When I was six years old, I saw a flashing electric blue rectangle descend from the night sky. I thought it over, and decided this was not the sort of thing I should talk about to anyone ever. Because I couldn't talk about it, I gradually forgot about it. This is the story of my intellectual journey.
When I was thirteen I bought Fingerprints of the Gods. I discovered in that book that humanity's past might not be a single simple linear ascent to greater sophistication. So I took Ancient History in high school, where I was told that humans began as apes, and civilisation began with pyramids. There was no acknowledgment of any uncertainty in this story, so I kept my mouth shut.
I tried LSD, psilocybin, mescaline and synthetic phenethylamines, dextromethorphan, salvia divinorum, and a weak preparation of dimethyltryptamine. These helped me to apprehend that every person has a spark of divinity within, an eternal consciousness watched over by an absolute awareness that precedes the universe. It's not the sort of thing you talk about, so I didn't.
I went to university for three things: film, theatre, and the critical examination of culture to determine what the hell is wrong with the world. I learned how to use a primitive camera for greater authenticity, how to pretend that a wooden box is really a chair, and how to place the blame for all the ills of the world on straight white men like myself. Marx and Freud got together with Adorno and Marcuse to say that I was a born oppressor whose guilt was proven by my denials, a pathological sort of person who must be repressed to encourage tolerance. I saw the mental dressing down that occurred when you didn't agree this was all brilliant stuff, so I gave up on participating in seminars.
Disillusioned with academic cultural studies, I applied my philosophy education to the perils and opportunities of the internet. What could be gleaned from those who spoke only to niche audiences, or took advantage of anonymity? I found that most every time there was a subject considered too crazy to countenance by polite society, there was at least a kernel of truth to it. Every time, too, there was someone who took that truth too far. I didn't want to be a fool or to be thought one, so I didn't even begin to engage with any of these interesting topics, except to study them.
The Earth is almost certainly round, but I haven't been to space or studied the physics of planetary formation, so I have to take someone's word for it. The return of flat earth theory is likely being helped along by intelligence interests for the study and manipulation of the population, but as a thought experiment it's a peerless gauge of a person's capacity for challenging their assumptions. No, the Earth isn't flat, but all it would take is a vast intergenerational conspiracy to deceive you on the matter. It's a valuable exercise to consider the inconceivable for a moment or two.
Vaccines are described as safe and effective, but their inserts list serious conditions as side effects. The unconscionable opinion of the science-denying anti-vaccine Dr. Andrew Wakefield is that the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine should be issued separately at different times as three generic vaccines instead of one patented product at once with a greater potential for adverse effects. This is why people have tried to silence and destroy him. Vaccines may claim credit for the benefits of nutrition and sanitation, but the basic theory is still sound.
The elite meet in secret to party away their cares and perform ritual magic to absolve their consciences, but they always have, and the world hasn't ended yet.
There is strong laboratory evidence for mostly weak but almost universal powers of precognition, telepathy, clairvoyance and psychokinesis, but the people claiming strong powers have more reason than most to fake them.
JFK wanted to limit the power of the central bank, tell the people about UFOs, and cooperate with the Russkies to go to the Moon, so everyone got together to kill him, but he was probably Abraham Lincoln in a past life, so he may already be back.
Crop circles are mostly faked, but the people who regularly make them feel compelled to do so by an unknown force.
Stratospheric aerosol geo-engineering seems like it might be a real thing, but if we're all being contaminated by metals falling from the sky and seeping into our brains, then the people saying that necessarily have addled brains, and shouldn't be trusted.
Bread and milk are very bad for you. You shouldn't eat them. But they're delicious.
9/11 was executed by Saudi terrorists with help from Mossad, the CIA, and members of the Bush administration, but everyone fucking knows that.
Some people are absolute jerks, and when the delicate equilibrium of your brain is tipped so that you stop breaking down endogenous DMT at the normal rate, you spontaneously trip out on your own brain juices and your asshole boss turns into a lizard. But that still doesn't prove there aren't reptile people.
Unidentified Flying Objects are a mixture of psychological, social, optical, and piezoelectric phenomena coupled with the observer effect operating on chimeric projections of consciousness grounded in other layers of reality, distorted by terrestrial psy-ops instigated by boys with toys they want to keep secret.
But before I had found all of these qualified positions, I was willing to throw myself into one. Dr. Steven Greer said that he could use a combination of remote viewing protocols with Vipassana meditation to call down these UFOs. I had just read some relevant books, and I dimly recalled seeing something in my youth, so I decided to reverse engineer Greer's methods and see me some UFOs. With a vague sense of addressing myself to interdimensional star people, I continually asked in my head for a period of several months if I could please see some saucers. It worked, but what do you say about that?
After years of coping with the psychological fallout of seeing a fuckton of flying saucers on request, I came to terms with the mystery of our perennial interaction with others from a distant land, whatever the truth of it is. I made my peace with the unspeakable at last. I had weathered the gauntlet of conspiracies and the occult, of all the impossibly crazy ideas a person can consider, and I had emerged half-sane and not completely unreasonable.
It was around this time that it was pointed out to me that the critical theory I had read at university as an apparent critique of "our" own culture was actually disproportionately written by members of an ethnocentric tribe that considers itself as distinct from, and superior to, our deplorable culture. It wasn't sober self-criticism at all.
It was then that I realised that actually paranormal phenomena are relatively easy to discuss. You may accept or deny them. Jews can only be praised or ignored. To do otherwise is to invite accusations of stupidity and evil, for having the misfortune of asking a question that has been rendered curiously cartoonish.
This has been my intellectual journey thus far.
