Category: Musings

Mainstream Thinking – They

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

Many find some comfort if their thinking and opinion is shared with others. What the peer group believes and what “they” say can have a very strong influence on individuals. If someone is in a position of authority or power others take on board whatever it is they say no matter how well considered that might be. These days being adamant can be mistaken for being accurate. There are many who are dogmatically insistent. People can gob-off without thinking about consequences.

If you are a big cheese or have power by association you are given air time and taken more seriously. Your words may become gospel.

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It can be important to some to be seen as “right” and to “win” an apparent argument. They can get quite heated.

I have less of a need to agree and comply with mainstream thinking. Technically as a quasi-hermit I do not have a peer group. I do not have to worry about getting cancelled nor about career progression. I have often considered the so called wisdom of the omniscient “they” as flawed.

There is an experiment currently underway in the USA on the propagation of adamant opinion. It will confer quantifiable outcomes.

In principle free speech is a freedom of the democratic “west”. In practice social factors mean that this is not the case. You can lose your job for saying nigger or commenting on the right for Palestinians not to be starved and slaughtered. You can be arrested for calling out murderous bullies. People in frocks and with penises are no longer allowed into ladies toilets. There are many taboos which may not be strictly against the letter of the law, others have been legislated against. Freedom is curtailed. We cannot have anarchy…old chap…

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Peer pressure, the whims of the herd and hive, forbid certain ways of being, of thinking and certain elements of speech. I am not surprised if I am avantgarde and not immersed fully in the norms. I have always had an entrepreneurial orientation. I do things people have not done before. I get balls rolling and break new ground. Whoopee…That is past history and probably over for this lifetime.

You never know who is reading what you publish on this internet thingy. There is always a mild risk of things getting propagated, of people cutting and pasting, using things well out of context. The amount of cut and paste text on things alleging to be spiritual is large. This is a non sequitur. If someone is trying to promote a “spiritual” way of living they probably did not ought to nick stuff, rob it. But hey it is on the internet so it is free, fair game.

I personally am now finding the suggestions of algorithms on some internet platforms very boring and difficult to get past. The use of search engines gets a bigger and bigger waste of time day by day.

I do not type “please show me some paid for advertising or promotion”.

We are, because of these omniscient algorithms, presented with an ever shrinking pool of information and knowledge, suitable for the statistically significant click-sumption as measured by the lowest common denominator of the average “they”. It is yawn-some and sucks the will to live out of life. Before long we will be cloned by Facebook and X into a mind-numbing blob. A blob which does not think nor offend, which lacks any originality. A blob which is adamant of opinion and that arrived at by algorithmic consensus.

The wisdom of they will be monosyllabic and conveyed solely by emoji…

Mainstream thinking will be blob. The future is blob. Long live blob.

Interesting Concepts – Spiritual Hierarchy

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

The dream previous points to a real life tricky situation.

I had  visions going on with me having “om mane padme hum” tattooed on my forearms and the sensation of monastic robes. I had these walking down Brixton Hill, on the Victoria Line and sometimes whilst giving lectures on Chemical Reaction Kinetics. What to do? Should I tell my line manager? Should I pop over to human resources? I doubt they had a precedent or a protocol.{ Yes we do! Filed here under B for Buddhist visions, what to do , how to manage them and legal precedents.} Should I tell my GP doctor and risk getting sectioned? At the time I was not reading Buddhist literature nor in any contact with any sangha. So I decided to keep these things to myself. I was 95% certain what these visions inferred to me and for me.

This was a part and parcel of my journey into things non bog standard, esoteric even. Some of the science experiments I did at the time were fairly fancy tending to arcane.

From time to time an idea or concept captures my imagination. In the blue books opus by Kuhl and Bailey there is significant mention of “The Externalisation of the Hierarchy”. This is clearly an archaic terminology. But I liked the idea. People who were evolved had taken a back seat in human affairs. Now there was to be a mass incarnation event whereby all the “good guys” started arriving en masse with a view to changing the world. This effort was to be headed up by highly evolved beings known as masters who had ashrams under their tutelage. Slowly over an unspecified time all these beings would take their place as and among humanity. There would be disciples in training and initiates of various degree. There would be a stage of the forerunner and an externalisation proper.

