At times, this separation created a sense of detachment from self that felt especially bizarre when exploring the unfolding past. The person whose memories were made using my body did not feel like me. I felt immense personal shame with each new revelation. I felt like I was watching an actor forgetting his lines on stage and sharing in the audience’s sense of embarrassment and pity. The closest analogy I can think of is that of an addict going through recovery, as he remembers all the ways in which he misrepresented himself during the worst periods of his addiction.

In the weeks and months that followed, I would reach out to some of the people who I had interacted with during my illness in order to let them know what had happened, apologizing for what I felt was a personal misrepresentation. For the most part though, I’ve had to live with the knowledge that this distorted picture of me will exist in minds beyond my reach.

So this is how I began the previous blog post….

If we wish to try and understand something about what we are, I mean in a profound sense, not just the superficial shallow way that everyone takes for granted, I think there are two main routes we can go down.

So we could call this initial bifurcation the scientific and the subjective, both terms being very, very loosely defined and used in a sloppy way, just to indicate a rough idea.

And if we want to be posh, and impress people with our erudition – another good word, there, I’m getting warmed up here – we can talk about ‘scientific realism’ versus ‘naive realism’ as outlined here.

And I gave an outline of the picture as revealed by physics, which ends up taking us into the realm of quantum theory, where we are baffled and there we left it….

So that aspect is sort of sorted. There are thousands of blogs and sites where you can get a much better understanding of quantum physics than I could ever give you here. What I think needs to be considered, is why some people believe that the scientific view, the insight that physics provides, is superior, or should take precedence, over any other view.

So this is more the realm of philosophy. Another can of worms. At least the physicists can agree amongst themselves what they are attempting to do. The philosophers, after some thousands of years, have not even got that far. Yet.

Anyway. Yes. So, philosophy is thinking. Trying to think in a sensible, reasoned, intelligible manner, clearly, so that some other wretched human being can follow the line of thought, and receive the idea as intended. Not some garbled mish mash that has nothing to do with what you meant. Can we agree on that much, please ? For a start ?

Alas, I am not a great master of the English language, Bertrand Russell, Dickens, Shakespeare, I am in a hurry, Dylan Thomas would spend a week searching for precisely the exact word that gave the tone he wanted, I know what he meant, I don’t have the time, the internet never sleeps…. this will  have to do !

In the previous blog post, I wrote, recklessly, in retrospect, that I’d consider ‘all the other available options’.

That was a mistake.

Such broad scope, daunting, hard to know where to broach the subject. Because every single one of us has some sort of mental model of ‘reality’. So there are billions of them in existence, and there have been billions more, I assume, that have vanished, when their owners died, of which we can know little, if anything.

And we can, if we wish, lump them all together, in our rather patronising superior way – after all, WE have wikipedia – and classify them all with the somewhat condescending moderno-centric term ‘naive’, by way of contrast to the ‘scientific realism’ that I outlined previously.

But I have yet to meet, or even to converse, with anyone, who ‘lives in’ quantum consciousness, as their familiar daily reality, so there’s a problem there….

Scientists, physicists, know that stuff, they learn it, even specialise in it to an advanced level, but they keep it in a sort of separate compartment, as if it all happened ‘somewhere else’. Which is weird.

But we can get a clue, from history, and the Geocentric Universe.

Because, if you use your senses, your common sense, it is true, that the Earth is central and that the Sun rises in the East and sets in the West. It is not true, that the Earth orbits around the Sun.

It only becomes true that the Earth orbits around the Sun, when you start doing complicated mathematical calculations, and use technology, telescopes, to make observations that you can’t do with your naked eyes, and you need generations of folk all working on the problem, over a long period, to get it right, because it turns out to be quite complicated, counter-intuitive, and requires a heck of a lot of hard work and dedication.

So here we have the two viewpoints, the naive and the scientific. And they are both ‘true’, depending on the conditions, the approach.

