and redefine the level of risk it poses on the nation.
In the other two articles, the health experts offer new strategies on how the nation can approach testing, surveillance, and mitigation strategies. They also discuss new ways the United States can promote access to COVID-19 treatment therapies and offer alternative vaccine administration options.
“The ‘new normal’ requires recognizing that SARS-CoV-2 is but one of several circulating respiratory viruses that include influenza, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), and more,” the authors write. “COVID-19 must now be considered among the risks posed by all respiratory viral illnesses combined.“—Newsweek
It ain’t no big thing. The virus is taking its place as a common irritant. Let’s stop overreacting and get on with living.
“I can go into a playground of kids that don’t know anything about Christianity, lead them to the lord in…in a matter of just no time at all—and moments later they can be seeing visions and hearing the voice of god”.
“Because they are so open—they are so usable for Christianity. 1/3 of all people are children under the age of 15. Where should we be putting our efforts? I’ll tell you where are enemies are putting their efforts—they’re putting it on the kids”—Becky Fischer, Jesus Camp Pentecostal Children’s Minister
I wonder if the children realize they’re are being targeted for mass manipulation? Or is this a good thing? What is the benefit to these children?
Watching Jesus Camp on Hulu it occurred to me that most of our children in the western world are raised this way, whether believers or not.
Instead of welcoming our children into the human race to form their own unique personality, they are here on probation—simply candidates for humanity. (1) Instead of letting them know up front that our particular way is only one particular set of rules for life (that when they are older they can make their own rules) but are only accepted fully if they behave properly of their own freewill. Whatever you do—we can either praise you or blame you, so if nothing else, at least pretend you are one of us until your old enough to care for yourself.
Undoing what was done to us when we were young is new age enlightenment —through psychotherapy.
My children know that house rules are simply temporary ways of having family cohesion, and they are encouraged to know that whoever they are, they are loved and accepted by me.
My way isn’t the only way, but to the children it is a breath of fresh air to know that compliance to some of the things they don’t like—is only temporary. There is nothing wrong with them if they start to see things differently.
Whereas, my evangelical niece was shunned and criticized for not speaking in tongues and is now living estranged from her family.
As a reader or listener of any story we undergo what is called a willing suspension of disbelief as an attempt to understand the narration, trust the narrator, and interpret why the story is being told toward some underlying idea.
This suspension temporarily undermines suspicion. We are encouraged to have an open mind, but can we honestly do that then resurrect our senses at the end of the drama?
To enjoy any theme demands this—to let fiction entertain for a time is to insight the intent of the author to glean whatever underlying meaning for ourselves that can be siphoned off for future use or self improvement, or to simply be entertained.
This suspension of disbelief is a key point of christianity—the actors and storytellers now expect you to live in this state as a virtuous arrival at something, which is nothing at all.
In real life the story was rejected because it didn’t happen that way, but stories are as plentiful as those who believe them—and grow accordingly to the need that human foibles project into real life what lacks substance by any other view.
If there is any value in the Christ narrative it is this—to temporarily suspend doubt to repose some allegorical meaning or entertain some wishful daydream to escape the doldrums and insecurities of life and death. To demand it’s permanence is to stick humanity right where it is today—stuck in the past arguing a point that gave hope to despair, in which each is a symptom of the other.
Permanently suspending disbelief is impossible, for everyone is already an atheist. Trusting your doubt is as natural as temporarily suspending it to enjoy the show, but it isn’t meant as a permanent state of living—it doesn’t lead anywhere.
Things are not what they seem when you flip ‘em over. Our brains construct reality.
If god created something out of nothing why is there still nothing?
Life is but a dream. Why else does form exist out of nothing? Not the nothing before creation, but the continuation of that same nothing—now perpetuating the great illusion
The paradox of material is apparent. Humanity and the elemental forms appear from a singularity. Of that element we cannot decipher the dream from reality, sleep from death—even the physical forms, not only made of nothing but still consist of no discoverable thing. Parsing the dream with physics we find more roadblocks than avenues.
Gottfried Leibniz asked, “why is there something rather than nothing? Actually that may be the wrong question; is there really any thing to actually be analyzed? Can anyone describe what material form is made of?
But first, what we call substance must be defined. What is it made of if not strictly consciousness? Since the universe consists of only one elementary substance, no other particle consisting of a different nature could interact with it—in fact, immiscible.
Can we understand the universe from a point of view that does not include our experience?
As a logical system, the universe works by simple logical operations at the most fundamental level. Such a substantial logical system is allowed only one type of substance, or one nature. This is because only elements of a same nature – of the same substance may participate in a logical operation. Since the whole universe is allowed to contain only one type of substance, the cause has to be some aspect of that single substance.
The Hebrew model of creation is once again at odds with reality. It seems like this world is all part of something tangible, that a material exists, but it doesn’t. God didn’t create any-thing out of nothing, but the dream is so convincing to it’s forms you could never parse it.
So why is there something rather than nothing? Or really, why does there appear to be something when there is still nothing? Where are the building blocks of this creation?
One cannot find the element, god, or any ontological root because it alone exists. This is you. The seeker is the sought—the sought is the seeker.
If god created something out of nothing why is there still nothing?
Do we experience the world as it actually is, or as we need it to be?
Does natural selection really favor seeing reality as it is? Fortunately, we don’t have to wave our hands and guess; evolution is a mathematically precise theory. We can use the equations of evolution to check this out. We can have various organisms in artificial worlds compete and see which survive and which thrive, which sensory systems are more fit.
So, in my lab, we have run hundreds of thousands of evolutionary game simulations with lots of different randomly chosen worlds and organisms that compete for resources in those worlds. Some of the organisms see all of the reality, others see just part of the reality, and some see none of the reality, only fitness. Who wins?
Well, I hate to break it to you, but perception of reality goes extinct. In almost every simulation, organisms that see none of reality but are just tuned to fitness drive to extinction all the organisms that perceive reality as it is. So the bottom line is, evolution does not favor veridical, or accurate perceptions. Those perceptions of reality go extinct.
We’re inclined to think that perception is like a window on reality as it is. The theory of evolution is telling us that this is an incorrect interpretation of our perceptions. Instead, reality is more like a 3D desktop that’s designed to hide the complexity of the real world and guide adaptive behavior. Space as you perceive it is your desktop. Physical objects are just the icons in that desktop.
Once we let go of our massively intuitive but massively false assumption about the nature of reality, it opens up new ways to think about life’s greatest mystery. I bet that reality will end up turning out to be more fascinating and unexpected than we’ve ever imagined.
The theory of evolution presents us with the ultimate dare: Dare to recognize that perception is not about seeing truth, it’s about having kids—Cognitive Scientist Donald Hoffman
So, do we experience the world as it actually is, or as we need it to be? It seems more and more that life is an illusion. Not of the hocus pocus kind, but as a means of survival —
“If religion were clear, it would have fewer attractions for the ignorant. They need obscurity, mysteries, fables, miracles, incredible things which keep their brains perpetually at work. Romances, idle stories, tales of ghosts and witches, have more charm for the vulgar than true narrations—Jean Messlier
“In order to be effective, a doctrine must not be understood, but has rather to be believed in. A doctrine that is understood is shorn of its strength—If a doctrine is not unintelligible, it has to be vague. If neither unintelligible nor vague, it has to be unverifiable”—Eric Hoffer
In the matter of religion, men are but overgrown children. The more absurd the religion is, and the fuller of marvels, the more power it exerts, the devotee thinks himself obliged to place no limits to his credulity; the more inconceivable things are, the more divine they appear to him; the more incredible they are, the more merit he gives himself for believing them”—Jean Messlier—The Testament
The impression somehow prevails that the true believer, particularly the religious individual, is a humble person. The truth is the surrendering and humbling of the self breed pride and arrogance. The true believer is apt to see himself as one of the chosen, the salt of the earth, the light of the world, a prince disguised in meekness, who is destined to inherit the earth and the kingdom of heaven too. He who is not of his faith is evil; he who will not listen will perish—Eric Hoffer
What can science tell us about evidence based reality
What is physical reality and what is it made of? Is it not made of non-physical, theoretical particles? Energy/particles that have yet to be explained? But what exactly is a particle? Nobody knows, and the answer is a charming way of saying so (wink)
Illustration of space becoming form by excitation/vibration
Where is the dividing line between theoretical “particles”, waves, and energy that make up physical reality? What level of magnification is acceptable as reality? What we see as the building blocks of life and matter are unreal, non-existent, indescribable ideas of how non-intelligent space manifests as forms. They are words about ideas about how form expands out of space.
According to quantum field theory, particles are excitations of quantum fields that fill all of space. (1) It’s the standard deep answer of people in the know: A clever way of saying I don’t. Particles are “representations” of “symmetry groups,” Hence, particles are theoretical junctions in an excited or energized field that manifests as form. Now form we can relate to, but it isn’t made of any-thing—It is an illustration of nothing (no-thing).
It is a very grey area between math and mysticism. “In positing the existence of these more fundamental fields, quantum field theory stripped particles of status, characterizing them as mere bits of energy that set fields sloshing. Yet despite the ontological baggage of omnipresent fields, quantum field theory became the lingua franca of particle physics because it allows researchers to calculate with extreme precision what happens when particles (phenomenon) interact—particle interactions being, at base level, the way the world is put together. But keep in mind, the particle isn’t real “stuff” as we perceive “real” to be when it shows up to the five senses as form.
So remember—when you see the word particle, that is just to assist the mental imagery. It’s not an actual thing.
Particles can mostly be described as what they are not. Not this, not that, but by a series of negations we form the gist, grasp the idea, comprehend what the physics is trying to tell us. “Chip away the stone to reveal the image”, but that’s not what it is either.
“The correspondence between elementary particles and representations is so neat that some physicists equate them. Others see this as a conflation. “The representation is not the particle; the representation is a way of describing certain properties of the [imaginary] particle,” said Sheldon Glashow, a Nobel Prize-winning particle theorist and professor emeritus at Harvard University and Boston University. “Let us not confuse the two.”
Physiology and resisting temptation. The role of glucose and freewill.
If freewill exists, then cause and effect are not in succession—and the past does not determine the future. You are messed up all by yourself.
It would be poor judgment to say that the force compelling a bad choice is deterministic, whereas the force countering it is free.
Free will supports culturally valued behavior. Such behavior often requires a personal sacrifice for the sake of the collective. This position implies that selfish behavior is intuitive, primary, and easy, whereas socially responsible behavior is only won by a successful struggle against the unfree forces of self-interest. Contrary to this view, recent research suggests that culturally valued cooperation often comes easily and intuitively, and that, in fact, selfish behavior is the most often the result of deliberation.
When we look back on the important choices we’ve made in our lives, it is likely to think we could have chosen differently and had a different outcome. This would be incorrect.
Ego depletion refers to the idea that self-control or willpower draws upon a limited pool of mental resources that can be used up. When the energy for mental activity is low, self-control is typically impaired, which would be considered a state of ego depletion. Glucose plays a big role in maintaining our normative self, or the societal self.
Imagine trying to make a rational decision with the all-seeing eye holding a hammer over your head? It would get tiring, hence the hypocrisy of belief in freewill. Every decision depletes energy. Every resistance to perceived temptation does the same. Eventually glucose wears down and you are charged with sin, the inability to continuously resist two opposing forces you never initiated.
Is 15 weeks a reasonable limit? Is anyone in favor of this?
“The Supreme Court should return the issue of abortion to the states, which would mean overruling Roe. “The Constitution is neither pro-life nor pro-choice,” he said, adding that the Court should “return to a position of neutrality.”—Justice Brett Kavanaugh
Overturning Roe would not be a neutral act. The Constitution protects liberty, but if women cannot make decisions about their own pregnancies, then they will never have equal status under the Constitution.
At least if the court takes a stance of neutrality, many states would still be available for safe and legal abortion. Either way this is pretty exciting drama.
Seems like I already posted this, but on examination it was only deja-vu.
What is deja–vu other than confusion between real-time events passing through the memory cue? It can be an interesting head game feeling you’ve been here before when you know you never have, but what if you have?
Is there more to it than that? Some feel this as something experienced in a prior life, or seen in a dream or astral visit. Some recount vivid experiences with uncanny accuracy. The only time we are aware of our brains is when they misfire—everything is normal right up until it’s not, but along with that is a sense that something isn’t quite right.
Deja-vu “is not only a feeling of familiarity, but also the metacognitive recognition that these feelings are misplaced”.—Dr Akira O’Connor. So how do you explain it when someone recounts an experience in detail and verifies it? I’ll explain…
I booked an Air BnB near the coast to attend a wedding. It was old farmhouse built in the 1920’s on still, heavily wooded acreage. As we walked in the door my wife stops abruptly and says “I’ve been here before”.
She made a list of notes about the previous colors on the wall, the old man and woman that lived there, the library upstairs which was moved from another location, how the old man and woman died, and so on. Details about his medical conditions and that they really cared for the place.
We met with the new owners (married male couple) who lived in a newer house a hundred yards behind the same property. She gave him the paper and his jaw hit the floor. He said everything she said was how it was and how it happened. How did she know? What are your experiences with this phenomenon?
For several years I did body removals. Some were quite humorous, while others—not so much. A lot can happen in a week or two, especially in the summer months.
Having no emotional ties to a body made it a $50 job. It never once seemed like a spirit, or “someone” was missing from the body—only with an emotional connection might a loved one or friend hope it that way. Lots and lots of dead people where it actually appears that consciousness did not leave the body, but the body left consciousness. It simply disconnected from the grid.
By the way, the worst smell on earth is the breath of death—the decomposing gasses trapped in the lungs that expel when you first move a dead one.
This is my first hand observations of a single consciousness. Only if you were taught to believe otherwise would it appear any different than that. Consciousness remains in spite of life or death. It is what is.
Perhaps the brain was at one time a more useful appendix we’ve lost track of.
