Category: philosophy

Archaic Deity – Archaic Iconography…

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

Many depictions of deity are a tad dated. They arose in times when the power of kings and emperors was quasi absolute. The iconography has “radioactive” halos around sainted beings, chariots, swords and thrones. There are arguments about who stands or sits around the throne and on which side various beings are to be found. There are crowns and often a patrilineal succession of power. Humanity obsesses about organisational flow charts of the heavens and in the past who had career advancement amongst the Gods depended upon level of obedience and sycophancy. The celestial “human” resources department had severance packages to negotiate.

Fear of God put bums on seats and pennies on the collection plate.

These days the power of kings is much diminished. We don’t drive roman chariots all that much. The machete has replaced the short sword. The Heckler and Koch automatic has replaced the spear. The ultimate symbol of mundane power is a ginormous nuclear powered aircraft carrier equipped with stealth bombers. Thrones are old hat.

In constructing a deity and a pecking order of them, whether that be of Gods and angels or Buddhas and bodhisattvas, the notions are related to the mundane order of things. The iconography perhaps an aid for the illiterate. In many cases the “clergy” asserted power over flock and encouraged supplication therefrom. The “clergy” encouraged a notion that they were higher, perhaps better and more revered than the lay. The churches and temples extracted wealth and called it meritorious. It might help your journey in the afterlife to fund the claret of a bishop. It was a good pitch. People can read and think now.

I am not sure older notions of Gods and Buddhas wash as well these days. Despite what fragrances Unilever might add. Subscription to religious providers it probably falling all over the world.

There is a glaring difference in iconography between the seated tranquil garden statue Buddha and the tortured crucified Christ bleeding from his crown of thorns. This despite much similarity in their teachings. Man has emphasised the suffering of Jesus over his peaceful message. It prefers to show images of internecine cruelty and suffering rather than brotherly love. In our time there is much need both for tranquillity and for love.

Religious iconography is very often chavvy and overly ornate. It is showy and “look at me”.

“We have shit loads of gold! We the clergy must be powerful! Kneel pleb!”

Modern military power does not lend itself to very personal, even familial iconography. There is no big hearted daddy on the throne. Rather a couple of old men, fingers above a red button, ready to embody Shiva the destroyer aspect of deity. It is not an image of fatherly love. It is one of pendant wrath and nuclear winter.

Notions of deity need updating in a manner more suitable for modern mind, modern living. And no I do not mean a Marvel escapist universe. The sublime needs divorced from the family drama and the incestuous and the Machiavellian.

Spirit and consciousness needs to evolve away from the zoomorphic whilst retaining the feelings and value. A new form of understanding might spring from where we find ourselves now, so very obsessed with corporeal image and public relations spin-bullshit. Petabytes of images are quite a quagmire for the minds of mankind.

Yup…I think the old forms of iconography and depictions of deity are looking rather dated and may no longer be fit for purpose.

We may even need a thorough review of what we imagine deity and/or a God to be.

I wonder how might we imagine and create a God 2.0 ?

Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

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Le rasoir d’Ockham ou rasoir d’Occam est un principe de raisonnement philosophique entrant dans les concepts de rationalisme et de nominalisme. Le terme vient de « raser » qui, en philosophie, signifie « éliminer des explications non nécessaires d’un phénomène » et du philosophe du XIVe siècle Guillaume d’Ockham.

Également appelé principe de simplicité, principe d’économie ou principe de parcimonie (en latin « lex parsimoniae »), il dispose d’une ancienne formulation :

    Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate

    (les multiples ne doivent pas être utilisés sans nécessité)

Dans le langage courant, le rasoir d’Ockham pourrait s’exprimer par les phrases : « L’explication la plus simple est généralement la bonne », ou : « Pourquoi faire compliqué quand on peut faire simple ? » Une formulation plus moderne est que « les hypothèses suffisantes les plus simples doivent être préférées (il faut et il suffit) ». C’est un des principes heuristiques fondamentaux en science, mais ce n’est ni un principe de départ ni un résultat scientifique.

Le principe fait appel à une simplicité en termes de nombre d’entités, de concepts ou d’hypothèses utilisés, et non en termes de complexité de leur combinaison, les deux se contredisant généralement : si vous avez une explication d’un phénomène par la combinaison de deux causes séparées, le principe incite à rechercher une cause unique plus profonde qui serait à l’origine des causes préalablement postulées, ce qui donnera finalement, en cas de succès, une construction plus complexe mais avec un nombre plus réduit d’hypothèses.

