Further Questions of Culture

This blog was created with the vague, perhaps competing notions of showcasing a portfolio of original creative and philosophical thought on the one hand, and venting the unspeakable on the other.  It's not impossible that an intellectual idiom can be hammered out by the white-hot fire of frustrated logic, but dissatisfaction with the discourse of peers, friends and family does not guarantee a more successful expression in angry isolation.  Highfalutin obscurantism is an inviting refuge for the disappointed intellect.  Striking a balance between the limits of the herd and the excesses of nature's dangerous experiments may be a fool's errand, but how else do society and the individual proceed forward together?

I safely and lazily retreated from either honing my craft or sharpening my knives. It seemed sufficient to simply mark the passing absurdities of our day, as if they could speak for themselves, but the pace of unbelievable things has accelerated beyond my means to document.  The things that are shocking, ridiculous, unprecedented, ingenious and idiotic have become too numerous to even point to, much less comprehensively comment upon, even less still to interpret into any sort of artistic form.

We are living in a self-generating satire, a comic construction so sublime as to offer proof of the Divine Comedian.  Parallel realities compete for dominance, gods and priests old and new battle for people's souls, and history is upended.  Opinions are cheap, truth is costly, evidence is abundant and arguments are counterfeit.  It is a comedy of errors, if only to observing disembodied eternal spirits.  It's frequently a hellish slog for those of us who must navigate it on the ground.

It's my preference and inclination to locate these incompatibilities of meaning in the airy arena of our thoughts, values, and culture. This has been my cultural and academic education.  The magic dirt of Canada makes us all Canadian.  My Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian, Celtic and Anglo-Saxon heritage makes me see the world in a certain way, but I could see it differently, if not for the last several thousand years, and I would still be the same person.  Given enough time and the right presentation, any true idea can be communicated to anyone, once the language barrier of culture is overcome.  Right?

The idea works well enough on its own, but it does not permit expansion.  Where did the culture come from?  The people.  Where did the people come from?  The environment.  These values permitted these people to persist in this place.  Such adaptation is not arbitrary, but it may be more or less suitable to a different environment.

But what actually is an idea?  Where does it come from?  Does it bubble up from the neurons, or float down from the ideal world?

If the brain produces consciousness, and the brain is a product of evolution, and every other product of evolution expresses variance based on environment, it would be reasonable to expect different capacities to conceive, communicate and comprehend ideas among groups that have developed with different social and environmental pressures.  As an opposable thumb permits one to grasp an object, there are many heavy, slippery, misshapen ideas that one must exercise extra mental appendages in order to pick up.  Why should that capacity be universal?  The human form is highly variable in every other way.

If psyche and soul are indeed one, and all our thoughts emanate from a voice that ultimately resides in a higher realm, our truth must be found there too.  Assuming greater control of destiny attendant to a greater perception, our souls might be expected to shop for vehicles with the features necessary to satisfy our way of driving.  Speed, handling, gas mileage, all must be considered by the discerning driver.  A soul with any self-knowledge would pick the brain best-suited to its personality.  Even accounting for the possibility that we all have the same origin and destination, we are nonetheless taking different routes at our own pace.  Even the most cosmic perspective problematises universalism.

These are the further questions of culture.  Are perception and action profoundly informed by cultural differences?  Certainly.  Does that culture exist in a special space containing nothing but culture?  No.  Acceptance of either a biological foundation or spiritual roof to the house of culture forces the consideration that cultural perspective cannot be the fundamental source of difference.  Perspective comes from where you stand, and how tall, and how good your eyes are, not only where you turn your head.  You can try to walk a mile in someone's shoes, but you can't wear their feet.  If culture does not exist in a vacuum, it must be tied to things more or less tangible.

Whether biological animals invented culture to connect as a group, or God invented culture to separate into individuals, we have arrived at an impasse.  There is a traffic-jam of meaning, and road rage is getting scary.

This is very uncomfortable business.  The residues of old religions and the seeds of new ones overlap with science and politics in ways barely perceptible.  Knowledge of history and understanding of philosophy are inadequate to the volume of our rhetoric.  Passionate displays of moralising mask ignorance and apathy.  Some are emboldened, others terrified.  It is the best of times and the worst of times for truth.

It's a time for new stories, new ideas, new voices, new media.  The format will continually evolve, but this endeavour cannot continue as a quixotic catalogue.  My need to practice word-using must be brought to the task of considering the challenges of this crazy age, and to engage with them in a mode more real than bemused observation, sarcastic astonishment, or detached horror.