If you do an image search for ascended masters you will get a lot of “glowing” images pastel in hue with aura / haloes and sparkly eyes. There will be a predominance of males and white caucasians as masters. They will look a bit chavvy and kitsch, dependent on your personal taste. The images are not to my preference. They hint at bias in the portrayers.

In the opus the outline of the externalisation is sketchy in detail. When I read it for the first time my initial reaction was that the scale was small, there were far too few people to have a global impact. Since it was written the global human number has rocketed towards the ten billion mark. My reason suggests that were this indeed happening seriously then the scope outlined in public and in writing would only be the merest tip of an iceberg. The opus suggests that people may not be aware if they are a disciple or an initiate at first. They may develop an inkling even a knowing in due course.

Kuhl does not discuss the difficulties inherent in the manifestation of such a thing. It is pretty obvious that there would be resistance to such a putative series of events. People of power and high socio-political status are unlikely to want to listen to some whacko who may or may not be  an adept of wisdom. In the early stages of such a process, failure would be very common indeed. Slowly, very slowly, after many failures, the collective bastions against might start to weaken. Those obsessed in materiality will resist fiercely, even if it were to offer a form of salvation for them.

Kuhl offers no timescale no Microsoft Planner or Gant chart.

It is well known in military circles that no plan EVER survives first contact.

In his outline he mentions the second ray love-wisdom effort, to which it seems I pertain in that context. This means that I should perhaps resonate with Kuhl and Koot Humi as my “spiritual generals” of sorts. We would be on a similar wavelength so to speak. In principle I might be able to establish contact with them. Though by mundane biological chronology they would be very old indeed, well past Guiness Book of Records scale. I could say that we “met” in triangulation last night and nobody could prove me right or wrong. I could make umpteen non substantiable claims. There may be the simply impressionable misguided and those taking advantage among us.

One of the key themes in the opus is Goodwill to ALL of Humanity. At the moment we see an upsurge in xenophobic hatred. The flames are fanned by the so called right wing using a point of grievance to stir up bile and anger. Like a mob at the Roman Colosseum they bay for the blood of the foreigner, the immigrant, especially the differently coloured.

This primitive group-mind savagery is easily stirred. It seems things might/must get much much worse.

In the vein of esoteric thought the incarnation of the “good guys” will precipitate more action by the “bad guys” the hateful, the vengeful and the separative. One could see the rise in nasty separative isolationist ME thinking as being an indicator that the externalisation mentioned by Kuhl is underway.

In and around now Kuhl mooted that the age of the forerunner will be drawing to a close. Although this might offer hope it also points at things getting worse before that hope can take seed and bear fruit. Those of a calm persuasion will note that the deterioration is  first necessary and may even be seen as an auspicious sign that all is in hand.

It is an interesting notion that of a timed mass incarnation. Timed to occur when the need grows as humanity has forgotten the brutal lessons of the 1914-1945 global conflict. We see slaughter of the defenceless by state of the art American munitions in Gaza. The rock in the sling is no match for a Lockheed Martin F35. It is brutal bullying plain and simple. The invasion of Ukraine has invented a new twist in human conflict a new form of war, drone war.

If humans turned their ingenuity to goodwill instead of violence who knows what that ingenuity might achieve…

The world needs one massive wakeup call as is sleepwalks deeper into climate crisis overcome with petty squabbles and quibbles. It is time for humanity to get out of the sandpit and take responsibility. It is time to grow up.

Maybe the notion put forward by Kuhl is exactly what the world needs in and around now!!

New Age – New Humanity

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In the occult and esoteric literature there is promise of a New Age. This New Age will be radically different from the Woodstock – Wellness type of age. The change in human consciousness is mooted upward away from gonadic-emotional-concrete mind towards a fully intuitional or Soular consciousness. Such an age promises the understanding and perhaps attainment of The One Life. To get there it must cross the deserts of separative thinking. It must get past the we, me and mine towards a more global citizenship and to a wider ours. The old ways will not surrender easily. They will burn fiercely as they refuse to let go. Burn being the separation by fire and munition. They will burn for quite a while. People will justify death and fire to themselves.

