Mainstream Thinking – They

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.

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…

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.

Shunning Ostracism & Excommunication – Historical Precedent

I think it both accurate and fair to say that there is much historical precedent for the “human” practices of shunning ostracism  & excommunication. The practices may be official or unofficial, sanctioned by the hierarchy or simply via the social practices unspoken by “they”. Often the shunned is/are way ahead of their times, avantgarde or simply unwilling to submit and comply with some edict or other. Many who refuse to kowtow are ostracised. At the time the ostracism or excommunication is considered thoroughly justified. Imagined divine right is on the side of those doing the exclusions. The hindsight of years or decades looks back in disbelief. “Really? They did that?”

The shunners do not imagine for one moment that shunning is what they are doing, it does not even occur to them and is rarely overtly discussed. There is no thought or empathy for the shunned or ostracised.

“They are not us. We are right!”

Shunning ostracism & excommunication are cult like practices which continue to this day. The threat of these is used to coerce compliance. In Scientology one can even be declared “fair game”! The person ostracised and shunned is the subject of gossip and hearsay, in absentia. No prodigals are allowed.

Someone might read an article on say Galileo in the Inquisition and tut-tut, then talk of Martin Fleischmann or Ranga Dias. One is a hero the others not. If your reputation is tarnished it is very hard to get a research grant funded, the so called objectivity flies out the window. People are way more fickle than they are prepared to admit. Every church, including science, has some form of shunning practice.

Shunning ostracism & excommunication are tools of coercion and manipulation favoured by the status quo, used to assert power over. The fear of these can stifle any dissent. A church “elder” can claim it can prevent some god-fearing person from entering heaven. That is a manipulative mind-fuck of high order.

The historical precedents are extensive and these practises continue to this day, in churches, organisations, political parties, clubs and societies. They even occur in peer groups.

Humans are prone to repeat rather than learn from history. They keep the same old manipulation playbook, Grimoire, and use it over and over…

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The Problem of Out of the Box Thinking

Of late I have stopped looking at Twitter because there is an awful lot of stuff about the upcoming American presidential election. It does not speak well of the level of intelligence. It remains a mystery to me why/how such a technologically advanced society can have some very backward thinking, which is adamant and dogmatic.

Because I was “forced” to be right handed my school career got off to a bad start. I was forever being deducted marks for poor hand writing and shite diagrams. I chose not to study biology in six form because I was always losing marks for poor diagrams. I use a bow and arrow left-handed and I set up the food mixer “gammy” according to the wife.

Human beings can hold seemingly contradictory ideas at the same time without it causing them problems. For example, it is OK to bomb Gaza to smithereens killing thousands but to abort a foetus is forbidden / evil.  People believe the standard model of physics and yet still talk of heaven up there and hell down there. The concept of getting virgins as a reward for martyrdom is inconsistent with not having a body or penis when dead. People refer to heaven as a “place” but without physical form Cartesian notions of space are invalid. How would a discarnate consciousness be even aware of space with no eyes, no ears and in the absence of a heartbeat there would be no clock to provide time. Time and space would no longer exist.

Apparently, there is more in the universe which we don’t know than we do.

“In the standard lambda-CDM model of cosmology, the mass–energy content of the universe is 5% ordinary matter, 26.8% dark matter, and 68.2% a form of energy known as dark energy. Thus, dark matter constitutes 85% of the total mass, while dark energy and dark matter constitute 95% of the total mass–energy content.”

Yet people can be very adamant and assertive.

History shows that scientific models evolve and change. We tend to keep the old models and then add exception or special cases until using the old model is like flogging a dead horse. New out of the box ideas are nearly always seen as whacky at the get-go. This can lead to reputational loss and peer group shunning.

The phenomenon of quantum entanglement and its resolution with at distance effects on the other half of an entangled pair was a non sequitur for Einstein. We choose to describe the physics by calling two eigenstates entangled. It works for our purposes and has practical application. There is a part of me which wonders if we are missing something, if there is an underlying physics we are not yet aware of.  Will the people a century from now look back at our naivety? We teach wave particle duality but the electron does not give a toss how we describe things. We forget that our descriptions and models are just that. They are only so good as they are useful yet people are evangelical about them.

Logically there is a physics problem with heaven and hells. Where are they? Are they off planet, in a parallel universe, down the back of a sofa? What exactly goes there? It cannot be corporeal.

People can tend not to ask such questions. They can be seen as heretical.

A fair swathe of humanity believe in some form of “life” after death, which seems illogical from a reductionist point of view. Nobody has every proven life after death; therefore all “scientists” will tend towards atheism and life ends period. Yet there are many scientists of faith.

I personally have circumstantial dream evidence which points at reincarnation. I can say this in public because it no longer can affect my career prospects.

Modern science can be said to apply to the manifest universe. Religion suggests something non-manifest as we know it in the common view of the world. If using our current thinking we don’t know what 95% of the energy-mass of the manifest universe is, how can we be sure what is not manifest?

There is a big hole in our understanding.

In meditation I have opened the Sahasrāra chakra using visualisation and, in a stepwise manner visualized my awareness and consciousness outside my body. I did this by stretching the Sutratma and Antahkarana over a number of months. This was thinking out of the box so to speak. There was very little residual corporeal awareness “there”. According to some theories this is what happens at death. In that tradition this is a death practice.

I can in no way prove that I took my awareness out. I could have been kidding myself. I did also have a visual of looking down at me on the operating table during my colon cancer surgery. If I had to place a bet. Some kind of non-corporeal awareness can exist. I’ll find out for sure, soon enough.

People are allowed to think outside the societal box but they must not stray too far from the accepted reality box. If they think outside accepted paradigm, they risk excommunication. Another human being (priest) can by using a spell (rite) stop them from going to a place which nobody knows where it is and from which no one has come back bearing tales.

Anything truly original and avantgarde is very risky in socio-political terms.

Thinking outside the box close, just a tad outside the box, is allowed.

Trans-paradigmatic thinking is forbidden.