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One of the interesting thoughts for me which pertains slightly to this blog relates to finding an internally consistent and comprehensive explanation as to the nature of the dreams I have had and which are archived in this blog. I would genuinely be interested to hear any explanation from the psychology / psychiatry profession which attempts to explain the scope of them. This specifically so given my prior training as a scientist and current life context as a relatively socially isolated retired person.

Those dreams which appear to point at previous incarnations can be discounted as merely dreams. There is no need to invoke the hypothesis of reincarnation. But saying things are just dreams is a bit of a handwaving dismissal. It is not entirely satisfactory.

Invocation of the single hypothesis of reincarnation renders explanation easier in context and does not require any complicated theorising as to just why or how come I dream about, inter alia, Buddhist themed, dreams. Inherent in this is a difficulty because it suggests that there needs to be some mechanism of transfer of memory between different lives, different incarnations. It raises the question as to what exactly is the nature of the “thing” which not only reincarnates but which is able to carry memory and recollection in the absence of a biological body. The neuroscientist is likely to prefer a brain and perhaps evolving synaptic scaffold construct to explain memory. Such a thing cannot exist beyond the soft wet matter of living humanity. There is no biological or biochemical hypothesis which can account for the notion of memory transfer between lives. The science fiction writer or scientifically inarticulate new-ager might say, “it is all in the DNA”.  If it were, it is not facile to explain how “Buddhist DNA” found its way to a small valley in the foothills of Snowdon. Yes my mother when tanned could pass for an Indian especially if she wore a bindi. But the DNA explanation does not really wash. My dad was ginger.

The easiest explanation is to blame an overactive imagination on my part which somehow breaks though during sleep. Perhaps there is a part of my deep sub-conscious which wants to be “special” and thereby invents some new DSM-5 type nocturnal mental disorder, the classification of which could be career enhancing for some psychologist or other. I have a form of delusional psychopathy which may or may not be common. After all who in their right mind would make dreams like mine public? Best kept secret to avoid public gaze. We can come up with the Whacko McNutjob persona.

The fact of the dreams and their recall are, at least to me, real. My speculation is that they are not “common or garden”.

This does not require the invocation of significance. I am just some bloke who happens to dream a lot. No biggie…

Provided that they are not significant there is no wider problem or issue.

If however we invoke, even tentatively, a putative wider significance, a gamut of implications might surface. A similarity to mystical vision and quasi-religious imagery can be drawn. In some circles that is significant in terms of context and perhaps faith. The follow on question might be, “why does someone who, was for a short while, deep in the UK based science community have such phenomena?”. This community being the self-assigned debunker of myths and pseudoscience. “Bah!!”

One could say that weird stuff happens, end of story. It  / he is just an anomaly.

The easiest hypothesis is that the hundreds of dreams archived here are all “just some shit that I made up”. The follow on to this is that I must therefore have at least some imagination and persistent inventiveness. One could counter with the deep philosophical argument, “you just can’t make shit like this up!” I am not sure as to what the motive might be for this inventiveness though others could speculate freely. Maybe I am simply an attention seeker. Maybe it is all some big game to make people question the extent and wider applicability of their self-diagnosed omniscience.

For me it is just habit. If I have a dream which I can recall and am lucid in, when I get up of a morning,  I type it up in Word.  I sometimes make a short note on a post it before typing. There are close to 100 dreams in 2025.

I personally have no strong need to pick an explanation and have that as a definite. A part of the art of dreaming is to enjoy the unknown and the partially or poorly explained.

I can see multiple implications which will almost certainly never manifest. Life circumstance does not support these weekly possible trajectories. There is nothing I can do about it.

I could say something groovy…

The coalescence of the dreaming onto and into the physical plane is not easy. Surprisingly little, though nascent in dreaming, makes it through into the “agreed” and “shared” physical plane realties.

He is just a feckless dreamer, head in the clouds…

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Each of us make our own versions of reality not all of which are entirely apt.

Following the footsteps of a rag doll dance…

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

Not all cultural references are directly transferable some are “time of life” and others are “time of man” related.  I personally view myself as being on the conservative side in that outwardly I am not outlandish. It always used to amuse me how the “goths” had less of an idea of the shadows than I did.

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But Siouxsie et al. were definitely a part to the soundtrack of my life.

