How We View Things – Jeans or Robes?

Although there is advice to never judge a book by its cover that is exactly what most people do. They place stock in appearance. They also pay a lot of attention to the ubiquitous omniscience of “they”. After all “they” are the font of all wisdom.

I know that it is the simplest thing for me to don my £1000 leather jacket, put on a freshly ironed grandad shirt, my black leather shoes and put my Ray Ban “Matrix” sunglasses on top of my head. I can walk into a store or building around here and will be treated differently. Instantly they will imagine I am not “from around here”. I know that I can walk with confidence up to reception at a posh hotel and be treated well. My mother used to joke that I was “to the manor born” in the sense that I was not in awe of posh settings. I have confidence. We could suggest that comes courtesy of Nchanga Consolidated Copper Mines paying my school fees at a mid-range English preparatory school in Gloucestershire.

How we treat others depends on many things. If we have a sense of entitlement and imagine ourselves grand we might treat others like plebs. From our Olympian view others are beneath us. We may disrespect others and treat them poorly feeling justified in doing so. We may deign to offer an audience to the serf or underling. We may imagine ourselves the purveyor of knowledge to the ignorant or superstitious.

There is a joke here in that I was aiming to incarnate in Bhutan, I saw the dragon of Cardiff and found my mother’s womb there. Hence I wear jeans and not monk’s robes. I know beyond any doubt that if I met people with whom I have had a passing acquaintance whilst dressed in robes, without warning, it would be for them a non sequitur, and perhaps a complete mind fuck. They would not be sure as how to react or behave. They certainly would not offer me a scarf for me to offer them in turn, blessings therewith.

If I wore robes people would instinctively behave differently towards me. A book covered in Levis’ 501s reads differently.

I’ll wager that people may struggle to understand how I view things. In the previous post I mentioned that gossiping about someone is a form of bullying. If we gossip among ourselves we do not imagine it bullying. If we see it in a soap opera on TV we clearly see bullying. Why is East Enders different from our “normal” reality?

Although some may guess that they understand how I think and where I am coming from, I’ll postulate they are mistaken. Unless they have done two decades of meditation, read and understood a thousand science journal articles, read hundreds of patents and extensively researched the occult and Buddhist literature they are unlikely to have a similar intellectual background or mind.

But people can judge me and “understand” me from what I choose to put up in a hobby-blog. You might judge this book from the internet cover you are currently perusing. You may imagine that I am something like I was a couple of decades ago. The sense of humour might be similar but that is about it.

To reiterate.

I have never appointed a spokesperson or port-parole. Anyone claiming to speak on my behalf, know my mind or what I want; is a liar and a charlatan. Such a person is also a bull shit artist and very untrustworthy. If they are claiming any form of current acquaintance that is extremely unlikely given that I live a hermit-like life.

If we make shit up about people that is evil and a form of bullying. It can be slanderous and libellous. If my reputation is damaged by made up shit it prevents me earning a living or helping sentient beings.

Being Off the Map

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.

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.

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?

The Shoe Horn of Ought & Should

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When things don’t turn out how you think {and insist}, they ought to be, how they should be, it can fuck with your head. The sense of order is perturbed and a cognitive dissonance can set in. One can ignore the “data” before your eyes and try to fit an interpretation of “reality” to how it should be. One can invent stories to try to shoe horn notions so that the {sacrosanct} narrative of life does not get upended. Reality can be avoided because it does not match the fairytale.

A while back I had an “A” level physics student for whom I was a private tutor. The young man was very fluid and he was quick on the uptake when I used circular intuitive as opposed to linear list teaching. He was bored shitless at school, but we had some fun. He was a bit of a rebel. Run forward a few years and he was upset that his sleuthing skills had been unable to find much of an internet trace for me. It was a challenge for him and we eventually reconnected. His view was that people with my background do not disappear into the aether, there should be some institutional paper trail of my career. He could not find my contact details at Bedlam or Friern Barnet Mental Hospital.

In the UK alone there were ~313,000 missing persons reports in 2022-23 for England and Wales. More males went missing than females. And 0.3% of all missing persons reports had a fatal outcome. People can and do fall off the radar, slip over the edge of the world and otherwise disappear with few traces. It is harder these days because many carry a GPS monitoring device AKA ‘phone. It is pretty unlikely that anyone filed a missing persons report for me, though they might have. In which case I have not yet been found. The charities have pages devoted to individuals who are missing with entreaties for them to get in contact. I did not find a page dedicated to me. Maybe I should keep searching.

