05/11/2012 – Flash: Oldest Known Mayan Calendar Found

End Times Prophecy, or did they just run out of space?

And guess what? The astronomical tables found in a remote Guatemala dig  at the largest-known Classic Mayan site, Xultún, are 500 years older than those preserved in the Maya codices, and they do not reference any End Times scenarios.

According to the CNN feed,

Contrary to popular myth, Mayan experts have known for a long time that this calendar is not a countdown to the end of the world on December 2012, the study researchers said in a press conference to reporters.

The Mayan used a series of cycles to track time in which there were 13 baktuns each representing a 400-year chunk.

Researchers of the study say rumors surrounding a projected apocalypse on Dec. 21, 2012, is a misconception. It is just the benchmark when a cycle of 13 baktuns will be complete and a new cycle begins.

“There was a lot more to the Mayan calendar than just 13 baktuns,” said archaeologist David Stuart of the University of Texas, who worked to decipher the hieroglyphics found on the walls of a house, dating back to the early part of the 9th century (813 A.D.-814 A.D.).

“The Mayan calendar is going to keep going for billions, trillions, octillions of years into the future,” added Stuart.

Can it be true? We shall still wait with bated breath on the December 21, 2012 New Age End Times Mayan Prophecy, but trust me on this. Barbara Hand Clow and her cottage industry of Mayanist Prophets will have to look for another story to exploit their gullible reading audience.

2011/04/14 – Speed Bumps Part 2

Last night’s blog found me trying to open myself up further, as a way of furthering and delving deeper into the process of my self-honesty. To continue along with that thread, I just wanted to relate a mental lockdown I experienced when writing it where I felt a wave or tiredness and confusion that fell upon me, leaving me without a way to continue, seemingly. It was a fascinating experience when the challenge to myself to open-up was issued; I immediately felt a “brain-drain” and a loss of context to what I writing. This has happened before, but not to my recollection involving my self-reflection. I had intended to write out self-forgiveness points, but I didn’t see it. I shook it off to being “tired” and writing “at a late hour.” I just turned off the lights and went to bed.

In the morning I felt very unsatisfied with myself and what I posted . I thought it was a lame post, and not very good. One of the worst, ever! I discussed this with my partner who noticed that the self-forgiveness statements were missing from it, as well. She said there were so many points to do self-forgiveness on – so why didn’t I do them? I told her of the lockdown and she said, fine. Do self-forgiveness on these points now while they’re here. I felt a pang of resistance to that, and I knew I wasn’t going to get out of it, no matter how bad my back chat wanted me out of there.

I wrote out several lines of self-forgiveness and discussed the points a little more. I realized I would have to write an “answer blog” to get over the inequality between myself and what I wrote last night. How do I feel about it? Embarrassed . Ugh, because who wants to display  one’s weaknesses for public consumption? The bravest of us, no doubt. I am comfortable with the lack of privacy on the internet to a point, and then I am no better than the anonymous cowards who take shots at us behind fake names. Basically, there is so much SF to do and I’m not getting any younger, as the expression goes. But this what I signed up for, to make this blog a beacon among many. a place where my process within self-honesty can be mapped and seen to stand for something. I’ve lived my entire life within and as a secret, most times as a secret within myself, or as projections of many personalities, one for each occasion.

But I am happy to report, I do feel like I’ve changed, especially when it comes to my racing mind, which is more restful these days. After studying in various ways, I see that it is possible to transcend the mind’s incessant chatter. When I first started process, I couldn’t see it at all. I’m doing a better job at stopping most back chat before I begin engaging full-on with them. Still a long way to go, but I can see myself getting there. And that’s pretty cool.

 

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to judge last night’s blog as inferior (to other blogs I’ve written).

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself for become frustrated in not finding the right words I wanted to say.

 

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself for feeling my readers wouldn’t like it either, and would think it was poor.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself fo blaming myself that I was too tired to write effectively.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself for “giving up ” on the blog when I ran out of things to say.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself for “giving up” on the blog when I found myself not knowing what to say.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself for having a starting point of “getting the job done” instead of being equal to my writing.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself for judging myself for not coming up with more on this point.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself for attaching self-worth to what I write.

I forgive myself for having accepted and allowing myself to become influenced over, by, that which wants to keep me where I am.

I forgive myself for having accepted and allowing myself to manipulate the point of not writing effective sf because I haven’t been doing anything wrong, which most certainly be a point of ego.

I forgive myself for having accepted and allowing myself to write-through the mind instead of expression.

I forgive myself for having accepted and allowing myself to fear self-intimacy.

I forgive myself for having accepted and allowing myself the thoughts and opinions from others.