In the “A Discovery of Witches” TV series the notion of the main protagonist being spellbound has come to the fore. In which her parents cast a spell which both hid and prevented the usage of her powers. She was literally bound by spell or spell bound. The narrative suggests that this practice was usually reserved for insane witches and that it was a harsh thing to do, to prevent the person from living to their full potential, to inhibit and otherwise hinder them. The back story is that the “creatures” are forced to hide from the discriminatory humans and their notions of normality. Humans are depicted as prejudiced. The story also has “time-walker” as a top echelon witchcraft skill. A lot of the plot revolves around “powers” of a magical and special kind. Power ever being the motivator for political intrigue, shenanigan and skullduggery. Somehow Diana is able to summon an old text which may or may not hold the secret(s).

In physics a lot of stock is made upon observables and making an observation. If one in any way makes an observation one changes the system. For example if one “observes” a photon using a detector that photon changes the energy state of an electron. The photon ceases to be. The energy has been transformed from one thing to another. At a very local and very tiny level every act of observation changes the system.  Science rhetoric is less explicit as to the nature of interpretation and subsequent assimilation caused by the observation, the act of observation. One could say that the observation of a “handful” of particles in a science experiment can have a truly dramatic and wide ranging impact because of interpretation and assimilation to or with a previously held thought form or model. I might infer that a photon is the witness to an act of proton transfer. My observation hints at a physical process. Any observation changes the system and it cannot be undone. If I talk about it down the pub that handful of photons triggers synapses and a train of thought heads off on whichever trajectories.

I have always had a few problems with the notion of time travel because of observation. It is impossible to travel back in time without altering its forward propagation. Although pleasant as an artistic and entertaining notion it is philosophically tricky. {Ok there may be some time reversal events at sub atomic levels that I am unaware of but these may be mathematical legerdemain}. In terms of karma time travel is also problematic.

In my mind it raises an interesting thought line. “Does reminiscence alter the past or merely our recollection and narrative assimilation thereof?” We do not travel back in time to the acts of perception but how we retell what we “remember” does change our futures because our basis for world interpretation has altered if only slightly.

If for example you held a view that I was a complete bastard and you hated my guts, then any future interaction would be coloured by this framing. If on reminiscing you decided I was only a partial bastard then you have already changed the future. Your change of mind changes the future(s).

Time-walking may be seen as a reinterpretation of events previously observed. Bearing in mind that the apparatus of observation must of course be error prone and never 100% accurate. Not all instruments are sensitive nor well calibrated. We do not actually go back in “physical” time rather review our mental registers of how we have constructed the time evolving narratives. We could re-consider, re-view and possibly re-perceive. Much like an astronomer may apply correction factors to space telescope raw data. There is some “algorithm” which enables (perhaps) a more reliable assimilation. We may refuse to apply said algorithm because we are stuck in our ways and like to cling to old perceptions, prejudices and world views.

The quantum mechanics of a 75kg lump of wet proteins and fats going backwards {or forwards} in time do not seem plausible. Perception and “mind” however are clearly much less physically tangible. In a sense these may be able to travel along what might be called time-registers. In the absence of matter time has no meaning. In a sense time as it is measured is a property of matter (vibration or time to travel between spatial coordinates). How we currently measure time is by the observation of photons in a fancy physics rig.

To extrapolate wildly by measuring time we are changing our futures.

Diverse Intellectuals – Seer Time – Philosophical Dead Ends – Dream 22-10-2025

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

Here is last night’s dream had between 4 and 6:30 AM. I should note that I am on nocturnal low dose oral opium for the hip pain and have been for several weeks.

It starts in an urban setting on a terrace outside some kind of clubhouse or bar. I am with a man who is younger than me maybe forties. We are having a beer at a pub style table. I understand him to be an intellectual, a university professor of some sort. He is animated and has set me up with various meetings around campus. His accent has a very faint American lilt. He has crazy unkempt grey hair with partial male pattern baldness. From his random hair I guess he is Jewish of extraction. He has a satchel with papers. We are discussing models of the universe and I comment that nobody has data before the big bang and that I prefer a cyclical universe model. I am pretty sure that this is not the first universe and that this is consistent with the Vedas. He says there is no need to invoke prior universe. He says that he has lined me up with a busy day and that we should meet up later. He is a bit like the mad hatter running late. He means well and is jocular and friendly.