The brain as an appendix? Three pounds of useless fat…
Organisms come and go. Brains evolve into minor insignificant blobs—to bilateral synchronization, to the organic state of awareness. Being aware of being aware (the pinnacle of biological evolution) big brains have made humans the “chief mambas” of planet earth. But was this necessary? Is it even true?
In geologic timescale life is but an eye-blink. Upon death one constant remains—consciousness. It is in every thing. It is the background illuminating the foreground. “The entire universe is forever the same as the consciousness that dwells in every atom”—Yoga-Vasistha. When you are gone consciousness remains.
Does consciousness exists without the brain? In recent years that idea has regained traction from some unlikely sources—brain abnormalities and science.
#1. “A new research study contradicts the established view that so-called split-brain patients have a split consciousness. Instead, the researchers behind the study have found strong evidence showing that despite being characterized by little to no communication between the right and left brain hemispheres, split brain does not cause two independent conscious perceivers in one brain”
Split brain is a lay term to describe the result of a corpus callosotomy, a surgical procedure first performed in the 1940s to alleviate severe epilepsy among patients. During this procedure, the corpus callosum (a bundle of neural fibres connecting the left and right cerebral hemispheres) is severed to prevent the spread of epileptic activity between the two brain halves. While mostly successful in relieving epilepsy, the procedure also virtually eliminates all communication between the cerebral hemispheres, thereby resulting in a ‘split brain’. Ref Article
Yet the patients still have one mind. The idea that consciousness originates in the brain has been sideswiped by evidence—that it’s not so clear as that. There’s more…
#2. More than 20 years ago the campus doctor at Sheffield University was treating a student of mathematics for a minor ailment. The student was bright, having an IQ of 126. The doctor noticed that the student’s head seemed a little larger than normal and he referred him to Dr Lorber for further examination.
Dr Lorber examined the boy’s head by cat scan to discover that the student had virtually no brain. The normal brain consists of two hemispheres that fill the cranial cavity, some 4.5cm deep. This student had a layer of cerebral tissue less than 1mm deep covering the top of his spinal column. Ref Article
#3. When a 44-year-old man from France started experiencing weakness in his leg, he went to the hospital. That’s when doctors told him he was missing most of his brain. The man’s skull was full of liquid, with just a thin layer of brain tissue left. Ref Article
With speech and motor coordination intact, normal societal living, average as well as above average intelligence, the above cases are good cases for consciousness existing outside the brain. Even the split brain is a single consciousness.
Where are his memories stored?
Where does thinking occur?
Where is speech and visual acuity learned and stored?
Where is the moral compass and reasoning developed?
Where does this place evolutions larger brain hypothesis to support greater intelligence?
How do the 12 cranial nerves function without a source organ?
I imagine the big brain has something to do with esthetics. A population of pinheads wouldn’t be a real eye catcher— or would it?
Where western science meets eastern mysticism—bootstrapping vs intuition
“All this was familiar to me from my research in high-energy physics, but until that moment I had only experienced it through graphs, diagrams and mathematical theories. As I sat on that beach my former experiences came to life; I saw cascades of energy coming down from outer space, in which particles were created and destroyed in rhythmic pulses; I saw the atoms of the elements and those of my body participating in this cosmic dance of energy; I felt its rhythm and I heard its sound, and at that moment I knew that this was the Dance of Shiva, the Lord of Dancers worshipped by the Hindus— Frifjof Capra, The Tao of Physics
In essence the dance of Shiva, a high speed representation of the atomic level—high energy movements, pulsations, and rhythms.
“I was particularly attracted to the puzzling aspects of Zen which reminded me of the puzzles in quantum theory. At first, however, relating the two was a purely intellectual exercise. To overcome the gap between rational, analytical thinking and the meditative experience of mystical truth, was, and still is, very difficult for me.—Frifjof Capra
Mysticism is utilizing what has been experienced, while physics is theorizing, describing, and viewing the fields behind the instruments of what is probable. They have the same descriptions of matter and energy—one through boot strapped logic and rigorous tests, the other through intuition and the meditative arts.
Yet throughout the ages these displays of the cosmic dance are interpreted differently, based on the available language, technology, and culture. How would Black Elk describe this today? “Crazy Horse went into the world where there is nothing but the spirits of all things. That is the real world that is behind this one, and everything we see here is something like a shadow from that one—Black Elk
Or the Incas and their depiction of Alpa Camasca, meaning “animated earth”, or the Kofan and their ability to “intuitively” read the vibrations of plants and communicate their usefulness in language and practice—through a special process of seeing the cosmic rhythms.
“At the same time, everything is more than it appears, for the visible world is only one level of perception. Behind every tangible form, every plant and animal, is a shadow dimension, a place invisible to ordinary people but visible to the shaman”—Wade Davis, on the people of the Piraparaná, Amazon
So there we have it (there are many more) multiple cultures and even physicists describing a world very different from our normal level of magnification, each pointing to the universe as a unified cosmic dance—a dance without a regulating force.
“In other words I feel, no longer a stranger in the world, but that the external world were my own body…but a very overwhelming feeling that everything that happens, everything that I have ever done, anything anyone else has ever done, is part of a harmonious design—that there is no error at all—Alan Watts
It is probably true quite generally that in the history of human thinking the most fruitful developments frequently take place at those points where two different lines of thought meet—Werner Heisenberg
What about when 10 lines of thought, jungles, and time irrelevant meeting at the doorstep of modern physics? Is that evidence?
How eating vegetables is less ethical than eating meat.
How eating meat is currently more ethical than eating vegetables.
No question meat eating has been the way of humans for thousands of years, but is it time to stop eating meat because vegetables are a more humane and ethical consideration?
We’ve all seen video of slaughter houses and the “inhumane” processes that raise everything from eggs to thanksgiving turkeys, but do you know where your vegetables come from? People of color. Migrant farm workers—working full speed everyday in grueling conditions to meet quotas.
Here in the US it’s the Latin American migrant worker, in South Africa (pick any first world country) it’s the Zimbabwean (mostly) selected particularly because he doesn’t know the law, or his or her legal rights. The are routinely abused and grossly underpaid.
Now, because of the sheer volume of people we turn to farm raised everything, and because of the farm raising of everything we can support more people. This will eventually have to tap out, but for now breeding livestock is not nearly as concerning as breeding people. But the two are inseparably linked.
For grain growers only, Americans farm about 61.8million acres of the 2.4 billion acres of land mass. Again, machines do most of the planting and harvesting. 80% of South Africa’s farmland is grazing cattle. Hardly a fair comparison to the slave labor farm owners extract from the vulnerable. At least the cow gets a breath of decency before he dies—not so much for the farm worker.
Fruit and vegetable workers and their advocates tell a story of vulnerable, low-wage employment operating in fear without proper protections. Let alone information about the risks involved in their essential labor, and without hope of any share in expanded unemployment benefits should they fall ill or lose work. Impossibly long hours and bull pizzle for wages, eating meat causes less suffering than eating greens.
From South Africa we read the line, “WHITE AGRICULTURE AND BLACK LABOUR”—from the book, “We Cry For Our Land”. At a $200 (USD) a month, while in the USA it’s easily replaced with “WHITE AGRICULTURE AND BROWN LABOUR”. How many white people have you seen in the orchards or lettuce fields?
So really, eating fruits and vegetables is supporting oppression. A much more personal and grievous, generational situation than eating a cow or a rabbit.
—This is a serious game, these emergent property humans that have no meaning but continuation. Or is it the one-and-done chance at eternal life for the created Christian? That’s a great game, very serious, but a game nonetheless. “and for His pleasure they were created”—Rev 4:11
Does life have meaning? If so, it is a serious business. But life is not serious at all, “it is a non-serious play—with nothing to be achieved, with nowhere to reach. It is just a play, with no end”—Satrakshita. There is only continuation—til it all burns out then arises again. How long it takes matters none wit, like awakening from a long and dreamless sleep. You will never know what happened when you were out.
Seriousness is always end-oriented. It means that you are living in order to achieve something and life will be meaningless if not achieved. It also permeates culture—“the way and influence of Hebrew thought in western culture creates the backdrop of serious, scientific existentialism influenced by that same tradition”. We must save everything!
Science can pat itself with its competitive sense of compassion—to reduce suffering, while religion professes gods love for you while it does nothing. The only real thing that gives life meaning is death. The limits of time gives everything meaning.
Is data more important than conspiracy theory? Is one more organic than the other? It is this tug of war that makes life interesting. That same stressors of nature that pushes evolution into new boundaries.
So we see there are a couple of goals in mind— every last human is innocuously protected to die without suffering—if they would only listen… If they won’t—sanction life itself. It is very religious to do so. Life is so serious that punishment be administered for simply following your programming. No immutable attribute of oneself can be a sin, but it does make it interesting to think so.
“We will not survive to that day (500 years) unless major changes take place in our conduct to one another and to the extent in which we embrace the role of technology as being basically the lone source of our survival”—Neil Degrasse Tyson
No thanks. Not ready to play that game, but I’m sure the upcoming spirit children of god have been held back just for this specific, end-time (again) trial of their faith—to accept a purely mechanical, nuts and bolts universe or be ostracized as the heretics, shunned from medical care unwilling to comply. The flip-flop-ability of the game provides millions of variables.
“It is the knowledge that I am going to die that creates the focus that I bring to being alive. The urgency of accomplishment—Neil Degrasse Tyson
Is Biden’s new mandate to vaccinate businesses of 100 or more employees ethical, or even legal?
Concerning bioethics —is it ethical to mandate vaccination of citizens with an unnatural selection processes that, based on fear, have bypassed established checks and balances? Is it an ethical mandate regardless?
Here in Washington state we have vaccine mandates coupled with the threat of jobs and access. Now President Biden offering more of the same. For whatever reason nature has selected this process, yet humanity is serious enough to think it can hold it at bay ad-nauseum. We need 8 billion more people?
Will vaccines end the pandemic? No. But it will curtail some suffering while simultaneously causing other suffering.
“labs are turning to gene-based vaccines. Scientists use information from the genome of the virus to create a blueprint of select antigens. The blueprint is made of DNA or RNA—molecules that hold genetic instructions. The researchers then inject the DNA or RNA into human cells. The cell’s machinery uses the instructions to make virus antigens that the immune system reacts to. Cells respond to the instructions as a normal part of their daily existence. This is the same trait infectious viruses exploit; they cannot reproduce on their own, so they use a cell’s machinery to make copies of themselves. They burst out of the cell and infect more cells, widening the infection.
Who knows where any of this will go from here? What is nature trying to tell us? One thing is clear; humans will fight the natural processes until it all goes out with a bang instead of boredom. This artificial propping of human longevity may very well be its downfall.
It won’t be some presidential whacko to push the button, but will it likely go out with a syringe?
Is Biden’s new mandate to vaccinate businesses of 100 or more employees ethical, or even legal?
I know maybe it’s too late to say this, but the unnatural living conditions, overcrowding genomics to keep capitalism growing evermore is a root cause. Now what do you do about that?
Soon, every last one of us will be replaced by 2 or three more souls
In a hundred or so years every living human being will be dead and replaced with brand new souls god has created for his puppy mill, to test those same souls with an age old game—to see if they’ll simply believe. Finding the correct belief is paramount to continuation or damnation. It all makes perfect sense.
Where to put all these souls?
I’m confident the new crew will fit right in (barely) and adjust to their cages. It’s an interesting test, this god of the Hebrews has devised. With freewill diminishing in every generation, let’s hope grades are based on the curve.
Viruses don’t tend to co-infect. Viral interference is a process where the earlier virus triggers interferon, effectively blocking other viruses from gaining traction or even attempting cellular infection—so they wait.
With Covid-19 we have had virtually no flu season primarily due to interferon “interfering” with the flu virus ability to infect the already sick host. Somehow they communicate, for even viruses that enter through other receptors are effectively blocked by the primary infection.
Enter religion
Where are all the new religion start ups? Can we form a more coherent ideology while Christianity’s interferon is present? Humans are linear thinkers—one line of thought at a time. It isn’t hard to wonder how easily manipulated entire societies can be, once a doctrine or dogma stakes its claim.
It took the Greek gods about 900 years to finally die off after Christianity posted and enforced its beliefs. While this psychological interferon holds more logical approaches to cosmology and ontology at bay, all one can do is wait it out. It takes about three weeks of solitude to recognize the game that is being played for what it is. Since there is very little solitude and no natural quiet left in the world, we may be stuck with this til the bitter end.
Whatever the case, I find it interesting that humans and viral behaviors are so similar. We each carry about 6trillion viruses in our bodies. Makes me wonder who’s in really in charge here.
Testing the logic of middle eastern monotheism. Not only in name but in deed, YHWY defies the natural order
“If time, space, and matter didn’t exist prior to the moment that our universe came into existence, then logic would dictate that God would not be subject to time, space, or matter—TEP336
IF, is the key word here. You’d be hard pressed to prove there was ever nothing. Before there was something, there was the Tao.
Gods existence would be subject to the Tao, for YHWY doesn’t exist in the decorated form of Christianity, but is only half a god. It is the only way god could be a ‘He’. For He, is only in relationship to she, or the Yin principle—the feminine. Your god is not God. If yin and yang could be split apart, only then could YHWY rule the world in the patriarchal masculinity of the Hebrew religions. It hasn’t. May as easily have a one sided coin. All of nature and unature is the Tao, with both sides irrevocably linked like north and south, hot and cold, male and female.
If God actually were the lone, one true god hiding in the void, it would not be a patriarchal figure head, but an it. Higher and lower beings are both subject to the Tao, which is the isness of existence—the essence of what is. It is what a god would be made from. All gods are subject to it. As a He, YHWY, is only half of every manifestation of reality in the cosmos, which is evidenced by the masculine brutality of his religion fashioned after the kings court of the Tigress and Euphrates culture.
The Tao is the doing. It is the underlying web of being. It is this isness that sprouts forth creations interconnected web of life. It is the background —the comfortable, safe, unnoticed endscape that illuminates the landscape.
