“Science is magic that actually works.” The Reddit midwit likes to say. “Any sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic.” Is another one he regularly ejaculates, before he goes back to watching Doctor Who episodes or reading the Hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy.
But as Ioan Culianu and others have noted, magic, psychotherapy, marketing, religion and science all operate in an overlapping area, that of bringing about changes in the world, by influencing human beings at a subconscious level.
And the trick of science, is that it is a branch of magic, that elevated its art by denying this element. It points at atoms, molecules, hormones, DNA, p values and odds ratios and claims that it has given us a glimpse at an objectively existing reality. But one might say they practice a sufficiently advanced art of changing human consciousness: “This new therapy that we have developed to treat your anxiety disorder is so potent, it even survives a meta-analysis! Every scientist in the world has no choice but to agree to our conclusion!” “Wow, thank you doctor for this truly advanced work of magic, pardon me, science! I can already feel myself getting better!”
I’m pondering this, because at some level I can’t help but feel as if I have spent the past four years of my life on this blog, like an apprentice mage, deflecting some kind of black magic by a demonic army that invaded our realm overnight. Here we are, the world is shut down and we are locked in our homes, over a virus you need to test yourself for to know that you have it. And it can even damage your brain we are told, the symptom of which is that you feel more anxious!
Doesn’t this remind you, of a medium or astrologer who is engaged in cold reading? “Do you feel tired a lot? Depressed? Anxious? Why, it is the fault of Saturn this new virus!” Or consider the Biden administration, wishing its unvaccinated citizens a “winter of severe disease and death for the unvaccinated – for themselves, their families and the hospitals they’ll soon overwhelm”. Doesn’t this remind you of a gypsy woman whispering “a cancer” under her breath, when you do not give her your spare change?
Here we have armies of wizards, casting spells in each other’s direction: “KAWASAKI SYNDROME!” The blue mage shouts. “MYOCARDITIS!” The red mage yells back. On and on its goes, a cacophony of latin terms and biological gobblydygook, abbreviations comprehensible only to the wizards themselves.
And where do they fight this fight? Not in the streets, at least I hope not. No, they fight it out through black mirrors, powered by black mirrors on their roofs, or powered by magical black rocks beneath the Earth. Magicians here exchange malevolent streams of energy. One wonders whether there is any room at all for white magic, in this domain.
The níðstang we are taught, was part of a Norse magic ritual, to place a curse on an enemy. It consisted of putting a horse’s head on a wooden pole. But how different is it truly, from the Italian Hollywood version, of putting a horse’s head in your enemy’s bed? It is all just not psychological terrorism?
But I feel as a wizard, that my job here is done. I have shown you what I have to show you. I’ve shown you the laws of nature and of ethics that were violated. And within the building blocks of life, I’ve shown you were to look and what to look for, should you yearn to gaze into the abyss. I have gazed enough.
These are evil men who invaded our realm, I do not dispute this. Maybe you have forgotten why Facebook was renamed Meta. Maybe you have forgotten what was meant with the “New Normal”. Maybe you have forgotten the suicides, of all those people whose calling in life it is to organize parties and festivals and bring people together. I have not. I would love to see them vanquished.
But now that I have shown everything I have to show, I’m also kind of done with it. In terra incognita, anything could be going on. But as we look at molecules, we build mazes within which reality must operate, constraints that it must obey, if it plans on obeying our expectations at least.
There are billions of ants throughout this world, simple creatures, with limited awareness of their environment that have lived for generations. For all practical purposes, you can say that an ant exists in multiple places at once. Perhaps the ant with an injured left hindpaw carrying a tiny speck of mildew is the same ant as the one doing this 50,000 years ago fifteen kilometers to the North, because for all practical purposes their knowledge about their external environment was identical, so there was no genuine difference between them from their own perspective.
Pretty cool huh? Now try this for a primate typing away on a keyboard, in a galaxy with 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars. How consistent is your reality really? Do you ever just wake up and think to yourself: “Wait, were the Baltic states always as big as Germany? Foxes are more closely related to dogs than to cats?” Can you really trust your memories?
If you consider this possibility, then maybe the solution to a better reality is to know less. Give your soul more options to choose the best of all possible worlds, by reducing the number of criteria it has to meet. Maybe, gazing into the black mirror you are gazing into now, fills your mind with anchors to which reality must conform.
The Berbers in Morocco used to call a TV a “box with miracles”, at least according to an Arab boy from Morocco with a superiority complex I went to high school with. But I would argue the Berbers were not wrong. They understood it better than us Westoids, who saw this box as the fruit of progress.
Now you say “ha, I get it, a box that shows you miracles”! Well, that is one way of looking at it. But try this: A box within which miracles are locked away from you. Your friend told you he saw Sasquatch in the forest? Well according to Wikipedia that is not possible, because there would be more evidence of the existence of these apes by now than just some footprints. The miracle your friend reported to you now goes out of the real world and into the box with miracles, together with all the other miracles.
The world around you I take it, does not look very magical either. Consider my own bleak area of the Netherlands. A church here looks like this:
Not very miraculous, now is it? This is not where I would expect demons to be driven from a man’s body into a group of pigs. So I do not look around me too much when I ride my bicycle. I only know how to find miracles inside the box with miracles, so I bring my little box with miracles with me, blasting miraculous sounds into my eardrums, to compensate for the emptiness of the disenchanted world I live in.
But who disenchanted this world? Do I go to the box with miracles because the world is disenchanted, or is the world disenchanted because of the box with miracles sucking them up like a vacuum cleaner?