He leads me off to a mid-multi rise building which is an office block he wants me to meet someone there. She is a psychology-philosophy cross over academic. We get to her office which is clean and immaculate. More top end business than nutty professor. He leaves me with her. She is tall of Germanic demeanour with mustard brown immaculately pressed slacks and an expensive green silk shirt. She is interested in evidence for the psychology of the soul. It is a non-publishable sideline interest of hers. I explain some of my views. She says that she would like to have more discussions with me later that evening. She takes my left hand and places it between her legs on her pubis. I can feel her genitalia. I withdraw my hand. I ask if that is on offer later and she says that maybe it is. She does not understand that I am no longer fussed about sex. She is completely relaxed and unfazed, sex to her is no big deal, a kind of work out. She is pretty formidable and focussed clearly on what she wants.

The scene changes and I am introduced to a small more geeky-nerd come woman with dark hair. She is a professor in game theory and logistics. She and I start to talk about games of logistical journeys. On top of an empty upturned beer barrel she has a simulation of a game for a delivery. She shows me. I explain to her that I have not the faintest idea what game theory is. She moves onto to poker. She says that she can mentally calculate the odds of each hand from current position of play. I say that such a thing would bore me and take away the fun. I say that were I to play I would do so intuitively. Her eyes light up. She is fascinated by the statistics of intuition and is convinced that it is a real phenomenon. She suggests that we have a few hands of draw poker later.

She leads me off to a laboratory building in which I meet a tallish man dressed in a M&S style navy jumper and blue chinos. He is clearly some kind of physicist. We start talking a bit about ultrafast and he maintains that time is a very important thing. I say that time is subjective and nowhere near as objective as he imagines it to be. From the point of view of a seer, time can be expanded or compressed. Perception and time are a part of the same phenomenon. I explain that highly skilled martial artists and sports people can slow the time so that it is perceived differently from others. That is why a 100 mph tennis ball is easier for them to hit. From a seer’s perspective time is like a tram line along which one can place perception at will and this includes far into the past. The physics of time around the putative big bang was very much more nonlinear than it is imagined today.

The physicist takes me to a different part of the building. We are in an atrium outside a lift when the doors open and out flounces a tall man with and expensive long leather jacket and longish hair. With him is a younger acolyte whom I know to be his student and homosexual lover. The man in leather is a well-known published  philosopher. I think to myself that he is a right knob, a bell-end and pretentious. The physicist is also not a fan. I am led off into an office with sofa and armchairs. Alone with philosopher and acolyte we start to discuss. He drops names like a machine gun. I say that in my opinion philosophy as a discipline is at a dead end, stuck. This is because one has always to compare back to previous lines of thought and endlessly refence the development of thought over millennia. Who cares what people thought before modern science? Philosophy is therefore stuck in a bad time warp. He thinks me an uneducated uncivilised heathen and I think him a bell end.

The dream ends.

Rapport and Communication

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

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The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.

George Bernard Shaw

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The above succinct quotation is a lot more apt than many are willing to acknowledge. It is widely applicable. It takes a lot of effort, willingness and practice to enhance communication so that one can be “en rapport” with another. One has to be on similar wavelengths and not too divergent in intellect. There must be some shared commonality of allegory and metaphor, usually some overlap of life experiences. There needs to be some kind of tie, perhaps emotional or deeper. The sharing of space and time with another helps, sharing trauma or profound experience can enhance a shared experiential which enables communication. One can communicate well with someone who one “hates” because that intensity adds focus to communication. This intensity can aid or degrade communication. There are a lot of assumptions and biases present in most attempts to communicate.

Above all one needs to listen attentively and try to communicate, to convey. My experience suggests that many are unskilled in listening. To tune in to another requires one to be passive like a radio receiver. One needs to find the wavelength of transmission on the dial.

If there is poor rapport using conventional methods such as talking it is not surprising that unconventional methods such as telepathy are not well experimentally proven. I like the analogy of an electronic instrument. If the noise in the instrument is high its ability to detect true signal is reduced. The “minds” of most are a cacophony of internal dialogue unable to pick up signal. If the mind is distracted and unfocussed the spoken word fails to register with any longevity in the consciousness. {Oh look a butterfly, my ‘phone has just pinged with a text, what is for tea?}

I’ll speculate that profound inter-human rapport is on the wane.