Sometimes the sense of should & ought is more subconscious than fully present in awareness.

About twenty years ago I used to give personal development courses for science Ph.D. students. I had quit {a travesty} a tenured position. Although not overtly stated I sensed that this renunciation of something to which many of them aspired was a big subconscious black mark against me. I was a suspect. They could not take me seriously because I had shown myself to not be aligned with their view of how the world {and things} should & ought to be. It was a non sequitur of elephantine proportions in the room.

In other cases people invented scandals as a driver for my exit. Perhaps I had been caught on kiss-cam with a junior at an Oasis concert. The truth, simple and unconvoluted, was against the perceived order of how things are, how they play out and how they should be.

I have no idea what stories, narratives and other bollocks may or may not have been in circulation. People can need some ersatz to keep the sacred should & ought intact.

People make assumptions often and the quality of those assumptions is generally a lot poorer than they assume it to be.

If the wife and I died quietly one night, nobody would raise an alarm here. It would only be when the post box started to fill up that anyone would suspect. We don’t get many letters and if there was no Amazon delivery due, it could take months before postie noticed. Because we are isolated nobody would smell our demise.

Maybe that shoe horn is important for a happy life with 2.2 children and a white picket fence. I suspect that many people are kidding themselves, a lot. The effort to fabricate a demonstrable outcome aligned with how things should & ought to be according to the omniscient THEY, is perhaps aback the so-called mental health crisis. It is my thesis that should & ought are in fact toxins which we socially enforce upon ourselves and one and other.

The pressure from that shoe horn squeezes the life out of us….

Failure to Piss & Moan or Whinge & Complain…

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From the Urban Dictionary:

whinge

Verb To whinge

A British/Australian/New Zealand (possibly South African and other commonwealth) English word which describes incessant complaining. A behaviour commonly associated with poms/pommes/pohms/pommies (people from England).

If you want to get anything done in this country you’ve gotta whinge till you’re blue in the face!

Aw piss off ya blardy whingin’ pommie!

Whinging pom

An joyless English person who complains incessantly.

See Piers Morgan.

That Piers Morgan is such a whinging pom oh my god.

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This morning whilst trying to go back to sleep I was reflecting on a phenomenon of non-plussed. This is when I observe other people being non-plussed when I fail to piss & moan or whinge & complain in line with their normal level of their expectations. They seem not to know what to do when I don’t bemoan my lot or plead how terrible life is and how much miserable pain I am in {poor me, pass the feather boa.}


People are accustomed to hearing high levels of whinging and moaning and therefore expect these.

I have an idea that the medical profession don’t take me as seriously as others because I am not complaining endlessly and asking of their deity for help with my suffering. They can’t gauge things on the whinge / complain / moan scale.  I am too close to the zero-whinge state to be taken seriously.

As a rule most people like to have others hear there whinges and go, “there, there, poor you”. They seek someone to join them in their misery and seek affirmation of how terrible their personal suffering is, Bless.

If you observe, a fair percentage of so-called conversation is about complaint and woe-sharing. If people stopped whinging there would be a lot less. One is supposed to offer succour to the woe-sharer. If one does not woe-share people can be non-plussed. They do not know what to do or how to behave.

A very large amount of woe-sharing comes from the notion of how unfair the world is imagined to be. It is very victim and poor me in source. It is a bit sandpit or nursery, toddler like.

Who said that life is fair? Why do people have such an expectation?

Anyway, is seems to me that my failure to piss & moan, whinge & complain sufficiently leaves people non-plussed. It is a non sequitur which does not make sense. It can cause unease.

Imperial College Office – Explanations Dream 21-01-2025

Here is last night’s dream. I can think of no reason on this side of the channel for why I had this dream.

The dream starts in my old office in the Department of Chemistry, Imperial College, South Kensington Campus of nearly twenty years ago. Word has gotten round that I am leaving. Several of my colleagues come into the office, they are in a jocular, non-serious mood. They are not aware that I mean business and am not bluffing or negotiating.

I say to them that I do not believe that they can conceptualize the notion of me quitting without pressure or reward. They don’t get that I am doing the opposite of what most people are trying to do, namely, to secure their position and job. They think that I have gone mental, and have mental health problems, that I have somehow lost the plot.

I say that mentality divergence and novel behaviours are often misunderstood and frowned upon. I know that it is a complete non sequitur for them.