So that’s a very simple example, just to get some clarity. You can have a happy and satisfactory life, many millions surely did, living in a Geocentric Universe. You do not NEED to know any different. It is not necessarily any better, or an improvement, an advance, if you are plodding around your plot of potatoes on a mountainside in the Andes or wherever, you still laugh with your grandchildren and enjoy sex and being warm by the fire, and so on, without knowing about sub-atomic particles.

So why can’t we leave it there ?

There are drivers, forcings, that follow from opening Pandora’s Box. Francis Bacon warned us. Once you dabble, then you discover mixing this, with that, does… BANG !

And you can have fireworks. Which are fun. But then you can make rockets, to attack cities, and bullets, and then….

And you can never go back. You cannot un-invent the knowledge. It seems to be impossible to stop the rush of this ‘thing’ that we unleashed, which reinforces itself, and escapes from our human control, because some humans benefit from it, exploit for their advantage, then other humans have no choice, they have to compete. So everyone has to run, faster and faster, to try and stay ahead, somewhere near the front.

And this beast, this monster, this techno-mega-machine devours everything, consumes everything.

Too late now. We did it, we can’t stop and go back. We can try and analyse and understand. If we are very smart, we can use the same forces that drive it, against it.

I got that idea from Vinay Gupta. If you can run even faster than the beast, so that you are way out ahead, then you can deflect its path, as if it was a blind dragon, you can lure it this way, or that. A trail of blood soaked breadcrumbs, hahaha. But that means knowing the nature of the dragon, so that you don’t get trampled, eaten, burned to a cinder. That’s one possibility. I think Vinay means to lead it to a different destination to the one I’d prefer.

If we were to wish to survive, we’d have to have a culture that was ‘steady state’, completely different to this that we have, ‘constant progress’, constant innovation and change, out of control competition, where financial credit drives consumption, fractional reserve banking drives economic growth, debt forces people into debt slavery so that they have to work in unethical pursuits, the entire mythology of capitalism, of the Jewish usury and banking system that evolved since way back in the Bronze Age, all the ideas of loaning money to risk ventures that may go wrong and taking out insurance to cover the loss, all that stuff would need to end.

You know, an economic theory grounded on infinite expansion and infinite resources.

On a finite planet with finite resources.

An economic theory that is taught, every day, to students, and practiced every day by bankers, and by businesses, that is totally irrational and insane. But nobody  changes it, because it  funnels wealth to the top of a pyramid. And the people at the top have all the power, and will never willingly permit change.

We’d have to evolve very humble Amish style, Kogi style, Old Believer style, Yanomami style, ways of life that were self-contained with minimal eco footprints.

That Maslow set of human needs, where ‘self-actualization’ is placed as the highest priority would have to go, and be seen for the absurdity that it is.

Because, such hyper-individualism means that, the result is, there are no people, there will be no individuals to ‘actualize’. Because we are ALL extinct.

It’s silly, childish, irresponsible self-indulgent ego nonsense, anyway.

Other species are not so stupid and they stayed around for many millions of years. You know, the herd of wild horses, they are ALL horses, and they stay being horses, because that way, they all get to survive, century after century, millennia after millennia, and they fit in, to the global ecology, keeping the grass short, feeding the predators.

When some young colt decides ‘Hey, I think I want to be a….’ and misbehaves, his mother will drive him away from the herd. That is the most terrifying punishment, instinctively, he knows, it means his death, because he will never survive on his own.

She will drive him like that, as far as twelve miles, until he is completely broken, before allowing him to return. So that he understands. So that he never forgets. He must obey The Golden Rule. Otherwise, there will be no more horses.

Once, humans had this wisdom too. Intuitively. They have lost it, forgotten it. 

You can’t just do whatever you want. That’s not wisdom. If you do, disaster results.

We see this with Ram Samudralala, who think that his right to indulge his (childish, scientific) curiosity, takes precedence over all other values and rights. So he, ‘his team’ invent a DNA scissors, to take sections out, put them in, fiddle and mess, and see what happens. All in the name of ‘scientific progress’. Francis Bacon’s Pandora’s Box.