In the media when a psychic is consulted to solve a complicated murder case, perhaps find a body, they are given a piece of clothing, a photograph. This enables the psychic-seer to tune into to the missing person or object. Logically the rapport gained from a scarf or a photograph cannot be as strong as that gained from a genuine relationship with that individual. Perhaps by taking time to immerse into the life, the bedroom, the friends of the missing person a non-proximal rapport can be gained. But it would not be the same as if they worked together for a decade and shared life’s highs and lows. There may be some more predisposed to such a skill. We have the notion of empath on one hand and trained skilled psychological profiler on the other hand. One uses a subjective rapport and the other builds from a quasi-objective evidence base.

The notion of rapport is of course subjective and perhaps elusive. Rapport must vary in a temporal sense. For example I am markedly different in outlook now than I was two decades ago. Any rapport people had with me from back then has probably passed its expiry date. I can still put on my Worzel-Gummidge science head if needed. It is at the back of the barn behind the haystack.

Because we may lack a genuine rapport we can easily assume that we understand people and their motivation much better than we actually do…

Rapport has cultural elements too. This has been clear here in France. I have had conversations where I know we are not on the same page, in the same book or even the same library. I have noted the case. The other person has not. There is no way that you can convince the adamant that they have gotten the wrong end of the stick, even when you know they have.

Communication is way trickier that we imagine.

In Buddhism the notion of mind to mind transfer is active in the hagiography and key in the Zen lineages. Things are passed on non-verbally. This strays into the parapsychological notion of telepathy. In such instances the follower and teacher have shared considerable time, they have had grumbling bellies when the alms bowls were sparsely filled. They have meditated together. Their way of life has been shared, their philosophies have converged, their wavelengths have become similar and synchronised. Under such circumstances the likelihood of mind-to-mind transfer must be enhanced. They did not go home to their wives nor watch Strictly of a Saturday night. They are not worried about losing their jobs nor distracted by the next vagaries issuing out of Trump’s jumbled mind.

Rapport then is an unquantifiable but when shared is a common subjective experience. Communication is less difficult and mutual understanding more easily reached.  A convergence of being enables rapport.

I liken this mental rapport to the phenomenon of quantum entanglement. Two photons created as an entangled photon pair have their wavefunctions coupled, they are en rapport with each other. When one photon is “asked” about its state of polarisation and answers. The other photon telepathically knows what its state is too, despite any geometric distance between them.

Rapport can be thought of as a form of entanglement, a loss of harsh individuality, where a shared outlook is held, however briefly. During full rapport communication is “instantaneous”. The separate I, me, is melded into an us. In full rapport we might think as one.

The wavefunction contains everything we might want to know about a photon {or pair}. The mind contains everything we might want to know about the non-biological part of a being. Two minds fully en rapport share. Of course mental rapport is unlikely to be total though it could be significantly partial. A shared mental rapport might enable a telepathic transfer, being to being. Physical plane distance need not hinder.

If one studies an individual for an extended period one might get to know them and have a measure of predictivity concerning their thoughts and behaviour. This could be an ersatz rapport when you think you know but don’t really. The grey area between advised intuition and genuine telepathic rapport is probably experimentally inseparable. A stalker thinks they know the victim, a spook understands the target. To generate an accurate rapport with someone personally unfamiliar is not facile. We may imagine we know. We may be overly optimistic as to extent.

What we wish for and what is actual, can differ.

Hmnn…

Unacceptable Hypotheses

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

How we view and to an extent assimilate our notion of world is underpinned by a number of hypotheses which we may deem fact or gospel. Counter hypotheses are therefore cognitively unacceptable. This is because they can literally change our world and view thereof. Different hypotheses can upset the mundane power balance. And we cannot allow that can we.

For a long time, according to history, mankind imagined a flat Earth with earth at the centre of all things heavenly. Others suggested a heliocentric solar system and a quasi-spherical planet. Such views were considered heretic and punishable. For a long time the hypotheses of heliocentricity and orb-like planet were totally unacceptable especially to those in power, in the church. The infallibility of a human pope kept bums on seat and pennies on the collection plate. The infallibility of the pope was deemed factual and not hypothetical. It was the sort of “fact” that was enforced at the end of a blade or a noose.

Human history is littered with old hypotheses which have been used as the reason for slaughter. Hypotheses can be used to justify blood and murder.

The implications of a spherical globe are significantly different from a flat “2d” world. There is no edge off of which to sail. Without a round planet we would not have satellite TV nor surveillance satellites. A flat earth would be bad for NSA and CIA. The hypothesis of a quasi-spherical planet is game-changing in its implications.