All gods would arise from the Tao, which is everlasting. God is subject to it and would die, just as all that arises in the Tao. The void existed before god, he would have to came out of it. The void is without form, but neither exists without the other.
If god is a He, he is only half a god. The masculine and feminine, the yin and the yang, are infinitely bound with every game of life in the balancing ups and downs of equilibrium—between them is the void, the Tao. Hebrew religion has no balance. Logic would say their god is not god. Your god is a human construct from a male driven culture that has held the feminine principle hostage for 3000 years.
According to logic, monotheism is really dimidium-theism, or semi-theism. No wonder Christianity never meets or approaches its objectives—it is missing half of the whole equation. No wonder they want to punish the ineffable traits of being human—they’re playing with half a deck.
If anything at all is obvious, the Hebrew god is constructed of only half of the whole picture, with the feminine principle suppressed by the men of the Middle East—out of ignorance, lust, greed, or insecurity —Most likely all of the above…
Your god is not a god. It is a poorly constructed and chauvinistic half understanding of the universe.
The pinnacle of Christian belief—turning a hobby into cash
Some people make themselves really difficily to like on Facebook. Here are some recent shares by one—I think Jesus is ready to roll the stone back over his tomb and take up death.
Wouldn’t it be nice if they were held accountable for the promises they preach?
This guy is from South Africa. If anyone thinks the US has religion problems, march in to Pretoria…In Jesus name, of course.
The idea that everything is separate bits and pieces is an unscientific social construct
For what it’s worth—the idea that everything and everyone are separate bits and entities is an unscientific, social construct.
Everything you see is seen on the inside of your brain, while at the same time, that brain is on the inside of everything you see. Everyone else is also inside what they are seeing too (insert puddle analogy here) I know this seems rather obvious when you spell it out, so why does one feel we are individual agents of it? Why think of consciousness as an emergent property that arises from the brain—tradition, hypothesis, original sin? Why? Here’s an idea—
“The brain does not create or produce consciousness; rather, it filters it”—Peter Fenwick.
“My brain is only a receiver”—Nikola Tesla
Your brain is primarily a receiver too. Sure it has some memory and some habitual functions to conserve energy, but since birth it has received input—countless lines of opinion, indoctrination, definitions, and visual stimuli form a particular viewpoint and, occasionally can regurgitate a few lines of coherent feedback out of the mix, or pull an idea out of thin air (inspiration). How could an emergent property like a brain, developed by outside stimuli, suddenly become independent of it—unless that’s how you were taught to see it? There is no outside stimuli. You’re going through it and it’s going through you. That’s why your body is covered in little tubes. In and out, that’s what it does.
So you are inside of what you are looking at, and inside your brain we are seeing what we’re inside of. It is not outside you—it is you. The whole universe is you. It is all one thing. It’s all one process.
Our current thinking is a neat trick based mostly on a Hebrew interpretation from an authoritative culture where you are the created subject of a king—independent agents of freewill guilty of original sin, that you and your actions are somehow separate from the environment. This illusion permeates deep in our culture. You are responsible to “work out your salvation with fear and trembling”. You are on your own—but, “Any immutable attribute of oneself, cannot be a sin”. (1)
Maybe your brain being a receiver of consciousness is why it is so difficult to change your personality. It is 3 pounds of fat, receiving impulses and scanning for danger. How do you make it stop is the question? There are ways.
We are apertures of the entire cosmos, independent only as semi-unique physical structures—outposts in a self regulating organism where there is no freewill. Everything is a reaction to the flow of stimuli—even a well thought-out decision. Enjoy the ride!
Thinking you are near death can produce the same effects as clinical death
Near-death experiences are reported across cultures, with written records of them dating back to ancient Greece. Not all of these experiences actually coincide with brushes with death—one study of 58 patients who recounted near-death experiences found 30 were not actually in danger of dying, although most of them thought they were. (1)
The Near Death Experience Research Foundation- nderf.org – has thousands of published experiences, but those studied must meet certain criteria to be considered ‘near death’.
One compelling case was a child born blind who, during the experience, described vivid details, colors, shapes, and patterns she had never encountered since birth. A blind person describing colors is a phenomenon alone.
Considering NDEs from both a medical perspective and logically, it should not be possible for unconscious people to often report highly lucid experiences that are clear and logically structured. Most NDErs report supernormal consciousness at the time of their NDEs. Article HERE
Seeing what Christianity has done to indigenous cultures throughout the world as a token of love, spreading while being resisted is more in line with evolution than a loving god.
We had a similar event here this past month. Boasting about a fever and making her way around campus, an adult covid denier (superspreader) made her way around campus, became ill, tested positive, and put 80 students and 9 staff members in two weeks of quarantine.
Not that every staff member took it seriously either, as the self -quarantined can be seen at the grocery store and gas pumps chatting away face to face with whomever.
Who is in charge here, god, the people, or the virus? Spoiler alert! The virus is in charge. You can believe it is not, but evidence suggests otherwise. Resisting is futile.
As humans also continue to spread against all will and reason, it is obvious our agendas are not linked to the outcomes. We are not controlling anything at all, but do what we do thinking thoughts that make us think we’re somehow special, yet march to the beat of chaos on a competing ecosystem functioning to maintain its equilibrium.
The virus has found a foothold in the believers of religion and conspiracy. Operating on belief and others belief as usual, it doesn’t miss a beat. You can do everything to protect yourself—then here comes Cindy…
Is intellect its own bias? Whatever happened to experience?
Think before you read…
“The constant streaming-in of the thoughts of others must confine and suppress your own; and indeed in the long run paralyze the power of thought… The inclination of most scholars is a kind of vacuum suction, from the poverty of their own minds, which forcibly draws in the thoughts of others.. It is dangerous to read about a subject before we have thought about it first ourselves.. When we read, another person thinks for us; we merely repeat his mental process…so it comes about that is anyone spends almost whole day in reading, he gradually loses the capacity for thinking…
“Experience of the world may be looked upon as a kind of text, to which reflection and knowledge form the commentary. Where there is a great deal of reflection and intellectual knowledge and a very little experience, the result is like those books which have on each page two lines of text to forty lines of commentary.”—Arthur Schopenhauer
How you want to end your life, broken down, busted, and used up, or writing and reading someone else’s adventure and lacing it with opinion also gleaned from other opinion?
“The art of not reading is a very important one. It consists in not taking an interest in whatever may be engaging the attention of the general public at any particular time. When some political or ecclesiastical pamphlet, or novel, or poem is making a great commotion, you should remember that he who writes for fools always finds a large public. A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short”—Arthur Schopenhauer,
Truth serum for the soul. Seek and thee shall find…something
How woo, magic, and religion are simply glimpses into non-ordinary neurology. It’s all right here.
It is religion that drives certain men and women to ask real questions and find real answers to how the world operates. Thank you religion. Science has challenged the millennia long status quo—that what is occasionally seen by mystics is merely how the world would look when you mess with the wires.
Those who grew tired of being watched by a persistent deity that had no bearing on life, decided to answer a few questions on their own without postulating a god—but to find out how things actually work.
We have evolved with a certain brain configuration and perceive the world through a specific shaped eye and tactile senses. Alter these receptors any way you want and you can see the spirit world, which is this world in a non-ordinary, alternate perception of reality. This is the religious experience—attempting to maintain that different reality than what evolution has normalized as our current, best chance at survival.
Change the shape of the eye, we all may look like Jabba the Hut, but we’d still be here, and that would be normal. Mess with the optic nerve and flip the left and right lobes and voilet! Things certainly wouldn’t be like they seem now.
Understanding this, that a minor change in physiology and nothing would seem the same. I’m sure the octopus who is born knowing how to hunt and strategize it’s prey, has a completely different perception and hereditary underpinning than a human—but the octopus is still here, just a different set of lenses, and a different reality.
Enter the traumatic event or addiction.
Carry yourself deep into the difficult side of human existence, to the brink of losing family or life itself, or just play around with a little peyote? Activate those adrenals and delve into the hypoxia of a NDE and you can see god. Feel god. Feel your brain reach it’s outer limits to grasp at survival. Those unlucky enough just don’t have enough trauma in their lives, or indoctrination? It is up to them to move the planet beyond belief mode.
In the beginning was the word, the sound, the vibration, the big bang, the primordial om, the name that cannot be named.
Imagine being aroused from a deep sleep only to be hypnotized… “22 And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: In other words, man has been instructed to see the world in duality, that he and his actions are separate from his environment, which is not the natural state…of anything, and certainly not as “one of us” when a god, by every reasonable definition can be only non-dual.
19 And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. 20 And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field;
This was the fall of man—the rapid decent into a fixed, measured reality, now spread mother to daughter and father to son, oblivious to who or what they are through the language of labels.
′′If you name me, you negate me. By giving me a name, a label, you negate all of the other things I could possibly be.”—Søren Kierkegaard
By labeling we restrict our awareness into believing forms equal separate things. Filtering away the surrounding fractals through instruction, pattern recognition, and negate the background with descriptive words—sounds and beliefs that drown out, distract, then dismiss the colloidal background which brings everything into view. the source energy, the vibration into forms. It is useful in some ways, but also has a cost.
Cymatic imagines on a Chladni plate— made from sound vibration replicates a Meso-American glyph
In Inca the word for human body is alpa camasca literally meaning “animated earth”. This was a civilization which saw the human species formed from the vibrations of its world, as something with which it was spun into being, not a separate entity as is the common sense of today.
And Moses said “Now, for this cause I know that man is nothing (no thing) which thing I never had supposed. Not nothing as in worthless, or inferior, but man is literally no thing. It would be quite the epiphany for a Hebrew to realize he is a Buddhist.
“In the beginning was the word” (sound) the vibration, the big bang, the primordial om, the name that cannot be named.
The name that cannot be named in Jewish Kabbalah is actually the complexity of frequencies that cannot be vocally duplicated (so far) because it is everything, in every thing. It cannot be named, not because it is sacred, but because it is impossible to speak its entanglement with a vocal assembly formed of a single layer wave oscillation.
Tesla stated; “If you wish to understand the universe think of energy, frequency and vibration” As demonstrated on the Chladni plate, imagine a cymatic that incorporated all possible frequencies and waves? We would have an earth full of life and variety. Vibration may be an important ontological link in an enormous puzzle.
“The energy in a single cubic meter of space is enough to boil all the oceans of the world”—Richard Feynman
Isn’t this odd? How can this be, if matter is as dense as it seems to be, and that so much energy is so elusive to harness?
On a final note, researches have noticed that honeycomb is formed as round holes, and only forms into a hexagon after the bee exits the hole. Their hypothesis is that it something to do with heat generated from the bee. I would hypothesize it is formed by the vibration of the hive. An article HERE
Can we truly explain consciousness out of geology, yet deny that same geology is at least part conscious? How could that be? There is a myriad of explanations and footnotes to inculcate a believable mythology* emergent property, yet, the simplest answer may be the correct one. Maybe we should start there?
If we can use this to explain that, we can just as easily describe that with this. That we can identify this mind with those elements, yet deny those elements have part of mind? Reason tells me that one cannot exist without the other. It’s tricky—so observation and testing takes a cold, hard leap-of-faith which has developed into a popular new mythology, but is a very ancient teaching.
The modern world is an extension of human consciousness, and human consciousness is an emergent property of minerals, crystals, and primordialsoup lipids composed mainly of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen.
“However, “Emergent properties” is a scientific term, eerily similar to Pratītyasamutpāda in Sanskrit, commonly translated as dependent origination, dependent arising, or interdependence, a key doctrine of Buddhist philosophy, which states that all dharmas (phenomena) arise dependent upon other phenomena; “if this exists, that exists; if this ceases to exist, that also ceases to exist”. This is a sound principle. There is no such thing as a one way transaction. It contradicts what transaction implies.
Of course there are two sides of this debate. One is careful to re-coin terms to sophisticate an entirely scientific approach, while the original is a philosophy older than the dirt itself. Science has reinvented the wheel (or borrowed the wheel) from a religion. It is a re-emergent property already known for thousands of years through reason and deduction—and is the least complex answer. Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water. How this all happens will forever be missed as hypothesis continues solidifies into mythology. It is now the common sense of the modern world, yet takes some real mental wrangling to master.
Discarding what is useful with what is not—Shamelessly wasting water.
*Mythology: (from the Greek mythos for story-of-the-people, and logos for word or speech, so the spoken story of a people) “is the study and interpretation of tales or fables of a culture known as myths or the collection of such stories which deal with various aspects of the human condition”. The current hypothesis of emergent properties has become the accepted mythology of modern society—again. It is the current story of our people.
The only thing genuine is belief, which is in-genuine. The world as an illusion
Is belief necessary because the world is not real? Believing-in would not be necessary if it was.
Humanity has taken a necessary component of participating in the illusion and made it a dogma—rewarding the creature with promises for correct belief (there are none) Such belief is even considered more important than correct action.
So, why so much attitude when all beliefs have contradictory behaviors as bed-mates?
If you believe our ontology rests in biological evolution and the right mix of minerals creates intelligence, that natural selection leads to the fittest for survival, how can one simultaneously believe that humans are destructive viruses and the world should be changed—that the world would be a better place if humans never existed? We are simply results in a petri of selfish genes—
You are the result of billions of years of imperfect, immutable, unguided change with the best chance of survival. If you believe this, nothing that has ever happened is in error, so why fight it? Why fight anything? There are no mistakes in nature, yet one thinks he can outsmart his own organism. Thats funny!
If you believe that the universe is a self governing organism, that everything that happens happens to “itself” (god) then you must believe things are exactly as they can be, or should be (or you want it to be) so why the division if all this variety is simply an interesting drama?
If you believe there is a an all-wise, all-knowing creator that is in complete control (even ordains our elected officials since “before the world was”) that he will make you a heaven if you simply believe, why all the gun collecting, racism, and nationalism? Why postulate a god and then immediately make it a meaningless assertion? Is he is really in control? Why do you have no faith in your faith? Why choose to believe something that has no bearing on the outcome of anything?