How do you reenchant the world?
Well, I think this box of miracles is not going to help us much. It wants to be the source of all miracles in the world. It generates paintings in seconds now, soon it will generate music and video too, eventually entire PS1 style horror video games may just appear on the fly.
But plants can be magical, as can mushrooms. Flowers become eyes, trees show you their faces, angels start talking to you when you close your eyes. It’s frightening. What if you lose your mind? You put on music from the miracle box to calm yourself down. But the black miracle box is greedy. IT wants to be your source of joy and wonder. You see a bunny in the grass? I, the miracle box, can show you a thousand bunnies, RIGHT NOW!
So turn it off. Be alone with the plants. Be alone with your own thoughts, yes, even your fears.
Whatever you feed grows, so put down the black mirror and go out there my wizards. Re-enchant the world.
Quote: “Re-enchant the world.”
I delivered a manual for this.
Science is shizophrene, like we humans.
Best example is the wave-particle dualism of light. There are experiments which clearly showing light is a particle, called photon. And there are experiments which clearly showing light is a wave.
Two different realities. Incompatible.
There’s that ‘binary dynamo’ again, or perhaps I should call it the ‘schizophrenic substrate’ that keeps everything spinning.
There is only one reality, but how reality is perceived is filtered throughout whatever tool you use. Human biology, the brain, and your eyes are just another tool. Anything you can perceive with your senses is true, but what that really means is overstated allot. What you see with your eyes is just what reality looks like through that lens, same as how you can you can perceive reality as photons or waves through different lenses.
If you didn’t have any tools to perceive reality, no lens, you would still be conscious, but you would have no thoughts, and no ability to see (This is likely the state men go through when they die before they reincarnate). Gods and spirits must have their own lens to perceive, even though they are likely immaterial beings (Except when they incarnate into the world, like Christ) Perhaps understanding how to gain an immaterial lens is the first step on the path to truly understanding the Gods? Something to think on.
Adding to my point, what this really means is that their is no “truer” reality. Light wave universe is no different from what you see with your eyes; it’s just another lens that creates a different perception of the same reality you live in. Just because the lens to see light waves is soientific doesn’t make that lens more valuable than the lens you were gifted with through evolution. There is not a hidden transcendental realm where all truth is hidden away; you’re already living in the transcendental realm, and the material world is how you interact with it.
How do drugs work? They change your brain chemistry, thereby changing your brain, modifying the lens you use to perceive the world. Is a drug trip a truer reality than the one you normally live in? No, it’s not any more true or false. It’s just a different perception of the same world.
Though of-course, drugs can also induce delirium and paranoia. Being paranoid might be just a different sense perception, but it’s an objectively false perception, it’s why we call it “delusional” (Plenty of drug-free people are delusional, for example, people who believe in human equality, or the people that believe animals and babies can’t feel pain.) That nice old lady isn’t really planning to murder and eat you. No, the chatbot isn’t really a person, you’re just delusional.
But can clowns spirits really speak to you? Well, yes, if you take salvia you can see and hear them, you’re not delusional, it’s what you objectively perceive. What the clowns actually mean however is another question. All we can know about them is that they are immaterial beings. Are they merely constructs of your mind? Are they their own conscious beings that live in their own little world that you intrude on? Who knows?
Delusion comes from ascribing meaning to things that have none. You need to logically think things through, don’t try to see meaning in every little thing. The Gods don’t care to influence our lives generally. You can try to see meaning in everything, but you’re just deluding yourself, if the Gods want to speak to you, they will make it clear in a way that cannot be denied.
Quote Sensitive: “There is not a hidden transcendental realm where all truth is hidden away …”
But this is exactly what I persume: There is a hidden transcendental realm where all (absolute) truth is hidden. It’s the realm of the gods, and this realm is also the root world for our dual worlds, the Random World, and the Destiantion World.
For a while I was in this world (or at least it felt like). It’s a strange world where all things are dead and alive at the same time. You could pick up a stone there and make hours long philsophic conversations with that stone, until you lay it back on the ground and go on.
I’ve seen some interesting stuff about brains gaining in popularity recently. Another ‘schitzo universe’ thing, but moving on from that, in broad strokes:
The left and right brain bring different forms of attention to bear on what they look at.
The left is narrow in focus, like a laser beam, and we use this for locking things down and grabbing them – targeting and acquiring food etc. This half of the brain is the rational half, it sees living things as machines, etc.
Conversely, the right half of the brain is very wide in focus. we use this to see connections between things, intuition, it sees things as interconnected and alive etc. This half of the brain keeps an eye on the big picture while we go about our business targeting and acquiring food to make sure we don’t get eaten in turn by some predator. This is the side of the brain that gives our lives meaning.
How does this fit with the world around us? Well, in a nutshell, we’ve built a meaningless and joyless modern world that favours the left-hand side of our brains while simultaneously denying ourselves the insights and warnings from the right brain, as well as any deeper meaning.
Take a look around, and you have to admit, the theory does seem to match what’s going on.
Your church example is a good one: a church that is built with clinical modern efficiency, techniques, etc. somehow manages to strip all of the mystery, magic, meaning and joy out of being a church.
But it’s not just that, building a whole world that essentially excludes the right side of the brain causes, say, scientists to limit themselves to a narrow scope, they focus on a discrete technical challenge, unable to see or comment on the broader implications of what they’re doing.
No room for ‘wooly headed’ right brain thoughts in the ‘left brain’ dominated world.