An example of a hypothesis which is unacceptable to some is that Jesus was and is the long promised biblical messiah, the saviour. A significant population in the world find such a hypothesis unacceptable. No rabbi could accept this hypothesis and others see him more as a significant prophet. Were a rabbi to accept such a hypothesis it would radically change the assimilation of world and the recounting and recollection of history. You can argue that there is a vested interest not to accept such a hypothesis.

Some hypothesis cannot therefore be accepted because the implication of accepting them is too vast, it changes far too much.

Scientific causality and locality was a notion of Newtonian mechanics. Quantum entanglement kind of fucked with this idea and people like Einstein found this a swede masher and difficult to accept. Nowadays there is a burgeoning quantum aspect to science, business and technology.  

One could argue that there is precedent for old, dated hypotheses giving way to newer more widely applicable ones. Things of significant implication always face resistance and slow uptake.

I like the idea of a how a change in hypothesis can fundamentally and significantly alter how a world is and has been assimilated. A benign example of this is when adopted children find out they have been adopted and search out the backstory. The world is turned upside down for a while, perhaps permanently. Modern DNA testing has scuppered many a dubious narrative about parenthood. The hypothesis that Bob was dad to Alice was incorrect, it was Sergei in reality.

A while back somebody insisted that I was a so-called Man of Action and for many years dozens of people interacted with me on the basis of that hypothesis. It underpinned their assimilation of our interaction. It was a hypothesis which may not have been well founded. People might struggle to re-assimilate the world and the nature of interaction given an alternate notion.

Hypothesis can be a close relative of assumption. The working assumption here in France is that I am “anglais”. It is the first “hypothesis”. It is pretty easy to change intellectual understanding of this but still people behave towards me as if I have the same orientation as an English. Although the hypothesis has changed its latent implementation remains.

Based on various visions and dreams I have had one can draw up at least two different hypothetical explanations. These might be radically different in implication both locally for me and more globally.

The simplest explanation is that the nocturnal dreams and waking visons are a form of hallucinatory psychosis. I am off  my trolley and provided that I don’t cause any discomfort / break laws there is no need to have me locked up in a psychiatric unit. I am not a threat to anyone and by and large understand my day to day reality such a taxes and medical appointments. Although socially isolated I am not dangerous to myself or others. This is a facile hypothesis with only a very local implication. It does not impinge outside of our immediate geo-location.

Another interpretation is that some of the dreams are to do with previous incarnations of mine. If we accept this as a hypothesis then we can assimilate an explanatory narrative which has me having several Buddhist flavoured lives etc. As this stands it  has no wide implication. It is the sort of thing someone well into their cups might claim down the local boozer. No drama. Just another hippy-trippy fruitcake believing something which cannot be proved nor directly unequivocally disproved. Disproof is implied from lack of proof. If however this points at a tulku incarnation of a high lama, this has wide implication in at least one context. Some would struggle to accept this as a hypothesis specifically because of the way they see me and have behaved towards me. It would need a rewrite of life narrative.

This points at an obvious. Hypothesis can not ever be completely separated from context; they are nearly always highly context specific.

In 2009 I had a “conversation” early one morning walking around a wood near Tring. In that I was told that I was a very close disciple of Buddha, Siddartha. Implied that I had been a contemporary of him and spent time with him. The default hypothesis of psychotic hallucination or schizophrenic voice hearing explains this easily.

To accept the “conversation” as factual or hypothetically correct would be a push for some, particularly those who have made my acquaintance.

In 2011 I had a dream which pointed at Bakula one of Buddha’s closet disciples, a scholar who came late to the path according to text. He is named as arhat in scripture and hagiography has him as an enlightened being. I am less convinced that enlightenment of a disciple happens in a single lifetime just from hanging out with the Siddhartha dude. In certain circumstances he is revered as a kind of Buddhist “saint”. Prior to the dream I had no conscious memory of having heard the name Bakula.

The facile invocation of grandiose psychotic dreaming is easily made. Maybe I want to be important subconsciously and made up a story to make me significant.

For me to accept it as hypothetically possible is not tricky. For others it may be harder. For example what does one do with that? How does one treat a reincarnated person who actually met and hung with Siddartha? What is the precedent? What is the protocol?

Quickly such a hypothesis becomes cognitively unacceptable. It cannot be proven true and it would take more evidence than Mulder and Scully could ever furnish for it to be believed, no matter how much we may want to believe. I’ll suggest that there may be many hypotheses which describe an aspect of reality which are totally unacceptable. These hypotheses may be before their time. In time they may become less unacceptable until such time as people are ready to believe them.