I forgive myself for having accepted and allowing myself to fear writing self-forgiveness publically because of my ego.

I forgive myself for having accepted and allowing myself to judge myself as ‘less then worthy.”

I forgive myself for having accepted and allowing myself for not being fully present when I write.

I forgive myself for having accepted and allowing myself for attaching importance to what I write.

 

 

 

 

2011/03/13 – Stars “Send Love” to Japan! Really???

Japan is in deep shit, an unknown number of people dead and missing, infrastructure destroyed, millions of people homeless and hungry, a nuclear meltdown… but never fear. Everyone’s favorite pop-psychologist/New Age guru, Dr. Wayne Dyer has a request: he wants you to “send love.”

 

Send Love to Japan ♥ Send Love in some form to those you believe wronged you, and notice how much better you feel and how more peace you have. — Dr. Wayne Dyer

 

Yes. Send love and you’ll “feel better.” And it seems like Dr. Dyer’s advice is being picked up by the Hollywood glitterati. Pop Singer Kylie Minogue claimed she ‘sent love’ to those affected by the recent earthquake in New Zealand.

P Diddy tweeted:”Oh man yall see this earthquake in japan??????!!!!! Let us pray!!!! God bless Japan!” I think God’s done enough “blessing” on Japan, thank you very much. Ryan Seacrest tweeted that he was “[s]ending prayers to everyone affected.“  Awesome that the Hollywood celebrity community is sending so much “love” to Japan, but how does someone like you or me “send love” to millions of people on the other side of the world?

Some people imagine a green light around their heart and visualize the green waves reaching all the way to Japan. Seriously. People actually believe this shit: that through the power of what they can imagine within their mind, they can have a physical result. Some people believe if they can “fill themselves with light,” they can “send” that light to others, and things will be all better. At least, the ‘sending” the “light” will “feel” better. I know it might seem incredible, but there are people who call on Arch Angel Raphael or Uriel and visualize them bathing places in crisis with healing light.

What a bunch of hooey. Is there anyone who can offer us with proof that such energetic transactions do indeed take place? I understand where this all came from; the New Age belief that the human mind is allegedly the most powerful thing in existence. But I want to see those who are engaged in “sending love” and “energetic abundance” to Japan and other parts of the world, to give evidence for their claims. If only we could build a machine that could measure such stuff…

Ok, I kid. But this kind of “magical thinking” has gone too far. It is not taking responsibility for anything. It only serves to give nominal ion a way where one doesn’t have to commit themselves to do something for real. And to read about these Hollywood stars with more money than anyone “sending love and prayers” to Japan is sickening. People need to stop pretending that what they imagine is real.

 

 

2011/02/09 – Choice, “God” and the Existence of Evil

The problem of evil isn’t an argument against or for religion. Definitions of evil vary, and evil begins and ends with human activity. To say that god doesn’t exist because “evil” exists is tantamount to saying that he must exist in order to define it. If you truly don’t believe in god, then evil can’t exist, not empirical evil anyway (someone measure it and we’ll talk). The entire problem of evil debate is a case of pot, meet kettle. Both “sides” are being zealots. You Tube comment from Gorzakk Today, 02:09 on 3.1 The Free Will argument is used by Christian believers

 

I disagree with the first point of this comment (the “problem of evil isn’t an argument against or for religion”) directed at the “Design of Christianity” series of videos created by myself and Andrea Roussow for Desteni TV. The problem of evil is indeed the raison d’être’ of religion, especially the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. God is the salvation from evil in the world. Without the existence or subject of evil, theology would not exist. Obviously, a theist does not need a God to explain evil in the world. But there are three ingredients available for solid, theological constructions: God, evil and free will.

It may be strange to see free will casted as a “theological” argument, but as such, but without it, the Church would have no compelling reason for people to join it. Evil exists, according to Christian theology, because human beings have an evil nature, but can choose to be “saved” or “redeemed” through the acceptance of a set of beliefs. Choice, “God” and the existence of evil, are the three most persuasive points religion offers people, and if one takes any of the three points away, them the theological construct collapses. You will either miss the omnipotent authority the religion appeals to, or the magic bullet of “choice” which makes such an appeal meaningful, or give a reason why should continue to live in a brutal, compassionless world filled with cruel, compassionless people.

To the point “Gorzakk” gives about that our claim of a non-existence of God must equal the premise of the nonexistence of evil is pure intellectual dishonesty of the worst kind, because we obviously do not need a “God” to explain the existence of evil, for as “Gorzakk” plainly states, evil “begins and ends” with human activity, which we agree, as we can see  the evidence of evil all around us in the world, while “God” exists on a platform of hope, belief and faith. The reality of evil is not in question, as it exists for the atheist and the believer alike. I would say this: that we say there is something wrong with the religious belief system if it such a house of cards that can be taken apart  so easily.