I could go on, but why the fighting when every religion, philosophy, or science, ultimately shows that there is nothing that can be done that is a mistake, or perfectly natural?
If science really believes natural selection is true, religion is a perfectly natural progression of evolution. Science then would be right about their science but wrong to fight religion. If evolution is true, why fight it?
And finally, why is belief so prevalent around the world? Is it because it isn’t real? There is nothing to hold on to. Is it possible the ground of being is strictly illusory? If not, why the need to believe in everything? Why the world of beliefs if there is such a thing as reality?
Beliefs are so important that they are protected by law—is like protecting a spirit with proper documentation.
The world must be believed to be seen…”Belief makes one fight. Fighting makes one strong—the selfish gene is in control after all”
There is a grey area between life and death, a conscious-brain and conscious-ness
Some children are remembering past lives of themselves (or others?) with the two most compelling accounts in recent memory being Anne Frank (Barbro Karlén) and pilot James M. Huston Jr.
At 3 years old, James claimed to have been shot down in WWII and told his parents his real name, the ship, the mates, and so on. This persisted so they investigated and found his story contained many obscure facts and corroborations with the deceased man’s living relatives—including old shipmates from the USS Natoma—in the battle of the pacific.
It’s interesting to examine western vs eastern thought on the subject, where westerners turn to reincarnation as a comforting idea but difficult to believe, while the easterner has no trouble believing it but wants to get out of its endless cycles of futility. Funny, really.
So, from where do these past memories arise in these kids? The stories are many, and now with the internet many of the details can be verified using an objective approach.
There is a grey area between life and death, a conscious brain and consciousness. Where do these memories come from? What else could it be? Is everything a cold hard fact, or is there more to it that makes Hebrew religions and hard atheism alike, uncomfortable?
It happens in every culture and even those religions that don’t believe it, are being forced to consider it, like in the story of Marty Martyn.
These two accounts are also covered in depth on Netflix “Surviving Death” episode 6
Is it a coincidence that the golden age of physics had this common thread?
Has any religious doctrine ever supplanted a scientific discovery? I used to answer that question with an emphatic no, but I may have been wrong about that. It is highly likely that Newtonian physics was supplanted by the Upanishads—the ideas from Hindu philosophy called quantum mechanics.
What’s different about the Upanishad -vs- say, Christianity, is the Upanishad can be made into math by the most skilled of all scientific minds. It can be tested, and it can be fit into what we know about the nature of duality, consciousness, mind, and matter.
Is it mere coincidence that physics can be so mystical in similarity, that uncertainty is certain, and that through observation we find that waves become particles (matter) and that the “real world” is illusory (not what it appears to be) upon our observation of them?
“The Upanishads describe how reality arises out of consciousness. But consciousness cannot be found inside our bodies as a substance or an organ.” That trying to see the Self (Brahman) with the same electrons and photons as It, the projector only records interference because me are mixing waves of the same substance. What is sought is the seeker—the seeker is the sought.
“Since we haven’t been able to locate or explain this interaction, we’re left with a deceptively simple choice: either consciousness or reality doesn’t exist”—Erwin Schrödinger
But I despise the two choice debate. And as we see psychologically, consciously, physiologically, and every where in between, that consciousness is reality. There is no such thing as experiencing a non-experience. It’s all one thing. Everything is waves—some long and some short. Some last a lifetime while others millennia, but nothing is permanent —so no thing is real but one thing.
Realizing this has boosted physics out of the arena and into space.
On the other hand, the Upanishads uphold an idealist view – that consciousness exists by itself, and that the physical world depends on it. There is no objective reality that exists independently of the observer. Schrödinger supported this view and lamented the aversion for it: “it must be said that to Western thought this doctrine has little appeal, it is unpalatable, it is dubbed fantastic, unscientific. Well, so it is because our science – Greek science – is based on objectivation, whereby it has cut itself off from an adequate understanding of the subject of cognisance, of the mind”
Curious to know what other physicists of the era were influenced by the upanishads?
Werner Heisenberg, Carl Sagan, Robert Oppenheimer, Erwin Schrödinger, Niels Bohr, Nikola Tesla…
The golden age of physics and invention had a common thread that is wont to ignore (customary). The Upanishads and Indian philosophies date back about 5000, years. Their rebirth was witnessed at the turn of the 20th century.
“I do believe that this is precisely the point where our present way of thinking does need to be amended, perhaps by a bit of blood-transfusion from Eastern thought”—Erwin Schrödinger
“I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things.” Isaiah 45:7
—The word translated “evil” is from a Hebrew word that means “adversity, affliction, calamity, distress, misery. and woe “ The word also refers to moral evil, and often does have this meaning in the Hebrew Scriptures.
If god created everything “but” one thing—how would this even be possible? Is she that good?
On another note, Jesus stands on the right hand of god, but who stands on the left? Why does it never say? Never let your left hand know what your right hand is doing… There are clues so lets take a look.
Isaiah sums it up just fine but so does Job. Satan is the prosecutor set to test Job, while Jesus is the defense attorney. After striking a back-room deal, all three were in on the trials of Job—together! They are one in purpose and different in approach, but working together no doubt—if any of it were true. It actually makes a better Hindu script.
In Hindu philosophy this all works just fine. God is everything and nothing happens that doesn’t happen to god. It’s the best thing going to relieve the boredom’s of infinite living. In fact it’s a drama so interesting that it comes and goes in cycles forever. It is your karma, meaning; it is your doing.
Christianity is at odds with its own doctrine. Contradiction #1267 and counting. It’s what happens when you shoehorn monotheism into an obvious knot.
The goal is to identify what is actually going on; not what we wish was going on…
While religion has attempted to define that for me and failed, to find yourself isn’t listening to how you have been labeled or perusing through self help books, but looking within and answering the question all by yourself.
The duplicity of humanness is evident even in the structure of everyday language. Who am I? Want to find your real self? Automatically, these imply there is intrinsically more to you (two of you) and that there are many I’s within you, and there is self—The real Self, and finding that one demands you understand that the I you have been trained to be, isn’t the real you, or the entire you at all.
Unconsciously or consciously, we all mostly identify with two selves. The life you live in the matrix, and the real you that tires of wearing the mask. The imperfections you displease in the mirror and the ideal self you, that you can never quite master.
The you that complains about the way the world is but cannot change your own consciousness, habits, or secrets, has no room to judge anyone else who can’t change either, where real change is mostly accomplished by pretending and frequent relapse.
Many of us are quite aware (and tired) of the hard work and imposture of acting out our performative and cultural selves. Humans often seek refuge in nature, in the home, the bedroom, the bathroom; places where the conscious performance of their everyday interaction rituals can be put on hold.
Those that no longer identify as I, are those that have dropped the rigor of charade and discovered self. Ethically, then, it may be important to recognize that for the most part, we are all real impostors—each playing their preferred game; that little niche of life that dispenses the most hormones to their particular personality. The rigorous scholar, the realist, the spiritualist, the concerned politico, the worrier, the philosopher, the court jester, the asshole—each in his own right the perfect display of a self governing organism, when they can get away with it.
If one is to blame all are to blame. Like republicans blaming antifa for leading the White House riot, yet republicans followed them in—when they thought they were republicans…
Also thank god for serotonin and endorphins. These are two of the LORDs best kept secrets, bringing people into the fold by mere micrograms of inspiration. “Phenylethamine is the hormone that results in the feelings we get in the early stages of a relationship. Cocoa beans contain Phenylethamine too— Getting a release of this hormone with just the right manipulative timing can cement your relationship with Jesus—god-is-that-good”!
The pharmacological relationship between phenethylamine and amphetamine suggest that phenethylamine plays a prominent role in mediating mood-enhancing euphoric effects.
Initially discovered in 1935, it became widely known in 1953 in US research. We’d known about it but was studied as enteramine. Whatever you call it, it’s the good stuff that can be released by mood enhanced sermons, falling in love, or moments of emotional and physical rescue. Combine these babies with adrenaline, norepinephrine, and cortisol in a crisis and you can literally see the image of god come to the rescue, etched in your memory forever based on your precondition response. “When people experience a traumatic event, the body releases two major stress hormones: norepinephrine and cortisol. Norepinephrine boosts heart rate and controls the fight-or-flight response, commonly rising when individuals feel threatened or experience highly emotional reactions. It is chemically similar to the hormone epinephrine — better known as adrenaline. In the brain, norepinephrine in turn functions as a powerful neurotransmitter or chemical messenger that enhances memory.”(1)
Here we see that god has done nothing that evolution didn’t do first. While in days-of-old these feelings were credited to god, we know now that spiritual experience is nothing more than the release of hormones—where timing is everything. An upbeat crowd, a calculating sermon, or a life altering event and…Voilet! HERE is a fantastic 5 minute video explaining more. If you want to activate all the receptors in your brain at once? LSD BABY! “Right now we know for sure that LSD has activity at the Dopamine, adrenergic, and serotonin receptors 2A, 2C, 5C, and 6. (2)
Religion—a way of transforming the neurological, evolutionary response into an unsolvable mystery. God shall not be mocked, but he can be manipulated through nature’s pharma.
No religious doctrine has ever supplanted a scientific discovery
Rawgod said, “A bit pedagogic, don’t you think, Jim. Nothing is ever always something.” Isn’t that also a statement of always, btw? But isn’t this true, that no religious doctrine has ever supplanted a scientific discovery?
As much of the world continues to chase its theological tail, more and more are ignoring what can’t be understood to discover things that 100 years ago would be miracles.
Imagine permanent, fully integrated prosthetic limbs and bionic implants being widespread. Scientists are also experimenting with various brain implants that might help restore hearing for the deaf and restore sight for some blind people. All ingenuity being extensions of human consciousness—our extended phenotypes?
The first images from ESA/NASA’s Solar Orbiter are now available to the public, including the closest pictures ever taken of the Sun. (1) Yes, we’re taking a closer look at the sun—the creator, the god of this world.
As we dig our way into the past we are finding humans have been here longer and longer, farther and farther back than we ever imagined.
These contributions all can fuel the betterment of humanity. To reach for understanding that all things are possible, and there is no need to believe anything outside of our own ingenuity.
Thank you to the farmers who have geniusly devised ways to feed this mob with less and less land. Instead of attacking them as co-conspirators poisoning the world with gmo’s, try thanking them for the extra yields that feed your offspring. They are the real miracle workers of the park. Now if we could just get that food to the children…
Another perspective on belief—a believers guide to unbelief
A man who believes in God can never find God. If you are open to reality, there can be no belief in reality. If you are open to the unknown, there can be no belief in it. After all, belief is a form of self-protection, and only a petty mind can believe in God.
As long as belief exists, there can never be the unknown; you cannot think about the unknown, thought cannot measure it. The mind is the product of the past, it is the result of yesterday, and can such a mind be open to the unknown? It can only project an image, but that projection is not real; so your god is not God, it is an image of your own making, an image of your own gratification.
There can be reality only when the mind understands the total process of itself and comes to an end. When the mind is completely empty-only then is it capable of receiving the unknown. The mind is not purged until it understands the content of relationship—its relationship with property, with people until it has established the right relationship with everything. Until it understands the whole process of conflict in relationship, the mind cannot be free. Only when the mind is wholly silent, completely inactive, not projecting, when it is not seeking and is utterly still —only then that which is eternal and timeless comes into being— J. Krishnamurti
Now with the word ‘god’ there is nothing to which it refers, so each man creates his own image of that for which there is no reference. The theologian does it in one way, the intellectual in another, and the believer and the non-believer in their own different ways.
Your belief in God will give you the experience of what you call God. You will always experience what you believe and nothing else. And this invalidates your experience. The Christian will see virgins, angels and Christ, [a Heavenly Father] and the Hindu will see similar deities in extravagant plurality. The Muslim, the Buddhist, the Jew and the Communist are the same. Belief conditions its own supposed proof. What is important is not what you believe but only why you believe at all. Why do you believe? And what difference does it make to what actually is whether you believe in one thing or another? J. Krishnamurti
“Belief comes from fear and is the most destructive thing. One must be free of fear and of belief. Belief divides people, makes them hard, makes them hate each other and cultivate war. In a roundabout way, unwillingly, you are admitting that fear begets belief. Freedom from belief is necessary to face the fact of fear. Belief like any other ideal is an escape from “what is”. When there is no fear then the mind is in quite a different dimension. Only then can you ask the question whether there is a God or not. A mind clouded by fear or belief is incapable of any kind of understanding, any realization of what truth is. Such a mind lives in illusion and can obviously not come upon that which is Supreme. The Supreme has nothing to do with your or anybody else’s belief, opinion or conclusion”.
Hope is evidence of despair. Faith is evidence you’ve accepted that. Through this system of belief the trap is sprung and servitude to dogmas will forever divide us through that belief—any belief will do.
Qanon—I think people are saying it wrong. It’s a word in other languages. Can you guess which ones?
Is it any coincidence that qanon (qanun) is a word primarily of middle eastern usage? Of course it was borrowed from the Greek about 1000 years ago, but today it’s primary use is elsewhere—with the Q spelling.
In Azerbaijan (98% Muslim) Qanon means blood. In Uzbek (88% Muslim) qanon means law, or canon. See HERE for some other interesting Arabic connections, like sharia.
Maybe qanon is a clue in plain sight? Who else would love to divide the great whore of all the earth more than that?
As for the alternate spelling, there is no “o” sound in Arabic, but the “oo” as in boots. hence the u in qanon; qanun
And I thought it was just a cool spelling for my last name, hijacked to rouse the gullible.
A massive study analyzed every major contested news story in English across the span of Twitter’s existence—some 126,000 stories, tweeted by 3 million users, over more than 10 years—and finds that the truth simply cannot compete with hoax and rumor. By every common metric, falsehood consistently dominates the truth on Twitter, the study finds: Fake news and false rumors reach more people, penetrate deeper into the social network, and spread much faster than accurate stories”
How abrahamic religions suffer political contradiction—
If the USA was founded on Christian principles, why did they form a republic and not a monarchy?