And then, the military, or some smart kid with a rich dad, and a lot of kit in a basement, can use that to make a fucking bioweapon, that’ll selectively kill black people, or women, or anyone with a particular susceptible genome, or make an E. Coli that has some wonderful resistance to any known antibiotic that carries some marvellous new disease… and none of this is restrained by any serious adult ethical consideration or policed by mature responsible individuals, it’s just tossed about by completely reckless self-serving lunatics, and madmen who are living in sci fi fantasy worlds out of touch with any reality that makes any sense to the majority, who have no say, no vote, no voice, in any of that stupid conduct, which gets used by corporations, Big Pharma, Big Ag, whoever, if they think they can make a buck, regardless of any risk.

But it is probably too late for us now, so all is lost, and we take most other living things into extinction with us.

As Guy McPherson knows, once the runaway feedback loops are triggered, that’s it. Too late. Nothing more can be done. Most people do not have the education, are not equipped, to grasp this. There’s no point in arguing. Let them die. What difference does it make, what they think, as they die ? So many people die, all the time, every minute, all the time. The really big die off is yet to come, it’ll speed up….. but there’s a heck of a lot being born all the time too…

So, what happens, there’s competition to recruit the newcomers to ‘believe’ in one or other of the many belief systems on offer, by trying to convince them, with propaganda, and ‘education’ which has a tendency to be indoctrination.

This is why, imo, freedom of speech is sacrosanct, the ultimate and primary right. No human being has the right to gag another human being. If you do not like what they say, don’t listen, ignore them. But they have the fundamental right to say it, however wrong, repellant, stupid, or offensive it is. Because it might be true. It could be correct.

Sometimes the voice of the mad, odd, raving outsider is the only voice that we have left that still says the truth, because everyone else has forgotten, they’ve been told what to think. Emperor’s New Clothes.

So we are trapped in this dreadful conundrum.

Whether to be the rebellious colt, that leaves the herd, and finds itself all alone in wilderness, the one who sees that the Emperor is naked.

Or, to forego that spark of ‘self-actualization’, and conform to the tribal norm, for the greater good, the benefit of all.

I believe that this was the traditional territory of the shaman. The shaman was an outcast, out on the edge of the community, feared and disliked, suspect, because of possession of powers, insights, connections to forces that the majority knew not.

But also valued, for guidance, healing, therapy, and so on.

If we had listened to William Blake, we would not be in this terminal mess. Would we have had laptops and the internet ? That’s hard to know. Do we NEED laptops and the internet and all the rest of the stuff ?

See, people are shocked, they feel this stuff is an unquestionable good, and an entitlement. However, it’s not like that, is it, if the option is, that if you have those things, then you become extinct.

They will reply, that it is IMPOSSIBLE that we will become extinct.

But that is merely wishful thinking, that overlooks and ignores the empirical scientific evidence. No rational, reasonable, sane person can argue on that basis. You cannot argue on the basis, that ‘I can jump off that thousand foot cliff, and not hurt myself’.

That’s not what sane, rational people do. Because sane, rational people KNOW that all of the scientific evidence indicates that everyone who has ever jumped off thousand foot cliffs (unless they have some technical trickery, a parachute, or wingsuit, bungee cord), falls to their death. They will obey the law of falling bodies, the law of physics.

There are anomalies. This I fully accept. All the time, and from every period, there are reports of anomalies, the laws of physics seem to be broken, or very odd things occur.

As we know, from the previous blog post, if you pursue the laws of physics, you end up in a very strange place indeed. We have no idea how much, or how little, we know and understand. Perhaps we know 90%, perhaps we know almost nothing, how can we tell, every time people have insisted they have the answer, they find it opens up even deeper questions…

But whenever tested, people jumping, they crash and die. We all know this to be the case. If you think that’s wrong, go and prove it wrong. Be another dead idiot.

And if we destroy the conditions, here on Earth, that enable us to exist, to live, then we will cease to exist. All of us. We will all vanish.

And we are destroying those conditions.