Careful if you believe, you might fall off the edge of your world…

Being Off the Map

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

In general people have a fairly fixed idea about how the world is, how people behave and what is expected. Which is a nice way of saying that people are prejudiced. The fact that I resigned my job at a decent university without any other, better job to go to, was for many a non sequitur. They could not get their head around it. It did not compute. Some invented some imaginary scandal to explain it, scandal ever being bread and butter in perfidious Albion.

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People do not associate words on perception and meditation with a smoking skinhead bovver-boy. Nor do they image that a piss artist front row rugby player can chant in deep voice. People are set in their ways and their minds are a tad concrete.

I quite like having more than one working explanation for any given situation. I do not have to settle in any absolute way for which one is “right”. Modern education insists on getting the socially accepted “right” answer to exam questions. Students want to learn how to produce and parrot the “right” answer so as to get “A” levels and degrees. People are trained to think in an absolute binary right-wrong way.

The most logical explanation from a socio-political point of view is that I am simply a burn-out who could not hack it with the big boys, the big cheeses.

Another explanation is that I am off the map. I differ significantly in orientation from most. I just don’t fit. I am a square peg which cannot be hammered into a round hole. No drama. People have long been wary of things which have not been mapped out.

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This means that only the foolhardy might seek to touch me with a barge pole. I could be infectious. Association with me could be career threatening.

I have been told by others that people do not want to be seen associating with me in public.

There is no incentive in a “what-is-in-it-for-me” sense to interact with me in any way, whether meaningful or otherwise.

I will likely remain off the map, uncharted.

People can choose to choose whatever it is they want to choose. Their choice is their choice. I have no wish to influence. If they make poor choices that is not my problem. I never advised them and they never sought my advice. People need to learn in whichever way helps them to learn.

This notion of standing back, non-interference, is neutral. It is nether life enhancing nor life destructive. It is an approach which does not make sense to others who wish to interact, to impinge, to affect and to influence. Some cannot resist trying to guide the lives of others and bend them to their will.

Non-interference is a direct consequence of emptiness, lack of will or ambition, is not on the map of modern ways of living. It is not there in “opportunity” land. After all “opportunities” should and must be seized!!

Why?

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Fate and Façade

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

A while back I wrote and entire blog around the notion of façade. It was called “Spiegelfassade”. The idea being is that people portray a façade, a persona, an ersatz, to others and then hide behind that. Rarely are human beings WYSWYG. They live in manner inconsistent with their authentic essence, life is a show-and-tell affair and they are not true. The public-relations-faux-façade is more present and giga-pixel ready these days. Insta-ready is not reality. One could make up a whole new identity with the help of AI and photoshop. This having a cover story is not new, it has been around for ever. There is tacit acceptance that some will need a cover in order to ply their trade. Others can take a face from the ancient gallery in a sociopathic manner. Others are knobheads.

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The trouble with cover stories is that people can struggle to know what is cover, what is real. There were cases in the UK of undercover cops fathering children whilst in deep cover. Who knows how wide the psychological damage from that propagated? I doubt national security warranted such cynical imposition.

Last night as I was drifting off to sleep, I kept “getting” the number 37. Today I learned that 37 is a prime number, which I kind of knew anyway by sight. Apparently, that makes it useful for cryptography. If you ask human beings to pick a number at random between 1 and 100 it is the second most popular number after 7. Human random number generators are skewed. It is also a number used in a magician’s or mind reader’s force. They can, by prompting, guide you to this number. Ta-dah…magic!! 73 is also a prime number which makes 37 an unusual reversible prime. People choose numbers that are “lucky”. The odds for picking 37 are not 1 in 100. Humans have biases where they imagine there may be none.

The problem comes when façade interacts with façade and there is an illusion of reality on one or both sides. To an extent this is the basis of all 1:1 human interactions. We have a professional façade, a home one and perhaps are real only when we are alone. But if we have over egged the façade, it is impossible to understand or know our true authentic essence. People do not know themselves well and may deny a whole bunch of stuff. They may only know their shell, their façade, which they mistake for reality.