Of our Founding Fathers who were deists; John Adams, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, Ethan Allen and Thomas Paine. Paine, perhaps, was the most radical of all: “Of all the systems of religion that ever were invented, there is no more derogatory to the Almighty, more unedifying to man, more repugnant to reason, and more contradictory in itself than this thing called Christianity—Thomas Paine “The Age of Reason.”
Furthermore, Jefferson in his autobiography explained why an amendment to the preamble of the Constitution that would have included “Jesus Christ” – so that the preamble would have read “A departure from the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion” – was rejected. Jefferson said, “they (the creators of the Constitution) meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mohammedan, the Hindu and Infidel of every denomination.”
Thomas Jefferson, politician and deist, is quoted in a letter to John Adams, dated April 11, 1823: “One day the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in the United States will tear down the artificial scaffolding of Christianity. And the day will come when the mythical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as His father, in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.”
How speech patterns train us in dualism, yet being and doing are the same thing
Does the forest have trees, or is the forest trees? Are those trees made of wood, or are they wood? No–thing is made of any thing, but of itself is so…The trees are treeing. It is a symptom of the cosmos.
I AM THAT, I am. More appropriately, I am this, not that. This, the subject, that, the object, and objects are simply forms which quintessentially are made of atoms which are made of no-thing. We may as well be analyzing the images on a movie screen—the massless photon, waves or particles, images?—imagines. Everything is happening in the mind.
In the language of Nootka Indians, there are no nouns and are only verbs—simply doings, for the doer and the doing are one and the same. An interesting way to see the world, and maybe more realistic than the dual nature of western thought. There is no one to blame for anything, for it is all your doing—take responsibility for it!
In Indian philosophy, nama-rupa, or named form, gets special distinction as the ultimate reality which is non-dualistic in nature. But it’s not really nature either, but mind. All of it is a projection from the apertures of the organism as in a dream of dreams—so real because it is in fact, all that we know.
In Wei Wu Wei, we are the mind using the mind to seek the ontological truth, but the seeker and the sought is one in the same and can never be found—what is sought is the seeker. That is the secret. So, our biggest hinderance to seeing this begins with language—that things have a subject and a predicate, but everything is a really a gerund. I’m not a jim, but I am jimming. I am a verb-ing. This certainly rings a bell.No wonder nobody can see it—like a fish searching for water in the ocean—it is nowhere to be found.
One thing that sets Christianity and Islam apart from other religions; is theirs must be the ultimate truth, it’s that important—yet it’s all they know. There are better ways of realization without the depreciation—sinners! Yes god has been revealed to others places and times, but…
Fascinating to me how others see the world, without the guilt of being born of no freewill from sin. Who’s right? There is only one contradictory free truth, so how hard can it be?
Faith is blind and hope is a sign of hopelessness.
I took some flack a while back linking those two words together. I don’t always ask questions because I already know the answer, but is there a point in unbelief that requires faith, in this case, of a young, lifelong casual believer (thanks grandma) who recently decided he’s an atheist, based on a few arguments from a well known celebrity?
He didn’t come to this conclusion based on inadequate religion, gnawing contradictions or of unanswered prayer, etc, but by believing a cleverly worded argument of a well known person. Is this not a show of faith?
Granted, as Rapar stated, “Atheism is the lack of faith like cold is simply the lack of heat, not a natural state of its own“.
And Tildeb; “WTF? What is that bit all about? Creating a false dichotomy here doesn’t create a more ‘balanced’ opinion; it creates another ‘I’m an atheist, but…’ apologist with a drive by smear at those who have every reason to grant experts higher degrees of confidence in their informed opinions. That’s not ‘faith’ of the religious kind at all Jim, and you should know this by now”
Do I need identify what kind of faith I don’t have? How can you not believe something you haven’t investigated? Have you ever had faith? Have you ever been a believer because of indoctrinating parents?His atheism certainly is faith of a religious kind.
Our culture puts onus our way, a weird position to consider belief as a positive and unbelief as its opposite. But we are unnaturally forced to consider belief and make a decision. I would think an informed decision would make a stronger position. This young man is ripe to fall into a Ray Comfort-style trap, just as he did a Joe Rogan.
So, after this I might rephrase, that his faith is not in atheism, but his atheism is faith in the opinion of the celebrity. Because I guarantee in this case, he knows not enough of either, belief or unbelief to really be a believer or a non.
Christian monotheism hinges on a word that isn’t there—the bias of translation
Imagine the daunting task of translating an ancient text into your own language.
If the work means anything to you, it can be helped along by extrapolating the story line to fit your beliefs. The New Testament is filled with interpolations by the translators, but one in particular has my interest.
You see, in Greek there is no indefinite article—no a’s prefacing a proper noun. Whether the kingdom of heaven is a monarchy or a republic hinges on how translators add their own little words that don’t appear in the Greek. Lets take St. John for an example. In chapter 10:30-36 —I and my Father are one.
31 Then the Jews took up stones again to stone him.
32 Jesus answered them, Many good works have I shewed you from my Father; for which of those works do ye stone me?
33 The Jews answered him, saying, For a good work we stone thee not; but for blasphemy; and because that thou, being a man, makest thyself God.
34 Jesus answered them, Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are gods? (82 Psalm)
35 If he called them gods, unto whom the word of God came, and the scripture cannot be broken;
36 Say ye of him, whom the Father hath sanctified, and sent into the world, Thou blasphemest; because I said, I am the Son of God? See, there is no the in the original Greek. Non-biased translation of the missing article would be a son of god, meaning; of the nature of god.
I know that doesn’t seem like a real big deal, but a son of god makes heaven a republic, not a monarchy. Son of god—of the nature of god. That Jesus did not think his status peculiar to himself (he thought everyone could realize this) the Hebrew roots in monotheism demanded he walk a fine line or be executed. Jesus, however, was more Hindu or Buddhic in nature than Jewish, which is what Christianity is—without the intellect.
“You may notice that these non-translations are based on dogma—for religious reasons” Article HERE you may find interesting. It’s all been translated with dogmatic bias.
What makes you expert enough to decide who to believe?
Authority is the almighty footnote (or now days, the link) But by what authority does one appeal to such authority? If you are using the work of another to heighten your virtue to the conversation, what expertise gives you the authority to endorse it? Authority simply means you are the author—it is a shame, really, that books now multiply by osmosis and libraries are filled with books about books—and the more footnotes the better! How on earth do you generate an original thought when inundated with opinion from all sides? How do you know the truth? By seclusion and solitude, by experience and not words from a page
Experience is not words or symbols that make them. Nor can experience by gained through the biastic process of reading what you agree with and dismissing what you don’t.
It seems that everyone is right, so everyone is also wrong, which means the amount of truth in the world could fit in a thimble. Each side vehemently believes they are right—it makes an interesting game, though not a very fun one. Is this game really worth the candle? Are things really that way, or are we all caught in the trappings of belief?
By endorsing the authority of another, it shows one must have some kind of expertise, that this person or group has a leg up on the situation and now you do too. Yet, if you have the expertise to make the judgment you are making, then you yourself are claiming some kind of authority—or that you don’t trust yourself but simply fall in line to the opinions of others based on how you were raised, which makes your opinions meaningless.
I can’t believe people can be this stupid!
If you are right and they are wrong, how can you decide they are wrong unless you are more expert on what they believe than they are?
If you believe you are right? in whose dogma are you believing that makes you more qualified to assess other beliefs of which you know less?
Bias is a funny thing—and like common sense, has been redefined by those who think they have it by some pure, determined analytical prowess (bias on steroids) versus the masses who don’t? Common sense is better defined as culture that acts in a commonly accepted behavior, but it really isn’t—only to you.
But in the end realize, the only common sense of today is this; that in spite of one’s beliefs about the other, the world is getting along just fine without them—nearly 8billion, one at a time, that can’t believe how stupid people are. We are right-on that—finally can agree.
For many millennia the world has been populated by an idiot majority—and realizing you play a part in that success should make you wonder (or sonder) and lead to a little tolerance, I would hope. Nevertheless, it’s an incredibly interesting show!
What makes you expert enough to decide who to believe? I have it on good authority (me) that by disconnecting from the grid and living in solitude for a few years, a life of living without words, not by the book or the videos (because that compels us to belief in another) that there is no monarchial boss of the universe. There is no father in heaven, nor are we separate from the whole thing.
Sonder: the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk—John Koenig—The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows
The past is a memory—the future an expectation—both only exist in the present—in your mind. Christian religions believe in the damnation of souls—hell, which is happening right now in Christianity. Are they are the dammed, and they live among us. No need to wait til your dead when you can have it now through faith.
Resisting the flow of progress, anchored to the past like it’s a virtue. Arguing every social advance, hoping someone will come and save them—but he will not save them from themselves. I can’t think of a better example of damnation than the current Islamic and Christian doctrines.
It would have been possible through Christianity if…if they really knew what the good news was all about. But they put the messenger on a pedestal and suppressed the message. Jesus is the only son of god—no more! The church immediately became irrelevant by holding on to monotheism. They are now nothing but talking shops, void of meaningful liturgy, void of any meaningful religious experience. Damned, in every sense of the word.
Wouldn’t the end of suffering also mean the end of awareness? Thinking of it in Judeo/Christian terms—in the “spirit world” a third of the hosts of heaven are currently suffering—cast out. It seems as though the dream of eternal bliss is either undeliverable, or deception. It certainly fails any test of reason or logic when “souls” are suffering in the heavens as we speak.
The end of suffering would mean the end of awareness. One cannot experience bliss unless able to experience discomfort. In life (even afterlife) there would have to be darkness in order to comprehend the light. If eternal existence in the heavens is all bliss, it would mean there is no light or dark contrast to raise awareness. It would be the end of awareness, which awareness only happens if there is polarity. Yin, and yang, front, back, up, down, light, dark—life and death.
Imagine if it was all pure white forever and ever? No contrast. Bland. The only form of awareness is the awareness of form, the whole cloth—and it’s a two sided one. When it’s lights out it is like a dreamless sleep where you never wake up. How would you know then you’ve been led with a carrot by controlling men who never, ever, have to show you results—ever? Whatever one may think will happen, the awareness of existence is polarity—without it there would be nothing at all. In other words; life now, as you and your families live so beautifully, is the best game going in the universe. This is heaven—it is also hell. But when you break on through to the other side—resorption back into the cosmic whole. Think, where do chicken pox go after they’ve run their course?
Christian ego is a useful illusion to perpetuate a great game, for there truly could only be one “soul” and that is consciousness, the cosmic background of all existence of a single organism.
If there is life beyond mortal living it is in one, contradictory free thought process—meaning ultimately it is all one thing. And as Hindu philosophy has solved the problem of evil—everything that happens, happens to god, and it is everything—there is nothing that is not god. There are no victims here, no one to blame but its yearning to placate the boredom of infinite living.
If there were a Christian heaven, the most difficult, eternal task would then be; how to unremember all the friends and family that didn’t make it. The end of suffering? Oh no! Just the beginning…
The biblical theology is that we are made—synthetic, not naturally occurring creatures that have no inherent existence in our own right—placed on this earth and serving in a probationary role as candidates for heaven.
From the clay figurine to the now complex individual, it was all spun into existence billions of years ago, god knowing that through the long and arduous evolutionary process he would eventually get his Adam (about 6000 years ago) through creation of the man shaped from atoms made into clay—now god can finally test his gadget.
But what is an atom? If so, what is Adam made of? Certainly when you break down the figurative clay into molecules and atoms we find the stuff—the foundation of all matter. Yet we don’t. Seems the universe is as infinitely as small, as it is big. The only way adequate way to describe anything is by its form and behavior. Seems to me that makes it the same thing.
The next choice is the that the order in the universe is a fluke—and accident of random collisions producing a spectrum of fungus, feelings, and intelligence. But in the end life is nothing but… This hypothesis has evolved into modern mythology, or imagery, if you will, of how it all began. Both theologies deprecate humanity to nothing but…
Whether you like it or not (until proven otherwise) the earth is a self governing organism that is filled with life. And it doesn’t know how it does it any more than you know how you grow your own hair. Things grow from within—they are made from without. Trees aren’t made out of wood, they are wood, in their own right. No amount of words can change that—and no amount of belief is needed to conclude what is. Whatever the case, it’s all pretty amazing.
The other day a friend of mine posted a question; “if you don’t believe in the christian god, what gives you hope?” I didn’t know I needed any until learning that theology.
If evolution is true, Buddhism and Hinduism are much more likely to be true than Christianity. What is believed is a far cry from what is demonstrable. What we have here is a self governing organism—like your body containing your self, yet you don’t know how you do it.
If Hinduism were true, Buddhism and Christianity can be true. If Buddhism is true, Hinduism can be true, while the abrahamic model is not, and defies what is known.
Science is a way to validate predictions so we can navigate the universe we live in. Nothing in science bears the name proven—it bears the name useful and not yet invalidated. It uses two tools—observation and repetition, to come to usefulness.
Christian Religion may be useful, but until it’s claims are proven, its claims are meaningless. It uses one tool—belief. And whether useful or not deems its own baseless claims as true. That god governs the universe is a meaningless question that affords no aid of discovery, nor proves any hypothesis.
What we call knowledge is the translation of life into words. But life is not the words used to describe it, any more than quantum theory is a particle. However, scientists have learned to manipulate their findings into usefulness, yet still have no real conclusion about of what or how “stuff” is made.
While quantum theory provides much usefulness, religious theory raises problems that only it claims to solve—problems it has created. It is therefore, an end-product without the effort of validation.
