Tag: whacko

Man of Knowledge – Science?

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

I’ll suggest that I am too whacko for mainstream scientists and not whacko enough and therefore science-phobic for what might be called new agers. As a consequence I inhabit a no man’s land regarded with suspicion from behind the machine guns of each set of trenches.

From my perspective I have met a few people who have harped on that they are men of knowledge yet they know very little about modern science. Seems to me they have a whopping great gap in that knowledge. Call me nit picking but this seems big to me.

I am a “nasty” spoilsport scientist on one hand and a unicorn jockey flaky tree hugger on the other. I have looked into the ”occult” and things like Buddhist philosophy further than most. Those who are experts in these areas do not know modern science to the extent I do. Yet they may imagine they know more thoroughly than I, because I am tainted by science and perhaps not “pure”.

Once people even paid me to teach “science”.

This morning I had an extensive and  highly technical dream concerning the excited electronic states of small single ringed substituted aromatic heterocycles. It looked at the charge distribution among various atoms and how that changed upon optical excitation and what that did for the pKa of various protons. I was discussing this with someone as a means for a targeted and localised change in pH in vivo. There was a time when I probably knew way more than was healthy about such things. One can extrapolate from single to double ringed heterocycles to an extent. If you know why this is interesting, you know..

Quite why I had this dream I do not know. We watched a film “The Exorcism”, Master Chef Australia and Celebrity MasterChef UK  last night. Neither of these would point at configuration interaction in electronic excited states. Nor would it explain Naropa or seraphim.

It is funny that “new agers” and luddites like Trump are suspicious of science and scientists and equally weird that science can glance down the nose at the uninitiated. I have had my vaccinations and can also do Vajrayana chanting. I can solve a two dimensional particle in a box Schrödinger equation {still} and know how to light incense sticks and smudge with smouldering sage, I can do shamanic drumming.

It is all about Garry Glitter really.  People want to know whose gang you are in…what your true colours are…

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Hopefully in a few weeks’ time I will feel a little less crippled.

Information and Context

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

Because people are lazy, they tend to treat information in a monopolar way, without actually acknowledging that. We have monopolar information. They are very confirmation bias oriented. The red caps might hear gospel from the don, the green caps from The Guardian and the anti-brown-Islam-o-phobes might want to hear Uncle Nigel pontificate. People perceive according to how they want to perceive, they believe what they want to hear. Perception is monopolar and not balanced or heteropolar. Bias is pandemic.

Taking a monopolar information source out of a wider context is rarely wise. Newspapers are sold to their biased audience and articles are targeted at that bias. Tell me what I want to hear and I will buy your newspaper, or clickety-click it on line so that you can get advertisement revenue.

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I could say that I have a fair general knowledge. Out of context that is a lie. I would be shit at normal pub quiz general knowledge, because a) I don’t like soccer, b) I have no idea about current soap operas and c) I know nothing about package holiday destinations nor who is hot on social media. I would be a middling team member on a University Challenge quiz team.

I can say with a fair degree of confidence that I understand how academic science is enacted and reported. I may be rusty on nuance, but I have a good gist. I can read a Nature article and know to what extent I understand and if there are gaps in understanding which I might need to follow up on. If I watch a video on YouTube, I know that it is almost always surface and that people have a click generating agenda. Pass the Saxa salt, please.

I have read widely in the esoteric – occult – new age bookshelves of the library, the one with actual books in not on-line. I have intellectual access to that context something your common or garden scientist will not have. Many so-called scientists are disproportionately fearful of being labelled “whacko”. The gossip around “cold-fusion” is exemplar. Yet I have discussed over a cigarette on the steps of the Chemistry Department at Imperial College with a practising homeopath and staff member. We talked and speculated on quantum effects in water memory. Homeopathy is derided by many a sceptic yet demonstrably erudite scientist.

People are scared of the occult. It actually means “difficult to see” as in “an occult fracture of the T3 vertebra”. It does not mean that I am going to bite the head off a bat, spit blood to anoint the bone of goat and point that at you whilst chanting incantations for your demise.

People can and do get the wrong end of the stick.

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It is possibly not illegal to file a patent application on “Quantum Telepathy” using the name Whacko McNutjob at the Intellectual Property Office in Newport, less eye catching perhaps at the European Patent Office unless the examiner was a Brit. One could ascertain if there was prejudice against Nut-jobs. We could define a new term, nutjobphobic.

I am confident that I can write an application of sufficient plausibility. I have three granted patents already.

People can over and misinterpret just about anything which they read on the internet. Rarely do they check understanding nor can they be arsed to read around or do further research. The gospel according to SEO optimized Google search returns is a highly skewed and paid for version. People forget and rely.

The informational fodder is not always the best fully nutritional meal for an avid clicker.