For this new age an entirely new and evolving human vehicle is predicted one which is no longer so rigidly at face value heterosexual in the traditional and socio-political sense. The new humans will be configured differently. I take the whole so-called current “gender” debate as a hint, a precursor of what is to come. In time when fully Soul conscious, the entire notion of gender will no longer be important or something to soap box about. Gender roles will become historical. People will procreate according to the apparatus at birth, they will not feel out of place.  They will not feel the need to claim any gonadic based notion of gender. Which is illusory on the timescale of Soul. There will be more fluidity. The entire framework for living we currently have will become old-fashioned, a historical artefact.

The incoming beings of different make up will at first be few and far between. Their number will grow as more incarnating Souls require them. There will be oppression. Their lives will not be easy. The process will be decades even centuries long.

The transition to the new age will not be quick or painless…

What is on the Cards – Tarot – V&A

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I first started looking into Tarot around 2001. At the time I was an academic in Physical Chemistry at Imperial College London. I was very busy and a part of my job involved considering the second order non linear susceptibility of surfaces and probing these with femtosecond laser pulses.

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It probably wasn’t on the cards that I would share these two interests. Needless to say I did not soap box about tarot to my colleagues, lead ballons and all that.

Last night YouTube suggested a short video from the V&A about tarot and the history thereof. I watched it and found out about Minchiate and subsequently Sicilian tarot. I also found out that you can request to examine and handle some of the collection. The video was well made and interesting.

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« Le minchiate est un jeu de cartes du début du XVIe siècle, originaire de Florence, en Italie, qui n’est quasiment plus joué depuis le XXe siècle. Très proche du tarot, mais plus complexe, il se caractérise par le nombre important d’atouts qu’il utilise : 40, là où le tarot n’en comprend généralement que 21, pour un total de 97 cartes. »

The V&A has a nice web page on the history of Tarot, click here.

In the past I was more often found across the road in the science museum where I, on occasion, explained various exhibits to a little person. Often I would attract a small crowd who pretended not to listen in to what I was saying. The science museum seemed more natural, home turf.

The idea of emailing the V&A collection room to ask to inspect tarot cards from my old Imperial address tickled my fancy. Would they note it and find it odd?

Anyway I have a PowerPoint slide pack course in which I relate tarot to the Kabbalah tree of life and the various paths thereupon, to the Toltec Jewels of Awareness and to the evolution of inherent and evolving awareness. If I remember correctly Théun used to say that it was the Toltecs who invented tarot as a means of communication under things like the catholic inquisition. Anyone who threatened the supremacy of the church was subject to torture and death. The church had a stake in keeping control and power and it burned others on stakes. Tarot being arcane could be hidden under a cover story from prying eyes.

I’ll wager that more people use tarot than second order non-linear hyperpolarizability tensors. Hyperpolarizability is more arcane than tarot.

Back then I looked in detail at much so-called occult literature with the skill set of someone who can read matrices, and spot patterns. I found a lot of the published work shoddy and inconsistent.

I have a weak notion, that I am probably uniquely placed to relate so-called occultism, Toltec, Tarot and Buddhism with the critical thinking of a once pukka scientist.

In the 1990s I never knew that tarot was on the cards for me, though I had started to use I Ching for divination and shamanic journeying to request guidance from the universe. The shaman’s drum and the optical parametric oscillator do not see natural bedfellows. Seemed pretty darned normal to me.

The history of things like tarot will always be largely the overt and exoteric because the esoteric and hidden, is not in the public domain.

I personally cannot get on with the more modern tarot decks, using the tarot de Marseilles almost all of the time. I don’t do cartomancy but allow the major arcana to add pictorial clues to whichever Jewel of Awareness is in play or needs to be used.

I do dream tarot cards from time to time. This may not be common.

Let me be clear occult as I use it means difficult to see, partially hidden from view and not the bleeding obvious. It has nothing to do with Satan nor any dark ritual magic.

There are enough evil people in the world who are successful in the ordinary socio-political and pecuniary sense. They don’t need upside down pentagrams and goat heads. They are just nasty evil selfish people.

I still don’t know what is on the cards for the rest of this year / life …

And the painted ponies go up and down…

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

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So the years spin by and now the boy is twenty
Though his dreams have lost some grandeur coming true
There’ll be new dreams, maybe better dreams and plenty
Before the last revolving year is through
And the seasons they go round and round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We’re captive on the carousel of time
We can’t return, we can only look behind
From where we came
And go round and round and round
In the circle game

Joni Mitchell

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Today started with sorting through my now extensive medical records for the next phase of the upcoming medical-merry-go-round. By the end of the calendar year I will probably hit ~100 appointments. I am already past 60 RDVs. That is shed loads.