A final note—
“In contrast to other nations the Chinese have no mythological cosmogony; the oldest sources already attempt to account for creation in a scientific way.” “It is rather striking that, aside from one myth (concerning Pangu) that China—perhaps alone among the major civilizations of antiquity—has no real story of creation. This situation is paralleled by what we find in Chinese philosophy, where, from the very start, there is a keen interest in the relationship of man to man and in the adjustment of man to the physical universe, but relatively little interest in cosmic origins.” “…the Chinese, amongst all peoples ancient and recent, primitive and modern, are apparently unique in having no creation myth; that is, they have regarded the world and man as uncreated, as constituting the central features of a spontaneously self-generating cosmos having no creator, god, ultimate cause, or will external to itself.” (1) Amen
Forgiveness is the misguided premise that people have the capacity to make individual, independent choices. Evolution is on auto-pilot. If there were such thing as isolated agency (beyond the organizational will of the field of all existence) the result would be unmanageable, runaway chaos.
Therefore there’s nothing and no-one to blame or forgive. This is the whole of the self-regulating cosmic organism—itself doing it to itself. Be a little patient out there and flow with it. You are not in control of anything.
The art of forgiveness is a form of self love and self interest. Letting go of the past relieves the anxiety and imagination that the past is driving the present. Such clinging is the root of anxiety. One can stop at any time, but this is what makes the game interesting.
If evolution is true, there have never been any mistakes in natural processes. Therefore, there are no mistakes in nature—only comfort, discomfort, or boredom. And, what gives one discomfort is someone else’s happy place.
We have been influenced heavily to accept evolution with a Hebrew-rooted twist, a sense of good and evil as a product of law—that there is a right and a wrong (even in nature) and choosing sides has become accentuated by the spreading of the good news. But there are really no laws in nature.
If the abrahamic religions are true, we have to make a faith statement—that what is true is superior to what is known—that what is believed is superior to reason or logical conclusion. Or, that contradictions are a natural process of heaven.
If we assume for a moment that the Big Bang is exactly how it happened, that we evolved into this or that, it would also conclude that we are many that stemmed from one, that we are all connected by a common event. We are a herd-bound species. Is that a result of survival in evolution, or because out of the one we became the many? That our primordial state was singular.
If we are the result of a cataclysmic event, eventually collecting enough space debris and luck to form planets and galaxies, isn’t our inertial state that of a single mind (needs defining) as well?
We can make a faith statement, that our individuality is a result of evolution—that what was, is not what is. Or we can make another, like Christianity’s stance that we are all separate individuals responsible for our decisions, that it is you, a single soul, a separate ego here on sufferance, while simultaneously providing a place to gather. Its a neat trick to use fear to isolate and use that same fear to couple.
If one prefers to be Christian and believe in evolution, you have to say god used evolution as a means of creation, that should, eventually produce the children of god, then it should be easy to accept all the differences a billion years of biologic variations would produce in the human mind.
To believe or not to believe? I think, therefore I make a mess of things…
Did you exchange, a walk-on part in the war, for a lead role in a cage? —Roger Waters
I figure if all goes well, I have about 35-40 years left as a human being. How do I want to spend it? How do you want to spend it? Anxious for the morrow? Is it productive or even enjoyable to involve oneself in compounding the mess by constantly trying to fix it?
The things that we object about our situation is precisely what we are doing to overcome it. Do you see that? Can you see that?
“It is perfectly obvious that the whole world is going to hell. The only possible chance that it might not is that we do not attempt to prevent it from doing so”—Robert Oppenheimer
While atheism is one step closer to peace, abandoning all sides of all dogmas makes it perfectly clear that beliefs are the cancers that grow more beliefs, to which very little of humanity has any immunity at all.
Washington(CNN) President-elect Joe Biden said Tuesday that communication from the Trump administration to help with his transition has been “sincere” since the General Services Administration ascertained his election win on Monday.
“Immediately, we’ve gotten outreach from the national security shop to just across the board,” Biden told NBC News’ Lester Holt in his first interview as President-elect.”And they’re already working out my ability to get presidential daily briefs”
May we please reject the hyperbolic political rhetoric and see this, time and time again, what makes the idea of America a fantastic process. not the beliefs that encumber it.
Decided to add 1200 square feet to the cabin. Been a little too busy lately to blog much, as the addition is in addition to my regular work. Here’s my last three weekends and every evening.
I’ve done everything but the dirt work. They told me trusses would be eight weeks, so I am timber framing the roof with a vaulted pine and cedar interior. Should be pretty. The roof load arrives Tuesday.
How learning about other religions makes your own less obvious
Which mythology is the true religion? This is interesting
He said “the world is a projection of the one who sees it, in exactly the same way that a dream is a projection of the dreamer—that in fact everything you see is your own projection from your mind. When that projecting system vanishes, then you no longer see things as inside or outside, you simply recognize it as being your own self”.
“But until that moment (awakening), everything you see is a an internal projection, in much the same way that a movie is projected on to a screen, but it’s all going on inside your own head”—David Godman, excerpt on Sri Ramana Maharshi
What we see as reality is a projection from the mind (the receiver) onto the background (which is consciousness) that permeates everything. Like watching a movie in the theater, you can never see the screen behind the images. That screen is consciousness that pervades the entire cosmos.
Our minds are filled with cultural distractions based on incorrect myth—that you are separate ego. “I”, is then fed by grasping at objects focusing thought projected outside of the Self.
When you pursue the identification of “I” by focusing deeply on who is the the thinker of those thoughts, it leaves, vanishes, goes back to the source—that is the moment of awakening, and seeing the true reality that is not objects at all, but the Self, which is one. That is god in this philosophy, and it is you, and it is everything—and good and evil are all inflicted on itself.
Nothing can be seen without a background—and consciousness is all that. There is only one philosophical question worth pursuing; Is any of it serious? When all is said and pondered into paralysis and analyzed ad nauseum, what is it that remains besides I am?
We are connected to the world by little tubes and nerve endings on our skin. The whole cosmos perpetually passes through us, and us through it.
The ideas expressed in this post stem from years of accumulated stimuli
Are we making our own choices or just reactions to stimuli?
Imagine a moment you are a lonely nerve ending. All of the sudden something rubs against you—“are you there?” “Yes, I am here”. But it takes another to stimulate relational awareness. Without other there would be no way of identifying self existence. It is said by some that god (or the universe) would not know it is god because there is nothing outside of itself to bring it to awareness of itself.
On the other hand, identifying self by other is also as ambiguous an introspection, because what others think of you rarely adds up to what you think of you. All of us are simply reflections of our external world.
So what is the difference between commenting, hitting the like button, or just moving on? Do you have to agree to appreciate another point of view? I was accused at watchtower of trolling christian blogs. I responded that I only read two, usually hit the like button to appreciate their efforts, yet only comment occasionally if stimulated to do so. But for some the reward is bloviating what stimulation they incurred previously. That is trolling, fanaticism—a self aggrandized irritation.
You may comment or not, but that choice has already been made by the years of stimuli, or not. There may-be freewill, but it was captured in a bottle long ago the moment humans learned the art of civilization.
How definitions have subjectively defined objectivity
After a serious consideration of so many points of view, atheism stands closely to buddhism, hinduism, and the tao, that there are no gods or God as a deity. Theresimply is—a complex interdependent organism we call universe—that of which, we are all pieces.
There is no god as defined by religions today, for the term god, how used as a deity is silly, really. There is only one thing and it’s an event. A big one—call it whatever you want, but abrahamic religions are at odds with common sense, reason, enlightenment, awakening, etc. And what is and what isn’t. It’s an impossible religion, stripping its members of the tools required for its objectives. Guilt is now institutionalized as a virtue. The hypnotic state is lord and waking up is forbidden. If there is god, there is nothing that is not it.
All I know is there are no things, no people, no objects. A noun is simply a figure of speech. A person is defined much more by what they do than what they are, but in fact its one thing. A thing is a unit of thought expressed in language to describe form. That same form that appears to be so tangible has little or no traditional matter as a concept, but energy. But that too, is one thing.
For purpose of description and understanding we must break the world down into some sort of units, but there is no matter, only shapes. Body and “spirit” are outdated terms. It’s all one thing.
One quite often hears people say “all things consist of matter”, but what is that? They are the specific patterns of manifested energy. Matter as such is an abstraction. Looking for a uniform matter as the principle of everything is like wanting to not eat cherries but fruit in general. But fruit is also an abstraction. Matter cannot be contrasted to separate things as something immutable to something mutable. Matter in general cannot be seen, touched or tasted. It isn’t tiny little granular building blocks of nature. What people see, touch or taste are only certain forms, registered in the neurons by language. Matter is not something that exists side by side with other things, inside them or at their basis. All existing formations are the same matter in its various properties and relations. Matter vs spirit are outdated terms. Its all one event where we calculate regularities and write them into generalities.
These forms of energy that appear so tangible by our senses (made from levels of the same energy) yet things are not what they seem. The christian ego is a fraudulent misrepresentation of reality. You are not a visitor here on probation, but you are here because you are it. You are the big bang still banging, way out on the edge of a continuous happening.
Nothing is in charge. Your freewill is a reaction to stimuli. Your choices are presented to you by dominant personalities that interpret—that the Rorschach Blot of a universe can only be their way.
So, what does it all mean? It doesn’t mean anything at all. But it’s a hell of a vacation from the voids that bookend a function of an interesting process. It’s amazing.
How one myth is no better than the other—accepting what is, as what cannot be contradicted
“There are two great myths of the universe that lie in the psychological and intellectual backgrounds of all of us”. It is the most common, common-sense of today, but they are simply myths.
One; that the universe wasmade and has a governor. “That we exist only in sufferance as subjects of god, visitors here on probation where we are artifacts made, that do not exist in our own right. God alone exists in his own right, and you exist as a favor”—and you’d better be grateful!
“That you are a subject of the royal Monarch, the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords, an idea inherited from the political structures of the Tigress and Euphrates culture, and from Egypt”. That god is the big boss, who’s authority trickles down to the obedient governed.
The other myth that was popularized in the 19th century—that the universe is a fully automatic, random fluke. That after billions of years consciousness sprang from a special mixture of minerals, with just the right amount of seasoning, hot gas and voilet! You—are simply a result.
But suppose there is a third option—that there is no governor, nor that the world is an accident that spawned nature, “but that the universe is a self-governingorganism that peoples from time to time”, the same way in which an apple tree apples, or a forest grows trees—that life is a symptom of the universe, the same way in which a flower breaks-forth without knowing how or why.
Either the earth is a mechanism of laws, which would either be governed by god, or be a mere spontaneous, automatic fluke with no purpose—or it is an organism—“and organisms are self-governing like your body—and life is a symptom of a universe”.
Not merely a guess as to how consciousness arises through the chain of elements, nor placating the senses by thinking a god who cares, the world as it is seen without contradiction, and the universe is without question, bearing fruit.
Areas in “quotation” compliments of Alan Watts, The nature of consciousness.
Initiation rites are seen as fundamental to human growth and development as well as socialization in many cultures. These rites function by ritually marking the transition of someone to full group membership or adulthood. (1)
These transitions into man or womanhood have a long history, while many include some special task or special knowledge that assists the new adult transition into confident living and acceptance, ie; that life isn’t what you’ve been told, so here’s the deal…
While at first glance it appears we have no launch-pad liturgy in the west to welcome our youth to adulthood—but we do. In Hebrew/Christian/Islamic cultures of the western world there is only one, true rite of passage—it’s called psychotherapy. Either a self administered journey alone, or with a guide (psychologist) in an attempt to undo (often painstakingly) what has been done to you, as part of an age old game of hiding the truth from children. And siphoning out what nature made to operate at maximum efficiency all on its own.
Some however, are so thoroughly steamrolled into this false sense of religion they never swim out of it, perpetually thinking happiness awaits in promises, while holding onto a life of anxiety like it’s the will of god.
Children automatically know the meaning of life, yet immediately we name them, define them, and separate them from nature until they can be trusted to carry on a serious life of contemplation. That they are strangers here on probation, only candidates for the kingdom of god if they can choose the right belief.
This state of never knowing if your saved or damned is a cruel trick. It’s no wonder people are mixed up for years, or even lifetimes trying to undo what has been done with the best of intentions, in a religion that is impossible.
I slept-in til 5:30 this morning and went out to water the garden—it was dead quiet, though I did see a mama deer and her twins eating my russet tops. As they hopped away the silence remained in the most surreal artistry. “Must be the soft, thick grass,” I thought.
I sat quietly in sanctification—my stone table cool and covered in dew, the garden growing. All the sounds of summer sleeping, I close my eyes and drown my thoughts in the silence, then the silence drowns my thoughts. Purely, this was the most joyful quiet I could recall since my boreal beginnings. After a time (it felt) I lumbered my way to the house, made a cup of coffee and slipped out again to wait for the first rays of light to shine through the treetops.
Something is a little different. I begin to wonder at this timeless moment enduring a little longer—longer than I expected.
Skillfully I go back inside, quiet, careful not to wake the misses and and the mutt. The one clock is blinking—the other is not. It is still 5:30. I look out the window and the water is still running.
Can humans think instinctively? Freedom of choice is precisely the state of not choosing. What is freedom of choice, when choice is the analyzing act of hesitation while making a decision and ignoring the instinctive action that has the backing of evolution?
While being a decisive person is considered someone who doesn’t stop to decide, a paradox in the definition itself which pauses me to examine. Why do humans approach everything backwards, abandoning instinct when they seem to know better? Thinking and words may have us spellbound.
Your mind, brain, and consciousness (whatever you want to call it) arises or evolves of the very stuff your thoughts are trying to analyze. No wonder it is such an impossible puzzle. And to examine what we consider the world outside ourselves becomes equally as frustrating, because it isn’t outside yourself either, although you’re inside it. Until one can release the duplicity of examining the world as separate and hostile, it will be utterly and increasingly futile to segment the universe, matter, and consciousness into words and formulas. Is there a more wholistic approach?