Amor fati

Psychiatry and Possession

Is it possible to be a sophisticated psychiatrist and believe that evil spirits are, however seldom, assailing humans? Most of my scientific colleagues and friends say no, because of their frequent contact with patients who are deluded about demons, their general skepticism of the supernatural, and their commitment to employ only standard, peer-reviewed treatments that do not potentially mislead (a definite risk) or harm vulnerable patients. But careful observation of the evidence presented to me in my career has led me to believe that certain extremely uncommon cases can be explained no other way.

Big Solution For Big Problem

Faced with the prospect of having to conserve water, the United Arab Emirates is considering building a mountain to command the rain instead.  Millennia hence, no one will believe the stories.

Neil deGrasse Tyson Fucking Loves Science

‘Science’ here has very little to do with the scientific method itself; it means ontological physicalism, not believing in our Lord Jesus Christ, hating the spectrally stupid, and, more than anything, pretty pictures of nebulae and tree frogs.

JREF Narrows Challenge

The overabundance of dowsers and psychics hoping to be tested but unwilling to submit to the arbitrary, fluid, and unfairly weighted experimental protocols established by an ornery stage magician -- The Amazing Randi -- has forced the James Randi Educational Foundation to limit applicants for the One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge to established psychics (sic) with a TV crew.

Confessions of an Idiot

~~~

I had a prolonged, traumatic birth, as a terrible winter storm raged outside.  I eventually arrived on the leap day of 1984, with a scar on one cheek from the doctor's forceps. 

~~~

When I was a couple of years old, the neighbour boy knocked me unconscious with a lead pipe.  He was pretending to play baseball.  The stitches left a scar on my forehead over my third eye.

~~~

When I was six or seven, I saw a flashing electric blue rectangle descend from the night sky.  It was outside my window and behind some trees, but nothing about it looked like anything I'd seen before or since.  I thought it over, and couldn't see any good coming from discussing it with the adults.  The experience was never integrated, only occluded by being ignored.

~~~

When I was twelve or thirteen I began to develop a neurotic melancholia.  My brother was gone from the house, and my parents' marriage had started the slow and quiet march to dissolution.  I had gleaned from my social studies classes that my nation had no identity of its own, and it was increasingly clear that my education was a boring waste of my talents.  I had every opportunity to develop the bad cognitive habits and bodily environment for a pernicious and persistent depression.  These behavioural and biochemical ruts can be overcome, and the thought of quitting made a friendly gadfly, but any mental illness leaves a mark that never fully leaves.

~~~

I went to Trent University to learn how to be academically critical of my society.  The unheralded Semitic cynicism of the theorists on offer neglected the constructive responsibilities of philosophy.  We only destroyed.  It was understood but never justified that an egalitarian communist utopia would fill the resultant void.

I could only do well in philosophy and cultural studies by keeping them strictly delineated and compartmentalised in my mind.  Cultural studies selected from every discipline, but its critique was beholden only to pissy projection.

~~~

When I returned from Ontario in disgrace and confusion, and without Honours, my feeling of affinity for the moustache man and his project had become so acute that I took myself to have my head checked.  The NS Hospital was no help.  They deemed me sane.  This would be a valuable tether in the years to come.

~~~

Cannabis had made the existential ache endurable, so it had been no great leap to obey the cultural script and proceed to other psychoactive substances--only to discover how at-home they made me feel.  I learned the warp and woof of tryptamines and phenethylamines, of illumination and The Void.  On a summer off from school, down by the brook, on a bottle of cough syrup, some mushrooms, and a beer, I became aware of a consciousness greater than myself.  In the morning, I cast Him out as only chemical.

~~~

When those chemicals no longer had as much to teach me, I moved on to the hard stuff: exopolitics, the New Age, and conspiracy theory. 

I had exhausted my education; there were still too many missing pieces in my understanding before I would be able to make psychological and philosophical sense of those classes. 

I had exhausted entheogens; absent a proper initiation by a carrier of a wisdom tradition (or the time, security, stability, and supplies to rigourously develop my own tradition) neo-shamanism seemed to be a pie-eyed dead end, in terms of obtaining reliable and consistent information. 

Cultural studies had at least made me cognizant of our capacity for self-delusion, and of the cultural mediation of reality.  Psychedelics had made me aware of dimensions normally unseen.  With the hope that my philosophy classes in logic and reasoning were still working for me, it seemed the right time to cross my Rubicon--and try to learn profound things from the scary, dangerous, and untrustworthy Internet.  After all, those disreputable drugs hadn't been so bad!

I made vast strides into the unknown over a very short period.  In a flurry of cheap documentaries and questionable interviews, I caught up with ten years of paranormal, spiritual, conspiratorial, and batshit insane conversation.  Much of it was remarkable, most was incredible, and all of it was far beyond the pale of polite conversation.  I began to get comfortable with a constant consciousness of the limits of other people's realities.