Don’t argue with me. Check the data. Find the most reputable and reliable sources, and check the numbers.

You know, this is stuff that can be measured, doesn’t have to be guessed. It’s like ‘Saturday the water was up to here, I marked it, Sunday, here, now it is Monday, it is up to here !’

What does it mean ? It means that the ship is sinking. To pretend that it is not sinking, when you can see the evidence, is wishful thinking. Foolishness.

So, then what ? Now, what ?

I think we are out of time, for any orderly, thought out and calculated adjustment. The whole global system is so vast, so many diverse and vested and conflicting interests, so much inertia, so much chaos and confusion, it’s an ongoing train wreck.

So, back to the topic… kind of… I have digressed. I am finding it difficult to focus, because I am distracted. I think we are tipping into all out war. This is a ghastly prospect and can occur very fast. The masses are very foolish. The leaders are extremely stupid, reckless and irresponsible. Anyone who cares, about their own self-preservation, their loved ones, needs to become very serious and sober. Appraise the situation. Not what the propaganda, the rubbish news outlets, are saying, but the true facts of the circumstances.

Neither masses of the public nor the leaders seem to have any real understanding what all out war will MEAN. For THEM. Think deeply on that.

Yes, I made a grave mistake, by writing the title of the essay ‘Reality’.

Without a definition of the term, the word, the concept, the whole essay is adrift.

So what does it mean, to be ‘real’ ?

Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand. [Margery Williams, “The Velveteen Rabbit”]

The dictionary definitions provide alternative synonyms, which circle around the notion, that there are some things that are actual, substantial, they exist, they are, they have presence and composition.

Contrasted and set against those, are the opposed qualities, fictitious, imaginary, counterfeit, not actual or factual.

So, this takes us right back to ancient Greece, to Thales, and the Cosmos TV series, where Carl Sagan exuberantly declares that he has discovered the roots of modern science.

Because Thales rejected the ‘realm of the gods’, the mythic domain of the spirits and ancestors, all that invisible, ethereal ‘stuff’, and focussed on the solid material ‘stuff’ that you could weigh and move about and buy and sell. He was a businessman and a politician.

And we can trace that division all the way to today, via Descartes en route.

Because, if you are quite simple and want an easy way to understand ‘the world’, well, there’s that nice solid ‘stuff’, that can be measured. That’s what can be called ‘real’.

And then there is all the rest, the ‘other stuff’, which is too difficult to measure, because we can’t catch it and we don’t even know where it is, it’s weird and troublesome. So, it is ‘not real’.

And that is where we are. Idiot materialism, the prevailing dominant worldview, that kids get taught, scientism, that there is ‘No such thing as…..’ Fill in everything that comes under the absurd illogical nonsensical rubric ‘super-natural’.

But it is a strawman, isn’t it. If we assume that the entire Universe (by definition, the word, One Thing) is one thing, then it is all natural.

The division that was made between nature and super-nature comes from an obsolete archaic paradigm, so why do we bother with it ? It’s rather like Aristotle’s division between physics and meta-physics. He wrote a work on physics, and then, he started, – I can’t remember, I think never completed – books that were meant to cover everything else, that got named metaphysics, kinda ‘not physics’ and we are still lumbered with that daft terminology and people classify ‘metaphysics’ as somewhat suspect, a suspicious area for poets and mystics who don’t respect ‘hard science’.

See, ideas, the thoughts that pass through your mind, have histories, they are beasts with genealogies, archaeology, heritage, flavouring that comes attached and likes to sneak into the discourse.

This is something like Dawkin’s memes, well, it is that, if you accept his theory, which comes in strong, weak, fuzzy, populist, and rubbish versions. I don’t think it is terribly helpful, except to advertising and marketing people. As a sort of grand theory of culture, I think it’s failed. But there clearly are memes, in the sense of advert slogans, that stick in people’s heads, jingles and pop song lyrics that jump from mind to mind and are infectious, and so forth.

And symbols, like the swastika and crucifix, that are laden with a significance far greater than the simple visual image, which evoke all kinds of deep psychological and emotional resonance.