Snoqualmie Tunnel Hike today–2.3 miles each way, of course
To treat our brain differently from any other organ that functions automatically without thinking, so too, the subconscious mind functions in an amazing way, unless you try to put effort to it—that thinking, the very specific and narrow channel of conscious attention with which we identify ourselves is the most unreliable means of examining anything, because what is, is being analyzed by the most unreliable portion of the human computer.
The scientific and religious approach, from the very beginning assumes we are separate from what we know to be true—that we are stardust, and to examine what you’re made of using what you’re made of, is a daunting task that should cause a laugh with absurdity, but instead causes contention because we fail to scratch beyond the conscious attention. It has to be examined by what we’re not made of—what is not obvious on the surface.
Thinking and what “should be” is a projection of the mind that creates an illusion of separation. Thought takes time; thought is psychological time that distorts the timeless.
“But were human”, you say, “we have to live in the world we have, with the tools we have”, you say, but the very art of approach from our infancy is at odds with logic and reason, combatting instinct and the underlying reality we have been trained to ignore in modern life. Laden with changing fact and pointless claims of progress, infighting, outfighting, constantly choosing from two wrong sides of beliefs that have us exactly and forever where we don’t want to be.
But human behavior without the thinking is most often heroic, while at the same time the hero says (s)he just did what anyone would do—yes, if they didn’t stop to think about it first.
And after analyzing all the data, the best inventions come by luck, not the scientific method at all. It is used much less frequently than it is lauded, and often used in backsplaining the discovery that was made by instinctive awareness–or luck.
Tracing our origins to technology—finding our way home
To great extent, humans seek to reproduce, not only biologically, but in other ways as well—plays, skits, actors in the theater and movies perfecting roles solely for some form of emotional connection, pretending by them, for us. It is a core facet of our humanness with a long history.
Reproduction through painting, from ancient cave art to mimesis, or illusionism, to photographic realism. We advanced to photography, the daguerrotype then the poloroid, the picture perfect reproduction still had no personality—it needed more, and necessity is the mother of invention.
Next we developed the moving picture, then the talkies with sound, and eventually brought it into the living room and by a few years later, to color. Next we add 3d, but still only scripted interaction—that would take a super computer, AI, and a hologram, using lasers to bring a 3d image to a stage in your home, where you could touch it, talk with it in a very lifelike way.
Maybe quantum computing will be that step? Lifelike imagery that thinks back, calculates the best response and flawlessly replies, inviting you into the drama. And not only will it move, but you could touch it, for its molecular imagery accelerated to produce mass, which begs the question—is that where we are right now?
“And the earth was without form, and void”. Then god added lighting, a stage and said, “let us make man in our image, after our likeness”. Now go, and do thou likewise…
“Out of the silence comes all sound, out of the void arises all imageryin simultaneity”
“physicists recognized that looking at the entire universe as a two-dimensional object that only looks three-dimensional might help solve some deeper problems in theoretical physics. And the math works just as well whether you’re talking about a black hole, a planet, or an entire universe” and much like in a hologram, this data is projected to appear in three dimensions. Like the characters on a TV screen, and according to the theory, we live on a flat surface that happens to look like it has depth.
Enter quantum entanglement
“In a new paper, the physicists calculated how these theories would predict the degree of entanglement — the bizarre quantum phenomenon in which the states of two tiny particles can become correlated so that a change to one particle can affect the other, even if they’re far away. They found that by viewing one particular model of a flat universe as a hologram, they could indeed get the results of both theories to match up”, And what is interesting, an image that appears 3d can actually be a flat surface (for Colorstorm) and what is happening here as a projection may be entangled with what is actually happening elsewhere behind the projector. Article
“Crazy Horse went into the world where there is nothing but the spirits of all things. That is the real world that is behind this one, and everything we see here is something like a shadow from that one”—Black Elk
Entering the final stretch of a meaningless search
“No considerate God would destroy the human mind by making it so rigid and unadaptable as to depend upon one book, a Bible or a Quran for all the answers. For the use of words, and thus of a book, is to point beyond themselves to a world of life and experience that is not mere words or even ideas. Just as money is not real, consumable wealth, books are not life. To idolize scriptures is like eating paper currency”—Alan Watts
“Today or tomorrow sickness and death will come (they had come already) to those I love or to me; nothing will remain but stench and worms. Sooner or later my affairs, whatever they may be, will be forgotten, and I shall not exist. Then why go on making any effort? . . . How can man fail to see this? And how go on living? That is what is surprising! One can only live while one is intoxicated with life; as soon as one is sober it is impossible not to see that it is all a mere fraud and a stupid fraud! That is precisely what it is: there is nothing either amusing or witty about it, it is simply cruel and stupid.
Had I simply understood earlier that life had no meaning I could have borne it quietly, knowing that that was my lot. But I could not satisfy myself with that. Had I been like a man living in a wood from which he knows there is no exit, I could have lived; but I was like one lost in a wood who, horrified at having lost his way, rushes about wishing to find the road. He knows that each step he takes confuses him more and more, but still he cannot help rushing about. It was indeed terrible. And to rid myself of the terror I wished to kill myself”—Leo Tolstoy
“The cruelest of games is being taught to pretend were not pretending”—Unknown
Our normal sensation of self is a hoax, or, at best, a temporary role that we are playing, or have been conned into playing — with our own tacit consent, just as every hypnotized person is basically willing to be hypnotized. The most strongly enforced of all known taboos is the taboo against knowing who or what you really are behind the mask of your apparently separate, independent, and isolated ego, yet the whole of experience is one process.
For humanity to continue chasing in circles, generation by twisted generation to find meaning, yet in the end all dead and buried with a divisive belief that he was more, and failed to love—and to live in fear and denial of nature.
Anhedonia: without pleasure, inability to enjoy what pleased you. Often developed on the realization religious life is a fraud
What actually we are dealing with in “Spiritual” matters?
A few months back Ark asked, “what the hell is spiritually minded? If you can’t define spirit then such a term is simply fluff”. Well, I can define it.
What people think it is, is much different than what it actually is. Here is a sample definition—“Spirit is the ethereal conscious that infiltrates the corporeal being to cause and sustain life. Being aware of this duality in human nature is to be in tune with the eternal, external human nature beyond physical existence”.
What it actually is though, is a connection to our natural instincts. Being ingenious by trusting your gut based on thousands of years of hunches that continue to pay off, evidenced by survival.
“One cannot help but appreciate the power of this instinct, nor its effectiveness as exampled by humanity thriving—in spite of being populated by an idiot majority” yet somehow continues to thrive, now beyond natures ability to replenish it.
Every day billions of people use this instinct to make important decisions. After all the data is analyzed, prayers offered, pros and cons considered, the decision is typically made by snap-judgement, gut feeling, a hunch—and very likely on impulse or irresponsible wants. This is the “spirit” in action—the survival instinct, and its amazing how much it actually works. And delegating authority to the subconscious mind is a win, most of the time. Don’t think, just do.
To those who seek validation outside themselves, this they call the spirit. But it’s quite obvious it is ancient instinct talking to itself and subconscious genius protecting the masses, often from themselves. No belief required. It did fine before its name change to “spirit” and will do fine again without it.
The antithesis of instinctive action is waiting. Nothing is more useless than waiting on the Holy Spirit to direct your decisions when you already know what to do. More often than not, waiting on the spirit is a call to inaction—and excuses.
Delegating authority to instinct has the backing of evolution and a proven track record of success. Long before Abraham was, we were doing just fine trusting the gut to warn us of danger and prompt us to action when needed. Now we must go through proper channels to do so, only to do it anyway.
Truth is reality laden with accurate misinterpretation and faulty perceptions.
“Why is this so hard to understand? Our perceptions are flawed, don’t impress that upon reality. Sheesh!”—Steve Ruiz
The illusion is simply that reality is not what it seems to be at first glance—even after inspection. That same flawed perception leads us to believe we can correct it by saying the world is divisible into feet and inches, seconds and degrees—dividing things by regular measurement and the dividing power of thought—The same nature of thought that implies we don’t understand, but somehow can trust the measuring devices we’ve thought up—while every thing requires continued re-examination after interfering by looking—weird
Think is a unit of thought, the same way an inch is a measurement of accepted distance, or a clock can track intervals. We categorize things into boxes so we can manage “the think” about them, pretending then that the world is a collection of bits and catagories, yet is as connected and inter-related as much as a human body. Every single bit is as unexplainable as any other—and to explain one fully we must explain everything fully.
Every perception is real (normal) from a particular point of view, though some truth is a little nastier at heart than others. Imagine how distasteful the world would really be, if believers still knew with a surety that the gospel of saving souls from hell should know no limits to persuasion.
For giggles we have to ask—if reality is so illusory (not what it appears to be) how could humans evolve with our perceptive reality apart from “real” reality? If our perceptions of reality are flawed, how could natural selection point evolution the way things seem to be, versus the true nature of nature? How could brains evolve to a non natural interpretation of things? It’s almost like it is some type of game…
If ghosts can walk through walls without disturbing a brick and the ghost is the mind of the living being, how can it lift an arm? Has anyone yet explained how that mind can affect matter when it is impervious to it?
If you push anyone far enough philosophically, they all end up in the same place. If you push politics in similar fashion, the same thing happens. The problem lies in not thinking it through far enough. We all want the same thing, yet hang our hats on intermediate causes and belief.
As science approaches mysticism, we measure finer and finer increments to avoid embarrassing ourselves with woo, infinitely subdividing the process, while religion continues to extend its own goalposts to avoid “fallen” matter and the “spirit” are one process. Nominalism and realism meet full circle, and only beliefs can keep them apart.
If you investigate mind far enough you turn up with matter; if you investigate matter far enough you turn up with mind. If you investigate yourself far enough you discover the external world; if you investigate the external world far enough, you find you. Why would that be?
Finally physicists wanted to know; how are things like when we’re not looking at them? In order to know how electrons behave we have to put them in a process that influences their behavior. So what are they doing when were not looking? It appears knowledge of something is the same thing as action upon it.
The act of knowing changes what you are knowing. Dualism (mind and body) is an illusion of christian mythology and has maintained its rigor only though faith. Because when we explore everything deeply enough, we find its all one process. Now we are at the final point, that life is a bunch of atoms (arranged just right) to form consciousness (not woo) but either way, monism is the final answer, when you push anything to its finality, its all one process.
Knowing is not a passive experience, but all knowing is a measured by its reactions. The illusion is to think you are a separate ego, when in reality you are simply a reaction of various stimuli that creates self identity. And too much of the same stimuli in any given arena, makes one a fanatic—because then, one actually starts to believe it.
How observing yourself is an impossible task—unpacking the bias
After centuries of two opposing (wrong) philosophies, it seems change is just too hard on pride—they will accept anything but this.
Robert Oppenheimer is reported to have said, “If we cannot disprove Bohm, then we must agree to ignore him.”—and ignore him they did. But why? Because Bohm’s theory of quantum potential threw a wrench in the hierarchy of accepted science, unifying physics with what mystics have known for millennia—its all one process. There are no separate events in nature, which means the universe is one organism. This is god—and nothing known or seen or felt is not—which actually means, there is nothing that is not connected, its all one—it’s a process—and you too, are it.
This is not the deity god of traditional misinterpretation—it is the fact that there are no partitions between any event, place, or material—that there are no things, only demarcations on an imaginary line through calculus. Where does one event begin or another end? Only in our attempts to interpret non-existent laws into symbols. Where math and the word becomes the reality instead of the symbol of it. Where Hebrew thought infiltrates science to its core to believe there must be actual laws of nature. But there are none—merely observable regularities through something regular—where clocks and rulers attempt to demarcate a connected process through a specific point of view—then put it into words.
If the Christian is right, then Hindus, Jews, Buddhists, and atheists, are wrong. When so many groups disagree, the majority must be mistaken. And if the majority is misguided on just this one topic, then almost everyone must be mistaken on some issues of great importance.
This is a hard lesson to learn, because it is paradoxical to accept one’s own folly. You cannot at the same time believe something and recognize that you are a chump to believe it. A sucker born every minute, but somehow that sucker is never oneself.
“Building on the interpretation of the quantum theory introduced by Bohm in 1952, David Bohm and Basil Hiley in 1975 presented how the concept of a quantum potential leads to the notion of an “unbroken wholeness of the entire universe” Science will continue to struggle along with this notion that it can observe itself, but you’d have just as much luck observing whats behind your eyes when you’re looking out. It’s the only logical conclusion. Observing a process changes it simply because you—are observing you, and that changes the experiment and it can’t be pinned down. The only way to properly observe the true nature of anything in its static form, is to do it without looking at it—and it can’t be done. But we can at least demarcate the highlights we choose to like, based on the proper stimulus that agrees with our anchoring bias.
The concept of time must be taught with rigor in order for children to conform to it. What greater illusion exists than to habitualize existence based on the past, to lay out the future while ignoring the present. Children have no concept of time—and they are right. For time is simply a mental relation between two moments—a learned reckoning. Living in the moment is therefor timeless.
“I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist only in the present, which is what there is and all there is”—Alan Watts
The past is a memory. The future—an expectation. Is the immediate present simply a fractal marking on a line of events, or a continuous movement through it, where the past is moving with the present?
“Our perception of time’s flow depends entirely on our inability to see the world in all its detail”—Carlo Rovelli
We have a deep intuition that the future is open until it becomes present and that the past is fixed. As time flows, this structure of fixed past, immediate present and open future gets carried forward in time. This structure is built into our language, thought and behavior. How we live our lives hangs on it.
“The concepts of time and change may emerge from a universe that, at root, is utterly static”—Craig Callender
“The concept of time is simply an illusion made of human memories, everything that has ever been and ever will be is happening RIGHT NOW”—Max Tegmark
“We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infintesimal hairline between a causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation (thinking and thinking about thinking) We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We are therefore out of touch with reality. We confuse the world as talked about, described, and measured with the world which actually is. We are sick with a fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas“—Alan Watts. These symbols limit our perceptions of life, for what can be known (accepted as knowledge) is simply that what can be put into words—symbols of events.