One of the answers in the University Challenge quiz last night was that “an unexamined life is not worth living”. People can quote philosophers in an erudite manner as a groovy tag to conversation. Rarely do they enact fully. Even those enamoured with the classics may quote more than do. We are selective. In this context fate is an interesting idea, that has on occasion a hackle tingling effect. We might like to believe it but only to an extent. We think we determine our life direction rationally, we choose. But a simple leaky condom can alter trajectory dramatically. We can be fated to meet someone who changes our life forever. We may miss a meeting that might be transformational by a hair’s breadth. We were not yet fated for that transformation; we came within a whisker.

If we live within the confines of our façade we may never know. If we are meant to find out, that façade might crack and perhaps violently so, revealing an unprotected nascent embryo beneath. It may evolve or develop another calcified shell quickly, lest the world sees an emperor unclad.

In all of us the authentic essence might leak through a crack. We might think, “what the fuck was that?” as we glue the porcelain mask quickly back together.

If like a Matryoshka doll there is façade after façade, identity after identity, it may take a long while to find that authentic essence. If we are fated to approach said essence then we will, no matter how much upheaval and struggle it entails. Layer after layer needs peeled back and like with onions we may cry along the way. If we are fated to stay in façade-land that is where we eke out our days.

Fate may engineer or come close, in one of these cases we will never know. Along the way we will have lent fate a hand by our choices, our decisions. It was fated thus.

Coincidence is Logical – Except When it Isn’t

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

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There is a certain type of person who prefers to ascribe coincidence, or random happenstance to events rather than accept any unproven {hypothetical} causal links. It would take a multiplicity of “coincidental” occurrence before they would deem significant corelation of happenstance sufficient to justify either causal linkage or even causality itself.

If the statistics to the contrary started to build up, they would resist dropping the logical conclusion of coincidence for quite a while.

Because of this they would never believe in karma. Even were it to slap them around the chops with a large wet pollack.

Say for discursive example you were covertly reading this blog and perhaps making some cunning plans which in some way pertained to me. You then noted that I posted “We’re only making plans for Nigel” here. The first port of call would be that this was entirely coincidental. You might start a tad, nevertheless. It is logically impossible for someone in another country to know that you were discussing or chatting about them. The occult ability of “seeing” belongs only to fictional characters like “Wednesday Addams”. At a stretch you might go so far as to think I had made some lucky intuitional guess which by fluke of timing matched circumstance. No way would you, as a rational scientist, accept that seeing is possible and that I am capable thereof.

People therefore write off many things because their confirmation bias says that they cannot or should not be possible. Anecdotal evidence of not boarding a plane because of  bad vibe and it subsequently crashing and burning, remains anecdotal and conversational perhaps to be found on “The Daily Mail”. The life of those prone to ascribing things near always to coincidence is a bit boring and chances are that they miss a great deal. They should steer well clear of roulette, statistics says so.

There are however many things for which coincidence and random happenstance are poor explanations. But logic is very limited and as it is currently formulated fails to encompass many things without far-fetched hypotheses like dark energy and dark matter.

“Show me a can of dark matter!!”

There is a part of society which believes in karma and synchronicity. Were you forever looking for these things then chances are you will find them. You could argue that belief in synchronicity is a self-fulfilling prophecy because of confirmation bias. Similarly if you were fond of the notion of seeing, ANY thing, any event, no matter how small could provide you with proof of efficacy. You could comb the opus of Nostradamus or the Revelation of Saint John and find clear {and incontrovertible} evidence of fulfilment of prophecy. It might not occur to you that you are kidding yourself.

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So where is reality?

Is it that coincidence is logical except when it isn’t?

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The Book of Revelation, also known as the Book of the Apocalypse or the Apocalypse of John, is the final book of the New Testament, and therefore the final book of the Christian Bible. Written in Greek, its title is derived from the first word of the text, apocalypse (Koine Greek: ἀποκάλυψις, romanized: apokálypsis), which means “revelation” or “unveiling”. The Book of Revelation is the only apocalyptic book in the New Testament canon and occupies a central place in Christian eschatology.

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Martin Luther King Quotes

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

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“We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

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“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”

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“I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.”

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“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

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“History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.”

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“Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”

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“Cowardice asks the question, is it safe? Expediency asks the question, is it politic? Vanity asks the question, is it popular? But conscience asks the question, is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but one must take it because it is right.”

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“Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.”

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“He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.”

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“Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.”

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“We must concentrate not merely on the negative expulsion of war but the positive affirmation of peace.”

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“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”

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“Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.”

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“It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one destiny, affects all indirectly.”

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