I have had more x-rays and MRI scans than your average person. I am due a few more. Next on the dance card are rheumatology, cardio stress test ultrasound and urology prostate specific antigen follow up. This to be followed by a pre-operative meeting with the anaesthesiologist, dietician and physiotherapist. They will probably say {politely} that I am a fat bastard. To which I might reply that I could start to smoke and drink heavily again so that I can get back to my former heroin chic. I could always knock up some crystal meth in the shed, that is an appetite suppressor.

It is difficult to know what difference a new hip might make. According to the hype it might be a game changer. They are not talking about the second one yet, which will be more complicated. It could offer a new lease of life. I doubt I will be down the mosh pit any time soon.

It is a kind of in between feeling. Something is impending, it is a couple of months away and there is a while away of time in the meantime. We have just received our “poll tax” bill for the year which might be the last or it might not. There are a number of jobs undone in the garden which I may be able to turn my hand to in January.

On the dreaming front there have been plenty. Recurring themes recur. None of which I am in a position to really do much about. There is no indication of an ongoing fate. Dreams of putative past lives might be interesting and jig saw puzzle pieces, to help synthesise a whole. But they do not show an ongoing fate, a path or direction left remaining for me to do.

I remain aware that “my” whole world is subject to sudden unexpected pivot. I am not however holding my breath for such a thing.

And the seasons they go round and round. Autumn is now here albeit a little early. It means leaves and fungi, rain and wind. Soon the pond will again fill and the bloody coypu will try to breach our defences to eat the lotuses on the pond.

And the painted ponies go up and down…

Not My Circus…

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

This morning I was up early and without any extensive dream to write up and follow up.  Yesterday I read up a bit on Tsongkhapa and it seems that they think he became a full buddha as opposed to a reincarnating bodhisattva. Not sure why some dude who died six hundred years ago is at the periphery of my consciousness. He was kind of a founder / renewer of Tibetan Buddhism.

I read to today that Nigel the bellend Farage is 62, roughly the same age as me. He is still gadding about in DC. People age at different rates and clearly he and BoJo have a lot more get up and go than me. My mentality is not about going out there and soap-boxing, stirring the shit. I don’t need the oxygen of attention.

Increasingly I am less and less engaged with the news. It is a same shit different day thing. The Spanish dude is the only one to openly lament the European response to Gaza which will be a stain on collective conscience one day and for ever going forward. Hindsight is often more accurate than spin and propaganda.

“And you did what while people were being slaughtered? Fuck all? Really?”

Irrespective of any dreams I may have, I am under no illusion that power and politics are seen as more important. I cannot fit into pretty much any narrative. There is not really a story to be spun or told which could prove socio-politically useful or beneficial. Therefore it is best that I remain “unheard” of. My estimation is that life here, despite any dreams, will carry on much to the same pace and rhythm. I am not planning to inflict myself on anyone else.

The world “out there” is not my circus nor are they my monkeys.

I estimate that I have perhaps a little more than a decade left to live. Which will largely pass away from public gaze, as a person living adjunct to life in as minimally participatory a manner as I can manage.

Emptiness and impermanence can lead to a sense of nihilism. That somehow there is no point or purpose to anything. It is all going to dissolve. So why build those cloud capp’d towers and gorgeous palaces?

I believe to an extent in fate and if fate decrees it, then my end of days might differ. I have had no sign of a change in tack yet.

Life here, despite the lack of events, moves fast. There are not multiple meetings and oh so important chock full diaries. “Where” I am moves day to day, my inclination arrives and vanishes. What I might have been up for one morning is gone the next. The now is quite fast. An aperture opens and closes.

Who knows “where” I will be this time tomorrow?

You’re Havin a Larf…

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A lot of people try to take advantage of others and play games. They may have cunning ploys. They may try to snoop and spy on others, to gather information from insiders and do anything they can to get an upper hand. They may ask multiple opinions. They may overestimate the quality of their source material and imagine that ancient data and accounts are still valid. People who imagine themselves smart, in the know and “clever” can get themselves into all sorts of messes. They may enjoy playing “secret squirrels”. They may imagine an idea to be good when it is not. Because they are, of course, infallible.