We’ll just ignore the fact that all animals have brains with two hemispheres, it can’t be that important right? Well, why go to the trouble of nurturing, feeding, and protecting that extra lump of ‘meatloaf’ in your brain box if it serves no survival purpose?
No, I’m afraid we all need to contain both ‘contradictions’ within the one skull to survive, and if we deny the knowledge and advantages both sides give us, then we die.
But that’s where modernity is at, and it’s perhaps a not just a big part of why this whole project is not just doomed, but also why it’s not very pleasant or fun either.
A call to think more ‘magically’ is both timely and necessary.
The first death is the spiritual death. . .
> Well, why go to the trouble of nurturing, feeding, and protecting that extra lump of ‘meatloaf’ in your brain box if it serves no survival purpose?
This is a very left-brained view of the situation, by your own framework.
Yeah you’re all missing a lot of the big picture. Modern humanity is largely disconnected from their ability to see the world intuitively.
And I mean it, when I say ALL of you. Excepting perhaps one in one billion people.
“Yeah you’re all missing a lot of the big picture. Modern humanity is largely disconnected from their ability to see the world intuitively.”
Well, yes, that was kind of my point.
And yeah, like all other normal people (and basically the rest of the animal kingdom), I do have a left brain and a right brain and I use both.
I’m not claiming that I use one to the exclusion of the other, or that one side is not valuable and necessary, or that one side can’t help provide useful knowledge and should be ignored, etc.
I’m saying the opposite.
I Agree. But as technician I must say that a pure dualistic brain can’t work, it would constantly flip flop. There is an anchor needed to stabilize this system, an anchor between, which means there must be a third personality between, our true self.
But we can’t see this true self, because it’s mostly dominated from the right or left side. Only in the rare cases, when both sides are silent, we can sense our true self.
Keep also in mind there are four hemispheres, two of the little brain we share with the animals, and two of the cerebrum, the outer brain only we humans have.
Therefore I think it’s a system of five.
Yeah, I’m sure it’s not as simple as all that, but the general gist I’m trying to convey is that there are two hemispheres. It gets technical fast, as they are not quite bilaterally symmetrical (the right is bigger), they are linked by the corpus callosum, there is the evolutionarily old brain, and the neocortex, etc.
Broadly speaking though, I maintain that the left hemisphere is for narrow focus, simple specifics, and the right is for broader vision, it’s what we use to work out how we approach the world, meaning etc.
The right side is bigger, it gives us our sense of religion and senses that things are alive, it senses connections, sees gradations. The left is the side we use for manipulating lifeless things, and it sees things as lifeless, robotic, making lists, it sees things in black and white.
So, broadly speaking, we can each see (at least) two versions of the world, depending on the type of attention that we pay to it. Maybe there are more, like you seem to be suggesting.
But I think a strong argument can be made that our civ has a very strong bias towards left brain thinking. There’s not a lot of room, for example, for the right brain in most occupations – people have specific roles, they need to perform specific tasks, that need to happen at certain times, it’s dogmatic, robotic, mechanistic, rationalist, etc.
On the other side, there’s music, religion, love, relationships – etc. Those are the kinds of things that really matter to being a human and give us all meaning, but I’ve never been paid for doing any of them in my whole life! Ha, ha.
Anyway, I’ll leave it to the psychiatrist to try to explain his theory himself – it’s about 10 mins: https://www.ted.com/talks/iain_mcgilchrist_the_divided_brain
If you have more time, this was a good interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4IeuIg9nGY&t=480s
I don’t know how this right/left thing squares with the subconscious etc. but I think it’s interesting, and it seems to fit what’s going on. Maybe I’ll have to read the book.
That said, I don’t actually think changing the way we look at things will save civ at this stage (nothing can save civ, and even if it could be saved, I’m pretty fucking far from convinced that it’s good idea to do that), but it might help explain how we got here – which it seems could be at least partly, maybe more than just partly, due to benching the wiser, larger half of our brains.
Many, many years ago, probably not long after I finished college, my sense of smell became much worse, for no reason that I know of. I could still smell things with some effort, but there were smells that were just gone. The main lost smell that mattered to me was the smell of fresh earth after rain. I could remember the smell vividly, but I could no longer experience it. This really depressed me whenever I thought about it, so I tried not to think about it. I was upset both by the loss itself and by the knowledge that it was a signal of mental decay. However, it didn’t seem to lead to any intellectual repercussions.
About six months ago my sense of smell got much better again. I even could smell piles of leaves when I stepped in them. That lasted until recently; now things are worse again.
The first Quaker, George Fox, described the world as experienced through Christ as having a “different smell”; all of creation had a different smell for him. This is so alien to Americans that a person I know who has truly read Fox got it wrong and remembered the passage as referring to a different light. But I think that sense is a great help in our spiritual experiences. I wonder about your sense of smell, and if that is part of the lack of enchantment. I wonder what can be done for the people who are now losing their sense of smell from covid. From my experience it can come back again, so there is some hope. A major reason I am trying to protect my dogs from covid (via claritin now) is to protect their sense of smell.
But for every loss you gain something, like someone who became blind got an increased ability to hear. You just have to find the gain.
Yes, that seems right. Each time something bad has happened to me I have found that something good has come of it; usually a gain in capacity for empathy that I had lacked. It’s not that I’m hard hearted by nature, it is just that actually pain and loss and the like really can make one understand others better. It hadn’t occurred to me to think of the smell loss in those terms but I will consider that.
> How do you reenchant the world?