This stuff acts like a sort of curtain, between us, our consciousness, and reality. It’s a sort of filter, like the filters you put over a camera lense, that change the nature of the light that enters to make the photo.

When I was young, newly married, I lived in tiny cottage in the mountains, owned by a very ancient Welsh lady, who had never been away from that valley, except once, 60 miles, in her entire lifetime. She told me many wondrous tales, about rural life, in such an isolated area, going back to Victorian times. She had a great sense of humour and giggled all the time, mostly laughing at herself. I mean, she’d grown up in the greatest poverty, think like Irish peasants, no shoes, a shawl, chapel twice on Sunday.

Anyway, a dam was built up in the hills, and as she stood looking out of her front door, some workers came past in the back of a lorry along the lane, and one was a blackman. The only time she ever saw such a thing in her life. She had such a fright she ran inside and bolted the door.

I mean, we can laugh, or think it is sad, or whatever. But for her, that was like a UFO.

People live their whole lives in totally different worlds, depending on these cultural filters, that define the nature of the reality that they inhabit.

Some buddhists call this sort of curtain The Veil of Maya, and the point of zen meditation is to gently remove all the layers, so that one perceives the raw reality ‘just as it is’. Which can be far more terrifying than seeing a blackman, so one builds up fortitude so as to withstand the encounter, gradually, until it becomes the ordinary condition.

But on checking wikipedia, I see, as so often, there is contention as to how the notion Veil of Maya is to be understood.

The various schools of Hinduism, particularly those based on naturalism (), rationalism () or ritualism (), questioned and debated what is Maya, and the need to understand Maya. The Vedanta and Yoga schools explained that complete realization of knowledge requires both the understanding of ignorance, doubts and errors, as well as the understanding of invisible principles, incorporeal and the eternal truths. In matters of Self-knowledge, stated Shankara in his commentary on , one is faced with the question, “who is it that is trying to know, and how does he attain Brahman?” It is absurd, states Shankara, to speak of one becoming himself; because “Thou Art That” already. Realizing and removing ignorance is a necessary step, and this can only come from understanding and looking beyond Maya.

The need to understand Maya is like the metaphorical need for road. Only when the country to be reached is distant, states Shankara, that a road must be pointed out. It is a meaningless contradiction to assert, “I am right now in my village, but I need a road to reach my village”. It is the confusion, ignorance and illusions that need to be repealed. It is only when the knower sees nothing else but his Self that he can be fearless and permanent. Vivekananda, explains the need to understand Maya, as follows (abridged),

Well, I don’t know. Let them argue. Best thing is to do the meditation and find out for yourself.

I apologise, I do not feel I have even begun to address this topic adequately, to the standard I would wish. I am too much distracted by worldly events. Every time I get a line of thoughts going, I visit a webpage and get caught up in the unfolding drama.

This American aggression, the constant provocation, trying to get Russia and China into a war, is completely unacceptable, it is insane, pathological, infantile behaviour, by reckless madmen that will get countless millions of us killed.

If we DO NOT WANT to die, in another world war, then we have to act, and insist that those people are disempowered, restrained, and prevented from causing any further harm. I mean, what the hell do they think they are doing ?

And now they try to pick a fight with the Chinese by threatening to sail warships into their declared territorial waters.

I find this quite amazing really. Like a drunk, staggering around poking people in the chest, ‘Wanna fight, pal ?’  it’s imbecilic behaviour, and such a contrast with the self-serving rhetoric, ‘the exceptional nation’, ‘the leader of the free world’, blahblah.

I mean, don’t they feel any sense, of shame, embarrassment, loss of dignity, to conduct themselves in this kind of crass, aggressive, rude manner, trying to get China to DARE to sink one of their stupid boats full of sailors ? ‘You are behaving like a spoiled brat, calm down, here, have some sweeties child…’

I shall make another attempt in the next few days.

If I am still alive. If there is no war effecting me here. If I can think of something sensible to say. If….