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I have never appointed a spokesperson or a port-parole.

Anyone claiming to speak on my behalf is a fraud, a shyster and a downright lying bastard.

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Self-perception may differ significantly from that held by others. If people are trying to take advantage of, or use others, they might assume a complete hoodwinking success, that they have fooled another and that their ways are opaque to the deceived. Rarely does it occur that their moves are transparent. They do not imagine that they have been read, seen through and their shenanigans noted. Nor do they note the fall in opinion or respect held of them by the gullible mark.

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If someone is taking the piss by their behaviour it may not occur that someone is taking the piss back at them and in spades.

For example if someone asks me a stupid question, I reserve the right to respond in an equally stupid way. I don’t care about being right or winning an argument so I could feed you the opportunity to “win” to see if you take the bait. It is surprising how many do!

Once I have disengaged, I feel free to take the piss back. Depending on where you are coming from you may not notice.

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In my book if you are having a laugh or playing silly buggers then so can I. I generally have less “to prove” than most and don’t care if I look like a fool or a pikey yokel. I have no sophisticated image and I for defo am not a big cheese…

If someone is “havin a larf” there are a number of options open. One of these is to confront, another is to ignore. One can let things play to see how deep a shitter people like to dig for themselves. One can do a runner. One can do something completely and utterly unexpected.

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People don’t really know what is going on in someone else’s head no matter how clever and cunning they deem themselves to be. There is a tendency to overestimate one’s perspicacity.

Some have world views and world assimilations that are markedly different from from ours, from yours. Yes, yours.

Late night we watched a film “Den osynlige”

“ The Invisible (Swedish: Den osynlige) is a 2002 Swedish film directed by Joel Bergvall and Simon Sandquist, very loosely based on Mats Wahl’s book of the same name. The film follows Niklas, a young and quiet man who falls short of his mother’s expectations and then finds himself attacked by a neglected young girl Annelie (she too, is metaphorically invisible) and left for dead. The next morning, however, he discovers that no one can see, hear or feel him, and anything he does to try and communicate is reversed; he is in a Limbo-like state between life-and-death, and must find out his ‘murderer’ and save his body before it’s too late. The film stars Gustaf Skarsgård, Tuva Novotny and Thomas Hedengran in the leads.”

In that film Niklas whilst in limbo gets to see his “friends” and classmates talking about him behind his back when he lies dying in the woods. People are generally only loyal to those present, the absent are fair game. It is a good film and shows how the inflicted expectations of others can fuck you up. Most “social” beings do not understand how brutal, nasty and petty the wielding of that societal shoehorn is.

They carry on regardless like clowns repeating the same folly, over and over. They can even think it is funny!!

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They can however be badly mistaken… …

Bad and Inapplicable Questions

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

I have received the preliminary documents for my meeting with the anaesthesiologist in due course.

It asks some questions which make no sense to me. It wants me to scale the best health I can imagine, the worst health I can imagine and rate today’s score on a scale of 0 to 100.

The best health I can currently realistically imagine is how I feel in and around now. It has nothing to do with how I might have been aged 25. I can’t remember that!! That best score is demarcated 100%. In general how I feel depends upon where I am on the pain relief schedule. When pills are due or after I have walked a lot when there is pain so this is the worse I currently feel.

Is this meant to be 0%? I am not sure this is what they mean.

Am I to imagine a session of waterboarding at Guantanamo Bay?

What about after eating some delicious Australian gourmet Beef Wellington?

Or is 0% dead….

On the “realism” scale I would be somewhere around 80-100% all the time. Where 80 % is pills due after a long walk.

If 0% is dead then I would feel fine because I would no longer have a body. So for now I will always feel worse than dead, because pain is residual. When I am dead, I will feel no physical pain.

I feel worse than if I was dead.

I doubt they would like or understand that answer.

It asks if I can accomplish my current activities. Of course I can. I have adjusted these so that I am able to do them so the answer is a big fat yes, I can do all my current activities. I have adjusted my activities to my ability.

It asks if I am anxious or depressed. It does not ask if I am calm and chilled…

The questionnaire does not fit me well, yet the answers are going to go into some spreadsheet or for research!!

I am not trying to be contrary but I do not think like that questionnaire suspects…

I feeling a tad Victor Meldrew…