You beg the Gods to do it together with you
The Gods are real, I have seen them. Not even used drugs
The Allfather, the dark, enormous power
Our Fair Lady the Triune Goddess, the silver light
Baldur/Christ, the golden light
Three trinities, each with an ascending, a central, and a descending/decaying hypostasis. Each hypostasis, and its avatars, were seen several time along history
That’s why Theodora, the wife of Justinian, would be instantaneously recognizable by the East Asians as the Fox Demon. And why a formidable Saturnic offensive followed. Plague of Justinian, thirty years of war with the Persians, then Islam.
Trace where the current shift of the world towards the power of the feminine originated, and you will get to someone who took a vacation in Rome. A. H., the occult Yin avatar, dancing on the streets of Netherlands while A. H. the Yang Avatar was burning up the world. Breathtaking, splendid power.
The Gods are here with us, and this abomination of desolation we find ourselves in is just a test.
All hail the Gods. Watch the anime movie Hells. We will graduate together from this school. The fire burns like a bitch, but we emerge stronger in the end.
Give offerings to the Gods — your sweat and breath as you go up a mountain. Your blood when you donate on significant dates.
Search for the places of power, at times of power. Up, up, on the banks of the pure silver lake, with the June flowers around it, and the jagged white mountain peaks. Watch Spirited Away and find more Christ in Chihiro than in a truck full of theology books. Read the Quran in Abdel Haleem’s translation and be left breathless. The Gods are here with us. Reach towards them. They will even teach you how to do fairytale-class magick, light and easy like a housecat jumping on a chair, and with shocking results visible within weeks. But reach towards the Gods. There is no light and dark magick. There is only magick done with the Gods, or against their will/permission.
I just love all the interesting religions I come across here.
I can’t say I’ve seen any Gods myself.
My loss by the sounds of things.
How many are we up to now?
We have a Gnostic, a Pagan, I think the left/right brain psychiatrist, McGilchrist, whose ideas I mentioned, is into Panentheism. . .
The point is to ascend to godhood yourself, not to become a slave to the whims of another. This isn’t a school, it’s a fucking cosmic factory farm and we’re the meat. The reincarnation system is a trap as well. These things you’re giving ‘offerings’ to, have a parasitic relationship to you, as you already have everything within yourself, and if they were true gods, so would they.
The Gods are the ones who choose how you reincarnate. For some of us, they also our ancestors (Sometimes Gods incarnate into the population and breed, for example, Wotan has bred with the Germanic peoples.” The Gods compete with each-other same as how humans compete with each-other, and we’re useful tools in their struggles. Service to the Gods is how you ascend to join them, only a God can show a mortal how to turn into a God. You don’t want to be meat anymore? Well, the farmers will offer you an out if you’re useful enough to them.
Actually, we’re gods by ‘birthright’ – it’s our true form. We just happen to presently be housed in flesh golems, and made into a slave race. Most people have this proclivity to see themselves and others as ‘useful tools’, simply because they have been conditioned from birth into blind obedience. By your own admission, you seem to understand we are being farmed here. Maybe you should consider looking for the exit. Protip: your slavers won’t give that information to you, you have to find it within yourself.
What is a God? It’s an immaterial being of immense power. Many of us descend from Gods, since in a sense we used to be Gods since we are material reincarnations of them. But we are not Gods, and there is no such thing as an objective “right” A right is a law a people decides collectively is proper to implement in the pursuit of their subjective idea of virtue. What people says it’s your right to be powerful? None, because that’s retarded. Power can only be given, taken, and built, no “right” will actually give it to you.
There is no such thing as some transcendental “true form” There’s only the reality you live in. What’s true is what you are. You ended up as a material slave for greater beings, so that’s what you are. You’re arrogant, you’re the cow that stomps its hooves and moos and thinks that’s what will make the farmer see you as an equal. The Gods care not for your “rights” they only care if you become more like them and serve their interests.
Wotan the All-Father is God, he is my God. Wotan is an amoral strategist, he’s playing a real time strategy game with the lives of his people, the Germanics and the Celt who’ve they’ve conquered and inter-bred with. Wotan rewards those that secure of the interests of his people, allowing them to reincarnate into their descendants (Who if virtuous, will be genetically fitter, selective breeding is virtuous.) So they may continue to serve him in the grand game.
Those who serve Wotan the best get the most power, as he is like a General that rewards position by merit. Perhaps you can serve Wotan and never become a God, well, that is all your will can handle. That’s fine, you’re not ready to be a God if that’s the case.
If you don’t like the grand game, you should flee to the east and become a Hindu. The Hindu Gods only care about removing suffering from the world, though be warned, if you allow them influence on how you reincarnate, you better not eat meat. I’m vegan anyway, but Wotan doesn’t care what you eat as-long as you serve the interests of his people. The Hindu Gods are universalists, and see you as no different from a fly. They love everything equally, so you better too.
I can’t cure your retardation for you; that’s on you to figure out. If you want to remain a slave, you can do that on your own time. I’m vegan too but not because of some shitty religion, it’s because I have a type of compassion that your god lacks, because it’s not a god, it’s a psychopathic pretender.
Alright, well, when you finally ascend and become a God yourself, make sure to give me a sign. I’m waiting. You clearly know the path…
To have any chance at ascending to any extent, one needs to develop and grow their soul. For this, one needs to go through hardships and temptations. More than one lifetime is needed. You need to forget facts, just keep the quality of the soul, to properly run a temptation trial after a hardship one for example. Not really possible to do this without the Gods.
I’ve been through more than you assume. I say what I say for a reason.
this sounds like a swan song. please don’t stop posting, you’ve really been expanding my world view.
i came for the covid fear-mongering, i stayed for the gnome-pilling!