There were certainly a lot of well-spoken people convinced of nefarious plots and epic cosmic battles.  They referenced the same undocumented fancies, and it was easy to get swept up in excitement over the imminent disclosure of alien life, and our imminent ascension into fluffy rainbows.  It was a strange time.

~~~

My pseudo-shamanic forays had finally begun to yield fruit.  My mystical readings had begun to cohere and come alive.  I was beginning to experience synchronicities.

I would hold conversations with an ethereal DJ.  It selected the songs in my extensive playlist that would answer with uncanny insight the question I was pondering.  First, the astonishment at such magic.  Second, the slow recognition of its ubiquity.

As the new year approached, I made a resolution to undertake an experiment.  It required a leap of faith.  I decided to take up the provisional acceptance of a series of dubious claims. 

If it was true that all existence is the fragmented consciousness of the One, all awareness must be made of the same stuff.  If we're all reaching higher levels of consciousness on our climb back to wholeness, there are probably intermediary conglomerations of awareness of which we can be a part.  If we're all connected through our common Source, it should be a simple matter to contact other intelligences by means of the very intelligence which seeks to make such a contact.

I resolved that in 2009 I would see a UFO.

~~~

I didn't step outside without looking up.  I didn't look up without asking to see.  Everywhere I went, everything I did, I held the thought in my mind that I wanted to make contact, I wanted to witness, I wanted to experience.  I asked in earnestness and humility.  I projected friendly compassion and curiosity.  I wanted to see a flying saucer and I meant it.

~~~

On the night in February when I signed for an apartment with my girlfriend, I walked to my warehouse night shift down a darkened road.  I was distracted from my feeling of relief and anticipation by a bright light in the sky straight ahead.

Before I had time to think about it, the word "angelic" popped into my mind.  This word wasn't really in my vocabulary, so it surprised me enough that I immediately took a closer look at the light.  It was too large and bright to be a planet, but it wasn't in motion except for a slight waver.  Something about the luminous shimmer convinced me that it was suitably angelic, and in a moment I found myself asking it in my head if it was a UFO.

The light gently winked at me in a seeming affirmation.

A pregnant pause; one-two-three.  A mugging double take wouldn't have been out of order.  That really happened, didn't it?  Another slow blink, after the same measure as the last question.  The light hovered still, now resolutely unblinking.

I tried to command it, telling it to do it again.  Instead, the light shrunk to the size of a faint star, and suddenly began moving to the right.  It quickly expanded to a large black shape with lights on it that passed almost overhead.  It was just enough like a plane that I could believe I had been fooled, and I spent the rest of the night laughing at the ambiguity of the sighting.

On further consideration, I couldn't remember a sound from an aircraft that came very close, nor a green light on the starboard side that faced me.

~~~

About a month after that first sighting, in a time of alienated despair, the floodgates were opened.  After noticing a series of strange aerial things one night, I saw a nearby flying object instantly reverse on its course without turning around--and there was no going back.

Over the course of 2009, forever to be remembered as That Year, I saw multiple daytime discs, luminous saucers, and glowing orbs, as well as countless suspicious lights that were surely almost all conventional.  Often enough, the more striking appearances seemed to interact with me and my expectations.  I found them to be playful, but also seemingly compassionate, sometimes responding to my emotional need to see them at a certain time or place, sometimes performing a novelty when I asked nicely.

It culminated in a pink saucer shrouded in mist going past my apartment window one afternoon like it was going for a Sunday drive.  This time our requisite exchange of recognition manifested as the orange-pink light of the object brightening responsively, and then the trail of vapour behind it got correspondingly longer.  Somehow this simple physical logic was too much.  Weird phantasms passing over populated areas are fine, but if they behave like they're real?  I had seen enough.

It was around this time that I was becoming preoccupied with my soul's mission, and beginning to suspect that my favourite singer-songwriter might be an evil sorcerer.  I had to grudgingly admit that it might be a good time to pause and reflect.