Losing Your Mind – Zen

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

Some people might think that I am/was a complete nut job for getting out of a contract which would have paid 8000 euros a month tax free, over a decade ago. I must have been out of my mind. Others might think me whacko for a number of my beliefs and that I have lost my mind. Why would a trained scientist not strive for recognition and research funding. Why renounce his job at a world “top ten” university? He must be barking mad and batshit crazy to boot.

I have lost my mind but not in the way people might think.

In general, my mind / head is a very quiet place. There is no continuous chatter of internal dialog. I am not busy with should and ought, nor is comparison mind resident there. My mental default is silence. I can observe, I can experience and absorb. I can hear and see, but there is no mind making endless qualitative thinking. If I want to think I have to actively engage my mind. It does not run off like a horse when the stable door is opened.

I could say that my “mind” differs from most. I know that it has changed markedly over the last two decades. But there is no way that I can explain or illustrate in a meaningful way what my “mind” is like to anyone suffering from internal dialogue or very attached to the common socio-political assimilation of world and society. I once experienced that world first hand as an active participant. I no longer do/am.

I still look much the way I used to but the animating contents of the meaty body are now changed. People might struggle to understand that I am not as I was and interpret me in terms of an old look up table of behaviour and manner. I’ll speculate that many would not get it or me. My assimilation of world is different, I cannot prove this to you or anyone really. It would take sharing a considerable amount of time and circumstance to appreciate and I would have to extrovert my thoughts and thinking in order for people to see just how different. I can still interpret events from a “normal” perspective but I do not share the emotions many are beholden to. I can appear to fit in and comply with the common world views.

In the Zen literature there is a lot of mention of Buddha nature. If I understand Zen at all it is to live fully in the present and at the point before mind knowing that as observer you are also participant and not separate from the arising phenomena. Zen does not like definitions because that is a feature of comparison mind and a definition by definition invites comparison to said definition which is “mind”. People stress over definition and argue the toss. Buddha nature is offered as a way of being, a nebulous ideal which exists when mind is fully quiescent. Most of the Zen koans are devised to show just how much mind trips one up and self-entangles. They point at not using mind the way which it is customary so to do.

In order to be “Zen”, one has to lose one’s mind and yet remain sane.

However, what is considered sane in the common socio-political assimilation of world, is all “mind” and therefore insane. If people like their possessions and acquisitional materialism, to detach from these would be considered lunacy by many. A wide empty path is the road of the lunatic who disavows possession, grabbing and the socio-political accumulation of kudos and social power.

Kudos is illusion in Zen and Buddhism as a whole. Yet many seek it with a passion.

Although people use Zen as an adjective for calm, they are not interested in attaining it because it requires that they forego the common world view. As we all know you cannot have your cake and eat it.

How is my logic?

Do we live in a sane world?

Is there an increasing problem with mental health as measured to the normative socio-political construct?

I have lost my “mind” does that make more or less sane than you?

Are you saner than I?

Discuss….

Can Nocturnal Dreams Change Lives?

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

In the limit if you have a lucid (aware) nocturnal dream and you remember it on waking your life has already changed. You can’t un-have the dream, you may not place much stock or import to the dream but your life has changed a tad. You have had an experience. Some dreams can be dramatically life altering. A persistent nightmare may induce a fear of sleep and cause disturbed sleep patterns.

Religious texts often refer to dreams and world events can pivot because of these dreams. The search for a Tibetan tulku can be aided by dreams. The pharaoh stored grain. We have the ghost of Christmas past.

I have some misgivings concerning some of the things pertaining to dreams and dreaming which I am coming across of late. I guess there is an overlay, in which I am too whacko for mainstream physical sciences and too hardcore meany scientist on the other hand.

I can say truthfully that I have made major life decisions based upon my interpretation of my passive lucid nocturnal dreams. These include getting out of an employment contract for a ~8000 euro a month tax free job. This suggests that I am not messing around. I make serious decisions with real world consequences. There are at least half a dozen instances of significant “real” world impact.

I have had a disquieting dream this morning which perhaps speaks of something in process or yet to come. It concerns some people I know. It may be nothing or it may be heralding, we may get circumstantial evidence post hoc. I have previously been able to correlate a dream of someone dying in a timely fashion with their reported death on the other side of the planet. You can’t prove prediction but you can note a temporal correlation. It could be coincidence I tend to err away from that explanation.

The basic intent behind my dreaming practice is to listen to my dreamer or Soul and to actively, in physical plane mundane day-to-day life, to evolve a fate. This seems different from what I have been reading about of late. Some people seek to play out fantasies in dreaming, which seems to be straying away from any notion of liberation. For me although it may sound weird, dreaming helps me to be real. It does broaden my perceptual horizon but on occasion it provokes a seemingly harsh choice. Which only makes sense subsequently.

In my case my response to my nocturnal dreams has changed my life trajectory. So, in at least one instance, the answer is yes.