Earth is just a breeding farm. Humans are a delicacy in many places across the galaxy. The mRNA was just to add the final touches of flavor, before the UFOs arrive for the cull and off planet processing, irradiation preservation and shrink wrapping. This is why all the interest in Antarctica. Underneath all that ice is the evidence of what remains from the last human harvest – the civilization that existed 80,000 years before. The primary objective of the mRNA was to make the brains more tasty. Human canned brains is what they feed to their little alien toddlers. They love human brains, but without the prion flavoring the alien children are not that excited as they are with the added prions. The real delicacy is human penises, especially the black ones. It is said to give virility. Little Asian penises are however feminine. Only the alien women eat those.
I saw this back in 1979!
“In the last quarter of the 20th century, the whole world seemed to sicken. Civilised institutions, whether old or new, fell … as if some primal disorder was reasserting itself. And men asked themselves, “Why should this be?””
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Cb2APdh3T8&t=3s
“It has been said that Man first believed in the powers of magic. When that failed he tried religion. When that failed he tried science. What’s next?”
“Man’s attraction to ritual magic and science is the belief that he can discover Truth and manipulate it according to his will. One of these is a lie.”
“Religion opposes both magic and science. Religion holds that only God knows the truth and that man must plead with God to spare him from it.”
https://ia801206.us.archive.org/11/items/HigeKermoianJr.learningAboutHisWorld.pdf/%28.pdf%29/Hyatt%20-%20To%20Lie%20Is%20Human.pdf
“Religion opposes both magic and science. Religion holds that only God knows the truth and that man must plead with God to spare him from it.”
I like it.
Sounds like an eminently sensible way to avoid going insane:
“This is all much bigger than me and impossible to comprehend, let alone deal with, so I’m going to lay it on you to deal with man, like you ask me to in your book.”
Cool music video relating to this discussion.
https://youtu.be/IGqeyQhBPMI
That is very cool – reminds me of the soundtrack to a John Carpenter movie or something
The creature and society at the end reminds me of how I imagined Neuron if you saw the story I posted in General Discussion.
Okay, I’ll have to read it.
No pressure, if you’re interested I started writing a longer story set into the future of Neuron’s world. Wrote the first chapter, will post it if you want to read it. It’s kind of schizo, as the story I posted in General Discussion is, so it that’s not to your taste that’s alright.
I read it, and I think you have your finger on the zeitgeist 🙂
Cool, I’m glad you seem to find it somewhat interesting at-least! If you want, here’s another story set in the same universe but a bit into the future. I don’t know If I’ll make a second chapter.
https://pastebin.com/Kv4a3uPL
“- Prof. Howard Birack: The outside world doesn’t want to hear this kind of bullshit. Just keep it locked away. You’ve already managed that for two thousand years.
– Priest: No prison can hold him now.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4gOiC_PXdg
Oh this is cool. You can tell it’s from the 80s, but I like it.
I’m loving on this band you’ve introduced me to – very cool.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-O3cZ3M4hAo
These songs are some of my favorites.
https://youtu.be/uSQt4ckq-dg
https://youtu.be/LGYk1Dcpl4I
Quote Tryptie: “This isn’t a school, it’s a fucking cosmic factory farm and we’re the meat.”
You have no trust into the gods. It’s a god factory, not a meat factory.
If the gods would give us all their powers now, we would create a hell even the gods would fear.
Good point.
If you want to get in to the demonic nature of all this, this is a nice long read.
https://barsoom.substack.com/p/make-demon-slaying-great-again?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
“We are under Attack!
The signs are undeniable. Hundreds of millions of the unborn are murdered each year with caprice; the ‘Elite’ harvest them for so-called ‘medical’ purposes. The Western nations have all but surrendered their sovereignty to nameless, faceless fools and puppets. Their people spit, mock, ridicule, and jeer at their forefathers without a care in the world.
Faith in God Almighty is viewed as a delusion, while the false deity of ‘the Science’ is exalted at the DIE-ing academies throughout the West. Today, these places are nothing more than sacrificial altars where the young are deracinated from their cultures and tossed into empty lives stripped bare of values, meaning, purpose, and significance. ‘The Science,’ as a false divinity, lusts for human blood sacrifices in said manner without end. History, culture, law, and legacy are mere constructs viewed as meagre vanities pursued by the illiterate and unjust. The ‘Elite’ dismantle, destroy, edit, and erase all these with impunity.”
Oh and it looks like the chinese spray balloons are back.
I can’t say I disagree with you.
First, Christ got dethroned in the West, but the chair didn’t remain vacant for long. Something else sits at the heart of Christendom now, and it’s not pretty.
The whole place would be doomed to descend into demonic, rotten, madness at the best of times, but here we are with civ in overshoot as well. When it doesn’t rain it pours hey?
It must surely end in a gory, insane, horrific mess.
Or at least I hope it ends, and we get a chance to put it behind us for thousands of years, or forever.
It’s not so hard to imagine our descendants herding their animals through the empty, ruined suburbs – gazing in wonder at ancient, demonic, graffiti. . .
“Hurry, the goats are skittish, it’s getting dark, and I fear sleeping among these gnawed human bones.”
I think you are right Rad.
Science looks more and more like black magic as the mask gets lifted.
It’s been nothing but sorcery since at least the 70s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1ho8di4ywQ&t=4s
More seriously, it’s interesting that here we are, in a western world that’s so thoroughly disenchanted and disenchanting, that we seem likely to be faced with a choice of either going ‘all in’ with the new techno religion complete with its own new god, which the Google engineers are still working on, or picking another, more old-school one.