I reflected in retreat for years, exploiting the goodwill of friends and family to survive, struggling not to succumb to this new madness I didn't understand, or an old sadness I knew all too well.  I went back over everything; every experience, but also every fact and argument that led me there, and every one that followed from it.  I adopted more nuanced perspectives on secrets and mysteries.  I became more sure of some things and less sure of others.  Mostly I languished.

~~~

There is still no idiom sufficient to take account of reality.  Not science, not religion, not the left or right, not the high or straight.  Mostly there is insular confusion.  A vast spinning cosmos surrounds us, and we're too ridiculous to assume our inherent dignity and face that universe.

I have fled from my experiences even as I struggle to understand them.  The truth is that I have to let them be. I don't understand everything, and I have to let that be.  Most people are ignorant dumbasses without a shred of passion or curiosity, and I have to let that be.  There's too much to learn and teach and explore and discover to be held back by not knowing the destination, or not getting everyone to take the journey.

Why Do Some People Find Deepak Chopra Quotes Deep And Not Dung?

This kind of tendency also feeds into broadly resonating societal effects, such as the susceptibilities that led—and still lead—some people to chase false “cures” for everything from autism to cancer, to follow false prophets who promise them transformation and revelation of hidden beauty while giving them nothing, and to confuse categories of existence and believe that the material is magical. And that is deeply, deeply important to understand.

Metaphysics Is Prior to Science

The difficulty with using raw scientific evidence, untethered from a valid metaphysical framework, is that it gives free reign to ideological bias. In that sense our metaphysical framework -- whether explicit or implicit -- is analogous to train tracks, where the trains are our scientific investigations, and the destination is the truth. Our scientific investigations are restricted to the tracks that the trains run on, and if we are to understand the truth of our science we must understand the tracks that constrain our work. If our metaphysical framework is materialistic, the destination of our inquiries will always be materialistic -- we can do no other.

Rationalists are Harshing My Empiricist Mellow

"Elsewhere they use a fair semblance of logic, but here their logic becomes wondrous weird. Elsewhere they generally succeed in preserving the standard scientific stolidity, but here they frequently manifest and confess a submission to emotions ill befitting those who sprang from the head of Brahma. Elsewhere they observe the knightly etiquette of the lists, but in this field think it no shame to decline the fair encounter, and, from the safe shelter of the barrier, to jeer about the presumptive quality of their opponents’ brains."

The Mainstream Media is Junk Food For Your Brain

"It’s a lot like when you know you should eat a salad instead of that enticing doughnut, but you choose the doughnut instead because it’s oh-so-good in the moment. When the less intelligent segments of society are presented with the real facts or even just told to investigate an issue on their own (the salad), they often react with confusion or fury, choosing instead to accept whatever the mainstream media is telling them to say or think (the doughnut)."

The psyop to neuter The Rebel

"In the psyop to demean, distort, and squash the rebel, there is a single obvious common denominator: the establishment media are doing the defining; they are the ones who are setting the parameters and making the descriptions; they are the ones who build the cartoons; looking down their noses, pretending to a degree of sympathy, they paint one unflattering picture after another of what the rebel is and does and says; they have co-opted the whole game."

From Christian faith to nihilistic void

"Commentators have mentioned the excessive submission ('love your enemy', 'turn the other cheek') and the guilt ('original sin'). However, despite all their imperfections and the corruption they've been subjected to, traditional religions still convey some important values: solidarity, charity, community, love. In this sense the materialistic, individualistic values that have been hammered into our minds are far worse than the religious ones that preceded them."

Is Richard Dawkins destroying his reputation?

"Dawkins might claim he only attacks the faith, not its individual believers, but in Sardar’s view his depiction of that faith denies its social and political complexity. 'What he is doing,' Sardar said, 'is creating a world that is more belligerent than the one we find ourselves in.'"

James Randi: debunking the king of the debunkers

"According to Sheldrake, his direct requests for data were twice ignored. After appealing to others at the JREF, Randi eventually wrote back, explaining that he couldn’t supply the data because it got washed away in a flood and that the dogs he tested are now in Mexico and their owner was 'tragically killed last year in a dreadful accident.'"

Epidemic depression as a wake up call to humanity

"When participants attempted to influence how the dice turned, the dice rolled in the desired direction about 51.2% of the time. While this may seem negligible at first glance, considering that this was the meta effect observed from 2.6 million dice throws from 148 different experiments by 52 different investigators, it's significant."

Bored

It turns out that drugging children who are bored in class doesn't make them better students.

How could psychiatry ever drive us to such thinking? Jon Rappoport explains.

Biological bad luck blamed in two-thirds of cancer cases

A study conducted at Johns Hopkins University and published in Science suggests that random mutations were responsible for 22 of the 31 cancers examined.  Behaviour and heredity are still relevant factors in assessing a person's risk of developing cancer, but the scientists concluded that 65% of cancer incidence could be attributed to unaccountable errors in cell division, or as expressed by Reuters, "bad luck."

Although the materialist paradigm usually prefers to isolate a causal basis for events, it seems to have been granted a free pass in this instance.  The possibility that cancer develops for reasons not yet measured is left off the table, in favour of an argument for early intervention (intervention that can be as deadly as the cancer it is intended to defeat).  Prevention is precluded.

The logic would break down if it were found that the occurrence of all cancers has been on the increase, not only those shown to be directly influenced by environment or genes. It would imply that global rates of bad luck have been going up.  This would be an exciting if worrisome discovery for a worthy statistician to make.