I say that acts of renunciation are Christian or monastic behaviours. They look dumfounded. I say that I may be prone to such things.

I say besides I have my book of dreams which I use to guide my life. There are hundreds of dreams. One of them says that he too has dreams and that he understands.

I say take me to human resources and I will sign the document now. We get up and move. At the door I pause and say maybe it might be better to wait until after the weekend to finalise because I have not yet told the wife.

The dream ends and I think that this was out of the blue and weird for something that old.

Security Vetting Dream 26-07-21

I had a bit of a sleepless night and had this strange dream this morning.

In the dream I am looking in on a meeting where for whatever reason I am being discussed by two smartly dressed individuals. One of these is male and the other, younger one, is female.  They are going through some kind of security vetting protocol and for whatever reason my name has cropped up. They are looking through a file and this includes some of my past addresses. They do not seem to have my current address.

There is a discussion as to whether they need to find my address and if I need to be interviewed, if someone needs to have sight of me. They are surprised that I have “disappeared” but not in a dramatic way. There is a bit of a non sequitur but not much concern.

The dream then re-iterates from the opening scene. No decision as to what to do has been made, yet.

I awake thinking that was a bit weird…

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This morning I have done some research in to UK vetting levels. In real life I am tangentially linked to the vetting process by family.

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.

Self-Diagnosed Omniscience and the Closed Mind

I have been having a dabble on LinkedIn and am more than a little surprised at the plethora of coaching, self-development schema and other things which sound too good to be true. People have to make a buck and the platform is used to tout and sell services. My logic suggests that either there are a lot of insecure and incapable people who need someone to help them and therefore there is a market or there are lot of “experts” surplus to demand. It has always seemed a bit of swizz to me. Someone develops some schema, some training, then demands payment from others to be certified by them. This kind of business model is in Aikido, NLP, Reiki etc. Someone must issue the certificates.

But exactly who was the source certificate, who passed them as competent?

I’ll postulate that many imagine their knowledge and wisdom to be more extensive and comprehensive than it actually is. This group of people includes really smart people at universities.

We might call them the self-diagnosed omniscient or the know-it-all gang. There are a lot of people who think they are “experts” who are unaware of the extent and breadth of their ignorance. But because they deem themselves clever and smart they are closed minded and negating of anything outside the limited church of their knowledge. They profess from their soap boxes in real life and on-line.

There is a related phenomenon, “the not invented here syndrome”. This is when group mind develops a norm, an explanation, a brand or a product. Anything which is not sourced from within that set or peer group is suspect. The brand must be evangelised and cannot tolerate any new ideas which might threaten market share. Ideas from outside of group mind are repelled with boiling oil from the parapets or Winchester rifle rapid fire from within the circled wagons. Nothing foreign and “Apache” can be tolerated and allowed to live. “They” and “we” do not like nor trust “them”.

On an off for over a decade I have had dreams in which I am not believed or listened to. There is not much I can do about that, nor do I feel hard done by. I know enough about human nature to understand that I am a bit of a non sequitur in the minds of many. I don’t make sense in the world of should and ought. For too many the step to “as it actually is” can be tricky.

We have the robes or Levis joke. I say that because of my background and my penchant for black Levis 501 I am not believed. If, however, I wore Buddhist monk’s robes the incredulity would mostly be washed away in a flash of saffron or magenta. It is that simple, people do judge a book by its cover even when they are self-diagnosed omniscient.

Which suggests that said diagnosis is at best premature.

Hmnn…

Incredulity Rumours Not Believed nor Listened to in Dreams since 2008

In my dreams a common theme cropping up in five of my typed up dreams is that people cannot believe what has happened to me, nor accept it as real. It is for them a massive non sequitur that I should find myself where I actually am doing what I actually do. They cannot believe that I am interested in the things that I am and that I metaphorically fell off the edge of their world.

They are incredulous to the point of denial.

In three other of these dreams, rumours {and implied gossip} are being circulated by people once close to me. These rumours are believed even though they are wildly inaccurate bordering on slander or defamation.

I am warned in five other dreams that no matter what I say or do people simply will not believe what it is I am saying and doing. The notion is that to try to get people to believe is to smack my head against a brick wall.

People are more willing to believe rumour than me.

Further in three other dreams I offer advice or knowledge and in no way am I or will I be listened to. The message is that it is tending towards {utter} futility to even try.

The subsequent post {“previous” according to wordpress} in the blog roll is an example of this disbelief theme.