Wombat:
>Yeah, I’m sure it’s not as simple as all that, but the general gist I’m trying to convey is that there are two hemispheres. It gets technical fast, as they are not quite bilaterally symmetrical (the right is bigger), they are linked by the corpus callosum, there is the evolutionarily old brain, and the neocortex, etc…
————–
LIE FIVE
The Model Is The Message
The model is the message — the image is devoid of fact.
The model(s) — paradigms — men use to tolerate their existential presence tells you more about them than the content of their message.
Trust more in a man’s moods than in his thoughts.
Assertion: The better a man feels the less complex his models. The worse he feels the more complex his models. The real question — do complex models explain more of
reality than simple ones? Or is complexity a poor model for describing the issue of models? Or am I misusing the concept?
What we need to look at is elegance.
The weaker a person the more binary his models. What do I really mean by this? As a rule weaker people think primarily in discrete one dimensional binary terms. They are stuck in a fascistic state of mind. This must be expected since their defenses are primitive.
Look at what has been done to the *whole brain model.* Weak minded people say that there *is* a left brain and a right brain. This type of “mind” does not even recognize
that they are talking about a model. A stronger person says, *a model* of the brain is…
A stronger and more knowledgeable person says, “a model of the brain based on Herrmann’s work consists of 4 factors and not 2. The whole brain model has 4 primary
components. They are left cortex, right cortex, left limbic system, and right limbic system.” Which person is stronger? Which person is in a better mood? Do my assertions concerning moods, weakness and model complexity apply? If they do apply how do they apply? Or is my model simply based on poor observations and definitions?
Which model of the brain will sell more books and towhom? This might help us understand my model better. Iwill predict that the two brain model will sell more booksand the people who buy and believe it will be more rightbrain and less left brain. A person high in mathematical ability and analytical reasoning would find the book a joke. A whole brain person might be interested in the book, buy it, but not believe it.
What sells is the model — not the product. The facts are that most of us live in a one dimensional, model discrete (yes/no) universe.
Some people can even tolerate *maybe.* How many people can tolerate a multi-factor interacting model? Very few. It would require that they specify conditions of when, who, where, and how. This is too much for most people. Their tolerance for existential presence is low.
Politicians and advertisers rely on the fact that most people only respond from a yes/no matrix. As people become more complex they add maybe. As they become more complex they add more and more factors. *Sooner or later they become organic and they look simple again. Complexity becomes a simple art form.*
BECOME WHO YOU ARE
THERE ARE NO GUARANTEES
https://ia601206.us.archive.org/11/items/HigeKermoianJr.learningAboutHisWorld.pdf/%28.pdf%29/Hyatt%20-%20To%20Lie%20Is%20Human.pdf
This seems complicated, and might take me some digesting (you seem to have given me a whole book about this here :)) but my first thought is, yeah, all we can ever do is model reality – only reality gets to be reality.
And so, yes, I accept that I have presented, in broad strokes, a MODEL of a ‘divided’ left/right brain and how this relates to us having two broadly different forms/styles/types of attention (I have no idea if there are more, perhaps there are, I can accept that).
I freely admit that I have not presented ultimate REALITY to you at all (which I think would be impossible), but just one MODEL of reality.
Just as one can’t fit a box of the same or greater dimensions inside a box, neither can you fit a complete and totally real and perfect understanding of a brain inside a brain.
That doesn’t mean that a MODEL of the brain isn’t useful though, even if it is ultimately bogus, or that it might sell a book 🙂
And intuitively, the MODEL does seem to have some strengths. When I look around, I see binaries all over the place – I don’t see that as being necessarily weak – as if a more complicated model is somehow stronger, and less fascistic? Really? I’m not convinced. It seems to me that a fascistic totalitarian wouldn’t even get so far as a binary model, because for them their truth is the only possible truth and it’s fervently believed in in absolute terms – they brook no opposition – apparently lacking the flexibility to encompass even a binary in their philosophy, let alone anything more complicated! 😛
I couldn’t care less about how complicated or not it is, I’m more interested in whether it’s useful and more or less on the money.
And when I look around, I see lots of binaries – does that make me a fascist simpleton? Perhaps it does! Ha, ha. Oh well, I guess I’ll have to take it!
Because, intuitively, I can’t help but see lots of ‘simple’ binaries: left brain (including its new and old parts) vs right brain (including its new and old parts), north pole vs south pole, up vs down, black vs white, night vs day, ying vs yang. . .
Does that mean that there’s not more going on (a little bit of good in the bad vs a little bit of bad in the good etc.)? Not at all! But I wouldn’t throw it all out on the basis of an exception, oddity, or desire for greater complication. Do that, and we end up doing all sorts of weird things like claiming there aren’t two sexes because the odd person is born a hermaphrodite.
Models are by necessity a simplification of the world, otherwise they wouldn’t be useful. They’d be reality! Which is probably better accessed by shutting off the evolutionary new brain that does the modelling entirely and responding reflexively to everything like a biting dog, who can do no other, because his face is pressed right up against the real world.
And that is an option too, and a straightforward and admirable one – perhaps this is sort of what you’re talking about when you talk about trusting moods, not thoughts?
And I am not anyone who would argue that there isn’t an admirable honesty in being ‘dog like’, as Diogenes responded when asked why he was nicknamed ‘the dog’: “I fawn on those who give me anything, I yelp at those who refuse, and I set my teeth in rascals!’