Aa a small example, our english language structure changes the meaning of the past every day, even moment to moment, ie; I love…you. Really, I love flowers. See how that works, even in common speech? Forgiveness also changes the meaning of the past, while a grudge locks you in it, held to bitter moments that no longer exist.
“reality is just a complex network of events onto which we project sequences of past, present and future”—Carlos Rovelli
“Zen is a liberation from time. For if we open our eyes and see clearly, it becomes obvious that there is no other time than this instant, and that the past and the future are abstractions without any concrete reality”—Alan Watts
We teach history, we plan for the future, but rarely teach anything on how to live today—and if you don’t ever live in the present, you wont be able to enjoy the future, because it never comes. Our cultures are constantly preparing for the next level of life.
Learning to think like an adult (to take life seriously) takes effort and repetition. Playing this hoax on our children is the key to maintaining the illusion and keeping players in the game—and kids know life is a game, and of such is the kingdom of heaven, uh, I mean…the game of life. But interesting nonetheless, that mystics, philosophers, and physicists all agree that time is an illusion—simply not what it seems. Language and writing are partly to blame (symbols) yet religion is quite the guilty party—always training for later.
Vibration is a reaction to an action, while sound is a relationship between a vibration and an eardrum. If a tree falls in the woods and there is nothing around with ears, it does not make a sound.
How then, prior to the relationship would ears evolve, when nothing in the primordial soup could comprehend vibration as sound, without already having ears?
Sight is the same problem. How could vision evolve without first being able to comprehend light? I have a friend that was born completely blind. Asking her what it’s like to just see darkness all the time, she has no idea what that means—no comprehension of dark or light at all—can’t even imagine it.
Maybe these questions have been already solved, but I am curious if someone smarter than me about evolution can answer this. It appears that the theory of evolution has the cart before the horse…why I sometimes depend on the reasoning prowess of others.
There is a Zen poem that says, “If you ask where the flowers come from, even the god of spring doesn’t know”. They also teach that these things arise mutually on their own, like backs and fronts, lefts and rights, and bees with flowers (you cant have one without the other) According to that philosophy, polarity is omnipotence—it is not knowing how it is done, but simply doing what is done, like growing your own hair—how do you do that?
Nothing is more evident than the existence of one’s feelings and experiences
“I take it for granted that empirical data, which is the data of normal sensory observation and experience, should inform our best guess at what reality is like. But are there any other sources of data that must be taken into account?”—Phillip Goff
“Nothing is more evident than the existence of one’s feelings and experiences”. If a supposedly complete theory of reality can account for all of the data of observation and experiment, but cannot account for the reality of consciousness, it can be falsified.
In the law of non-contradiction (LNC), it states that there aren’t, and cannot be any contradictory states of affairs. This law is known with a kind of certainty, similar to that with which I know my own feelings exist. One can perhaps debate whether our knowledge of LNC is more or less certain than our knowledge of the reality of consciousness, but it is clear that both are known with much greater justification than anything known on the basis of the senses—Phillip Goff
So if feelings and experiences are real and empirical evidence is real, how can a lack of empirical evidence for those feelings be dismissed by science? Or, is it consciousness that’s not real, but an illusion? Logic tells us one, or the other, is not real if they appear in a contradictory state—but both seem to exist. Which is it? Maybe it’s matter (the seemingly obvious) that is not the underlying reality of the universe…
What kind of world do you want, one without the other?
Another beautiful day of choosing sides based on a propaganda and belief. Seems Americans (the whole world) just can’t get enough of each other, but in the realms of endless polarity, should we expect anything different? If you want to know peace you must have discord—and if you cling to belief without understanding the nature of truth vs human cognition? My respects to the whole world—we’ve done it. What is the best way to confront nature, anyway?
This HERE from a front-line climate activist. (5min read)
There is no 12 step program to decontaminate the dialogue, but one bold one. Has it ever occurred to anyone, that the president is fighting because you are? Has it ever occurred to anyone that everyone is wrong because the questions are?
In christianity there is a principle (although they don’t know it) that confessing they are a sinner, whether it’s even “sin” or not, is exhilarating because in this one moment of life they know with absolute surety they are right about being wrong—and now have a benchmark to measure any success because of the failure. And realizing one is completely wrong is about as accurate a statement as can be mustered.
In order to be effective, a doctrine must not be understood, but has rather to be believed in. A doctrine that is understood is shorn of its strength—If a doctrine is not unintelligible, it has to be vague. If neither unintelligible nor vague, it has to be unverifiable—Eric Hoffer
The best way to prolong humanity is to stop choosing sides
Humans are limited by strictly linear thinking, being able to handle only a few variables of thought at a time. There are thousands of variables to every concern, yet the consciousness of the human brain is primarily a scanning system of a very, narrow focus of attention—and can only catalogue one line at a time by recapping the past (that’s why your basic education takes so long—miles of text must be read on a single line)
Our personality then, is to own the thoughts we think, or have been told to think are the most important thoughts of life, yet defining ourselves with such myopia is to discount every other human that have attended their focus to some other angle, which is equally worth exploration.
When we study physics we are dealing with processes that contain millions of variables we handle using statistics, which works fairly well when using extremely large numbers. But the practical problems of human life, deal in variables (lineal) in only the hundreds of thousands, and here statistical analysis is very poor. Charting it out with figures in this same limited, linear thinking is impossible.
We also try to solve our political and social problems with in the same way with total frustration—and with that same equipment we are now proposing to interfere with our genes? I digress.
The human brain however, is able to handle an enormous number of variables that are not available to our conscious attention. Your brain is now handling your blood chemistry, the secretions from your glands, and millions of cells without thinking about it—without translating what is happening into consciously reviewed words, symbols, or numbers. Translating what is going on in nature into words, numbers, and symbols, we confuse the world as it is, with what it is thought about, talked about, and figured about—while the difference between these two is vast—so we interfere.
Every human instinctively knows how to handle it all, but we then lose it in the language of discussion, primarily due to beliefs held by linear thinking.
It may be too late for solutions, but understanding is the first step. We cannot solve anything by interference. Nature will solve it all though natural selection, while human morality will try to fight it, preserve it, confront it and own it. But it is of no use. The only way to prolong humanity is to stop interfering—and we do this by understanding the founding principles of the game.
How focusing on the problem enlarges the problem—the art of letting go
Humans have a very narrow range of conscious attention that we allow to define us. Based on our personalities and what values (rewards) catch our attention, it begins to define us as a person and collectively as a specie, while the rest of life passes by—often a very good life that is all around, yet unnoticed.
“Target fixation is an attentional phenomenon observed in humans in which an individual becomes so focused on a hazard, that they inadvertently increase their risk of colliding with the object. In such cases, the observer may fixate so intently on the target that they steer in the direction of their gaze, which is often the ultimate cause of a collision“.
The human neuron is already very much like radar, always scanning the horizon for trouble. When we stay focused on danger, a type of neurosis sets in and we miss the good, open waters through such myopia. When this evolutionary mechanism of protection is embraced as a value, another mechanism engages—tribalism. Then when evidence is gathered to dismiss such behavior, humans employ a final, last ditch defense against reason—the backfire effect, which describes how individuals, when confronted with evidence that conflicts with their beliefs, come to hold their original position even more strongly.
As our christian dominated culture continues to fixate on the apocalypse, that somehow they can win with this mindset, we may just be bound to bring it on. But really they may have to wait a while, because actual life is petty damn good. Not that anything really matters when its all just a part of evolution. Our only chance of survival is to stop fixing everything before we blow it up by taking sides—or is that natural natural selection too?
How variety is not only a spice of life, but essential to it
“Other cultures are not failed attempts at being you; they are unique manifestations of the human spirit.” –Wade Davis
Ethnosphere, as defined by Mr. Davis is “the sum total of all thoughts and intuitions, myths and beliefs, ideas and inspirations brought into being by the human imagination since the dawn of consciousness”—the ethnosphere is humanity’s greatest legacy. It is truly amazing, the varieties of life, thoughts, and perceptions that have developed in the various habitats throughout the world.
Every ecosystem depends on vast diversity for its health. Since there are no “separate events” in the world—its all one big happening, ultimately every thing is dependent on every other thing to maintain equilibrium. Is the variety of perceptions and thought, born in the array of surroundings through the utilities of life, any different? Is not consciousness, as natural a resource as any other form?
Enter religion
There is one way of being human that holds itself in the highest of regard. It dismisses naturally grown cultures and interpretations of the world as inferior ways of being. It has done more to destroy the ethnosphere through its total ignorance to the value of variety, and if they have their way and bring everyone to Jesus or Allah, the earth is doomed. The ethnosphere is every bit as important as any natural habitat. When one idea or specie artificially inflates its numbers, it detriments not only its own health, but the well-being of the entire system.
Would it be moral in any way, to visit an indigenous culture for the sole purpose of getting them to think like you (under the ignorant guise of love and concern, no less?) To abandon thousands of years of diverse existence to live the monochrome life, where everyone thinks the same and lives by the same rules, now has nearly the entire planet living in a state of constant anxiety. How superior is that?
One is not compelled to test—only to believe. Until it is tested it will endure.
Spiritual disciplines, prayers, meditations, faith, songs, yogas, biblical study, and all forms of scripture, are ways of persisting in folly—doing over and over what you’re doing already, will eventually make you…wise? Yes, but it’s not how you think.
To exhaust all attempts at spiritual knowledge is to finally see the absurdity. Adherents need at last, to take this belief seriously. That is the only way out, as evidenced by those who have already left.
It is akin to convincing a flat-earther the world is round—you must let them walk, due-west as far as it takes for them to see it on their own—when they wind up right back where they started. Field test the words, live it, I mean, finally give it your true attention and quit dabbling in commandments and guilt, and you will see if for what it is—it is nothing at all but a donkey following a virtual carrot. It will last forever because no one takes it seriously.
“Every church or religion has established itself by pretending some special mission from God, communicated to certain individuals. The Jews have their Moses; the Christians their Jesus Christ, their apostles and saints; and the Turks their Mahomet, as if the way to God was not open to every man alike. Each of those churches show certain books, which they call revelation, or the word of God. The Jews say, that their word of God was given by God to Moses, face to face; the Christians say, that their word of God came by divine inspiration: and the Turks say, that their word of God (the Koran) was brought by an angel from Heaven. Each of those churches accuse the other of unbelief; and for my own part, I disbelieve them all”—Thomas Paine
The appeal to faith was a masterful play on the foibles of human psychology. One is not compelled to test, only to believe. Until it is tested it will endure.
Those who are weak in their atheism aren’t much different—believing the experts and catchy memes is no foundation to shout about either. I am mostly convinced that the two questions are wrong, but I know not what they should be.
So, you’ve decided to join (insert worthy cause or religion here) but your not sure if you really understand everything just the right way. A friend finally tips the scale with some wise words—”what the hell, just give it a try and see what’s up—you’ve got nothing to lose”. So you employ the time tested wisdom of the ages, deciding on hormones and a hunch.
This is the very scientific technique most humans use to abandon using the scientific method of inquiry. This is how my parents joined the John Birch society back in the 60’s. It was a perfect fit as all their fears were realized by highlighting everything the group opposed, as central to the doctrine.
“Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all the unifying agents. Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a god, but never without a belief in a devil.”—Eric Hoffer,
It is important now and then to scrutinize your own beliefs to make sure you are fearing the right things, but how to be objective in this process requires two things. First, find out what the opposition says and vehemently disagree with it. Second, convince yourself these are your beliefs that simply mirror the group—or is it the other way around? Now you forget (a pinch of doubt stirred, can go a long way, trust it)
Can anyone for one moment be the Buddha, unbelieve for a time and be the observer? Hardly likely, but the key to clarity is unbelief, so what to do? Employing the scientific method to belief (the problem) is a difficult task. For one, you have already decided the outcome by belief, skewing the interpretation of data. No, if you want to know what you believe, we must ask someone who doesn’t believe it.
“To continuously evaluate whether a being is good requires moral judgment, which requires moral autonomy, therefore it is not possible to continuously evaluate if a being is good while also worshipping it. Therefore, worshipping necessarily requires abandoning one’s moral responsibility, which is immoral“—James Rachel
Surpassing belief, which is simply withholding judgement until the outcomes of those beliefs are scrutinized by a third party (falsification) is the first step to liberation. Unless you’ve scrutinized your beliefs with the scientific method, an opposing view and an outcome based analysis, your beliefs are merely cans of hot air—in fact they are not even yours, or you, but the views of the group that through osmosis has hijacked your mind by a meme you’d swear was your own—until it isn’t.
To identify the real you, we must step away from belief mode—and like magic you will see the things you believed and fought for were not you at all. So distance a moment and relax—letting hormones make your decisions in haste adds a whole extra layer of insanity to conformity.
Surpassing belief mode and it’s limitations is likely the greatest challenge ever facing humanity. The appeal to belief in faith as a virtue appears to be the root problem of all problems.
All lives matter is a distracting end-around justice
There is a fundamental why the ongoing situation is so offending to African Americans concerning “All Lives Matter”, as a response to “Black Lives Matter”.
When someone says that Black Lives Matter, they are meaning it with an expectation that those responsible for the problem accept ownership of the problem.
This is one of the many irritations that offend African Americans (and me too) when people respond with all lives matter—it is blatant virtue signaling and another distraction to sidetrack a cause that should have resolved years ago—and like telling them to clean up after someone else’s mess in an area they have not had access.
Of course all lives matter—but not as much as this does right now. Maybe today the iron is hot enough to make a lasting difference?
Like pro-life is to women’s rights, the counter-movement all lives matter, is an endaround to maintain control and saddle black people with fixing a problem they didn’t create.
And don’t forget, blue lives matter—now, signing up for a dangerous job to stroke your ego is the same as facing down the barrel of those sworn to serve and protect—now serving and protecting themselves by abusing the oppressed? All lives matter is fundamentally racist to the core of white denial.
Justice uneasily reasoned—2020 By LP
TheCommonAtheist 