Quote Wombat: “That doesn’t mean that a MODEL of the brain isn’t useful though, even if it is ultimately bogus, or that it might sell a book.”
It could be that there isn’t a real and true model of the brain, because the brain has the ability to fulfil the wish of its user.
That means if you’re convinced to have a pure binary brain, your brain will reorganize itself in this way.
If you’re oldschool convinced that the brain is a decentral organ who works only as a whole, your brain will reorganize itself in this way.
If you’re convinced your brain has a center with four sub-system, your brain will reorganize itself in this way.
If that’s the case we truly can shape our minds like we want, we only have to be convinced.
Does the brain have four subsystems and a center? Honestly, I haven’t really looked into it. You seem keen on the idea though, so perhaps I should.
I’m not convinced though that our thoughts are able to shape reality, at least not in a holus-bolus kind of way. I’m not even convinced that we’re in control of ourselves. If humans were the center of the universe, maybe, but my intuition tells me that we’re not.
Despite all the nonsense and uncertainty surrounding it, I’m pretty sure that the anatomy of the brain has something to do with how we think. Generally speaking, the same bits appear to be responsible for the same types of things in between human subjects. Experiments can show this or that.
And I know, at least personally, that I use different types of attention depending on the task I am doing. If I use a laser like focus, then I lose sight of the big picture, etc.
That said, I don’t think they’ll ever work it all out to a certainty.
Our understanding always seems to be changing, even the brain itself is now more widely accepted as having ‘plasticity’, which seems kind of like what you’re suggesting with the brain re-organizing itself, rather than being hardwired into a certain configuration for all time, it can heal as well, take bits that aren’t being used and re-task them, etc.
Seemingly ancient sounding models/wisdom wherein other organs in the human body apart from the brain play a role in how we think and feel seem to be getting re-considered here and there as well.
And then there is the fact that nobody knows where consciousness comes from! It’s a mystery. Or at least I recall hearing somewhere that there’s no experimental evidence to prove it comes from here or there.
Is the brain just a receiver? Does it pick up consciousness from ‘elsewhere’? Does it get generated by the neurons, or by the gut, or by a combination somewhere, who knows?
And if they don’t know where consciousness comes from, the subconscious must surely be even more mysterious still.
Why stop at 4 or 5 sections? Perhaps consciousness is like a politician, who isn’t really in charge as he must operate within the confines of the law and certain expectations of the masses, and external forces etc., but he thinks he’s in charge and acts as if he’s in charge, but in reality, he’s not, he’s subject to ‘democracy’ among other things – a sort of quorum testing process of godzillions of cells throughout the whole body, who the conscious mind (which itself is comprised of a gazillion ‘elite’ cells in turn) is as much aware of as individuals as Richie Rich Sunak is of the individual plebs.
For your amusement, here’s Diogenes being a rascal about the imperfection of a particular ‘model’:
When Plato gave the tongue-in-cheek definition of man as “featherless bipeds,” Diogenes plucked a chicken and brought it into Plato’s Academy, saying, “Here is Plato’s man” (Οὗτός ἐστιν ὁ Πλάτωνος ἄνθρωπος), and so the academy added “with broad flat nails”
Can you imagine the kind of things he’d get up to if he were alive today? He’d have an absolute field day 🙂
Quote Wombat: “Does the brain have four subsystems and a center? Honestly, I haven’t really looked into it. You seem keen on the idea though, so perhaps I should.”
Google the “Man without brain” who has no hemispheres but live a normal life. For what are the hemispheres if they are not really needed?
Another interesting link (in german) about this theme:
https://www.beobachter.ch/gesellschaft/forschung-es-geht-auch-fast-ohne-hirn
Quote Wombat: “I’m not convinced though that our thoughts are able to shape reality”
Sounds crazy, but in the same way there is programmable hardware in the computers area, we can see our brains as programmable hardware in which even the system-architecture (brain-model) is programable.
Here’s one with an 1Q of 126 and a teensie weensie little brain (I presume he has both hemispheres though): https://www.irishtimes.com/news/remarkable-story-of-maths-genius-who-had-almost-no-brain-1.1026845
I didn’t spot one about someone with no hemispheres, but I can imagine a scenario wherein someone has one hemisphere due to damage/injury, or is born with just one due to a freak of nature or whatever.
I don’t know what it would mean for attention to have only one hemisphere – maybe you’d be just a ‘big picture guy’ or a ‘detail man’ from that point on, or have a far stronger bias than is normal.
I do know though that strange things can happen when the corpus callosum that links the two hemispheres gets damaged.
I remember a story about a man who had the linkage severed surgically to help with his epilepsy (the theory being that it was caused by a ‘storm’ between the two hemispheres, so he’d be better off with them separated). After the operation, he would go to get dressed, both hands would reach into his cupboard, and both would come back with a different shirt – so two men, with different fashion sense, in the one head!
I’ve heard of some other pretty weird effects of brain injuries as well. It’s interesting stuff.
Sorry, I only just followed your link – cool stuff in there.
The one hemisphere you mentioned is there, I saw something like that on Greys Anatomy just the other night 🙂
And so is a ‘brainless’ person with a high IQ – even a chicken can play tic-tac-toe I guess 🙂
I didn’t know about the potential for a nerve regrowing, I thought that nerves formed a ‘scale’ over the severed end that stopped that sort of thing, but it seems like all the ‘rules’ are out the window now 🙂
Or about a bunch of other stuff in there – like the person who could recall their operation, despite their brain supposedly not being able to work.
Thanks for this – it’s very cool.
And as I suspect is true about a lot of things, it shows that we don’t really know dick.
A Linux PC can run a Windows-PC emulator by simulating the system-architecture (brain model) of a Windows PC. If computers can do that, our brains can do that too, because our brains are way more powerful than computers.
We have to distinguish between the biological architecture (hemispheres of inner and outer brain connected by the corpus callosum) and the system-generated architecture of the running system.
The biological architecture is able to emulate any kind of system-architecture: mono, schizo and multi.
I’m suspicious of comparing humans to computers. Not because it’s not a good analogy, or is necessarily wrong, but because it seems like people have a tendency to explain people by comparing them to the latest and greatest technology of the day.
E.g. in the beginning, the ‘model’ of a man was a golem made of clay and magic. Then, a clockwork man. Or was it a steam man? Or was that a pneumatic man? Or was that a corpse reanimated by electricity? Then maybe an android/robot controlled by punch cards or whatever, then a computer. . .
But yeah, I take your point, or at least I think I kind of get it being the luddite that I am.
I’m inclined to agree that the brain is not the same thing as the phenomenon of consciousness, which was/is generally thought to be created by the brain by many people – although this appears to be in at least some doubt.
I am not now, nor ever have been, at all convinced that the mind is matter in and of itself.
Nevertheless, it does seem likely that consciousness is shaped and steered by the architecture/structure of the brain – there might be other factors as well. Time for my own analogy maybe – maybe something like consciousness being a passenger in a roller coaster, that runs about on a tangled spaghetti pile of rails. Generally the same kind of rails take it to X or Y, but if those are damaged, it can use different rails instead. Too simple probably, because it seems like the rails can be kind of re-connected here and there. . .
I’ll try an example, if you lose your hand the brain can sometimes re-task the neurons responsible for feeling your hand for another purpose. Sometimes they go to the stump, sometimes to the face (the neurons for the face just so happen to be located nearby to the hand). In those cases, you can take a pin, prick the amputee’s face, and they will tell you that you are touching their thumb, fingers, etc. Rinse and repeat enough times, map the amputee’s responses, and you can actually draw the outline of the amputee’s ‘hand’ on their face.
Same thing goes for the stump in cases when the nerves for the hand get re-tasked there – a little picture of a hand, curled over the stump, with little fingers and thumb and all.
Same thing can happen if you lose your genitals, which have been known to be felt in an amputee’s feet of all places.
These things have happened.
The ‘Split brain’ stuff, like the example I gave of severed corpus callosum, also seems to show that the architecture has a function. Split the brain, and you can sort of end up with two people in the one head. Don’t ask me how that person copes, I’m not sure it’s fathomable. I suspect they are pretty dysfunctional. Might even be better off having just one half a brain like the person in the article you shared.
I know the brain is not necessarily fixed, all sorts of ‘work arounds’ are possible, plasticity etc. Perhaps you don’t even need a whole (if perhaps shrunken/damaged) brain for some things like love like your article says.
Seems like maybe I might be ending up with another binary – the mind being shaped by brain architecture vs something else, but I’m not quite sure what that other thing is.
Nothing seems absolutely certain, which is the way of all things I guess. Kind of cool if you happen to have a brain injury, or know someone who has, or a doctor has ‘pointed the bone’ at you for some other ailment – all sorts of things are possible.
Quote Wombat: “I’m inclined to agree that the brain is not the same thing as the phenomenon of consciousness, which was/is generally thought to be created by the brain by many people – although this appears to be in at least some doubt.”
I don’t think either that consciousness is generated by brain matter, which is only the carrier of consciousness.
Long ago I read the activity in the corpus callosum goes up when we wake up, when we become conscious in the morning, and goes down when we go sleep and become unconscious.
We technicians have the rule: “Where the most cables are, there is the server room”. And I read too the neronal density is highest in the corpus callosum.
I don’t know what consciousness is, but I’m sure it’s housed in the corpus callosum.
They start cutting into the brain, and they find out that the ‘hardware’ matters in all sorts of ways.
This split-brain stuff is seriously weird:
“After the right and left brain are separated, each hemisphere will have its own separate perception, concepts, and impulses to act. Having two “brains” in one body can create some interesting dilemmas. There was a case in which, when one split-brain patient would dress himself, sometimes he pulled his pants up with one hand (the side of his brain that wanted to get dressed) and down with the other (the side that did not). He was also reported to have grabbed his wife with his left hand and shook her violently, at which point his right hand came to her aid and grabbed the aggressive left hand (a phenomenon sometimes occurring, known as alien hand syndrome). However, such conflicts are very rare. If a conflict arises, one hemisphere usually overrides the other.[1]”
WTF?
There’s another one about a guy who had a split brain that could read two pages of a book at once – one with each eye!
How does that work man?
Honestly, I just can’t imagine it.
Wiki has lots to say about the specialization of the different hemispheres – lots of particular differences apparently – speech over here and not over there etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain
Another interesting link from a german scientific magazine about multiphrenia:
https://www.spektrum.de/news/haben-wir-mehr-als-nur-eine-identitaet/2100087
Quote: “Wir haben mehr als nur eine Identität, wir haben ein inneres Team”
(“We have more than one identity, we have an inner team”)
They say basically the same like me.
The hardest part is to accept that you’re not alone in your head, because this totally destroys your feeling for privacy.
And if you fully accept your multiphrenia like I do, you have to give up privacy completely. Because you know there is always an auditorium watching you.
All what you say, all what you do, all what you think … your internally auditorium knows everything about it.