 

 

2011/01/31 – Doubt

 

When did I first doubt myself? The first memory I possess is when I was a little boy of six years old and involved in my first fight with another kid across the street. It wasn’t much of a fight, and I don’t recall the details, but I was humiliated in front of all the others kids that were watching and I ran inside my house crying my eyes out. I wasn’t hurt or beaten up or anything like that, I was more angry and shocked than anything. Angry at myself for not standing up for myself and shocked that “fighting” existed! I stood behind the screen door with tears on my cheeks and looking at the other kids playing without a care in the world. In a moment, and I didn’t have the words to express it, but I knew I was never going to like those kids who laughed at me. I was something less. For the first time, I felt depression, like the world had gone black and would never be the same for me again.

The secret was out, I was a coward and didn’t want to understand or even care about fighting.

A year later I went to Catholic School and learned about the Bible and Jesus and God and all the saints. I did not Doubt the existence of any of that stuff, since I took it all as something obviously real, since everyone around me considered all of it true. Especially the grown-ups. I loved participating in Mass every morning, listening to the mysterious sounds of Latin falling from the droning lips of the old Father, holding a golden chalice that held the Blood of Christ.

Father Thomas was a young priest who was assigned to my school (St. Vincent de Paul) when I was in the second grade. I thought he looked like a movie star or President Kennedy, young and handsome. I thought it was neat that we had the same last name. Then I realized that there was a Saint Thomas that was one of Jesus’ Apostles.

Then I learned that St. Thomas was also called, “DOUBTing Thomas” because he would not believe that the Lord had come back from the dead unless he could put his fingers into Christ’s wounds. According to the Gospel of John, when Jesus finally appears, Thomas is convinced and says, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus replies to the effect of that it’s cool to believe what you see, but it’s even greater to believe in things not seen.

However, I can excuse Thomas for DOUBTing since how many people come back from the dead. Thomas then was just being common sensical. But I have DOUBTed myself ever since that day when I ran home crying because I let a kid hit me. It is a pattern that I let repeat throughout my life ad nauseam. If there’s a problem, then run away. Or walk away, because somehow, I have programmed myself to do exactly this. I have everything I need to be an effective and directive being, but I accepted and allowed DOUBT destroy all of me. I have allowed DOUBT to give me permission to hate myself, and I don’t know why. It’s crazy.

 

Earlier today I felt like I was falling: literally, falling down some hole into the earth. What brought up that feeling? DOUBT. It’s like DOUBT freezes me in my tracks, makes every step I take forward, I take  a step back. Anyway…

 

Doubt has been my companion throughout all my life. Giving up because of Doubt was my modus operandi as I struggled through life. I didn’t graduate from college because I got involved with an older woman who I ended up marrying because I was “grateful” that a woman wanted to be with me. I walked away from my first real band because I didn’t think they wanted me anymore. I walked away from my wife because I wanted to do something than be a working stiff and a father married to a woman I didn’t love in a small, fucked-up, rural town in southern Ohio. I ended up creating something of my own and of worth when my next band became very popular. After several years I left because again, I didn’t want to do it anymore. Instead of defending my point, I quit. Was it Doubt? I had no doubt as a singer. None. But I wasn’t a musician. And I didn’t believe that I could play well.

Once again, I had doubted myself.

Then I went back to Ohio after leaving LA because I DOUBTed myself in being able to survive in California after my car was stolen. I was taken back by an old girlfriend, but I DOUBTed I loved her because I was more interested in her friend, who was more my “type.” SO I left and went to stay with my sister in Illinois, but I left because I DOUBTed myself there, as well. I couldn’t get a decent job and I was being harassed by the same type of kids I though I had left behind in high school. So I went back to my first wife so I could just have a place to live.

I had written and drew cartoons and worked on them to find a publisher. I felt I was getting better, but I still wasn’t satisfied. I did get a rejection latter from Kitchen Sink Press saying that my work was within the top 5% of the submissions they received, but couldn’t “take a flyer” on unknown talent at the time. He also said to keep submitting. But did I? No.

I was tired of being out of work, so I landed a truck driving job and spent the next two years away from home. It was pretty nice. But after two years I was fired because I had too many accidents. I was relieved because I didn’t believe I was a good truck driver, anyway. I was planning to leave my wife anyway, so I settled in another town. I was trying to get back together with the girl I came back to Ohio to, but she got mad at me when I told her that my wife had gotten pregnant. So I was all alone, trying to get my cartoons written and drawn. Drawing wasn’t a problem. I just didn’t have anything to say. So I began to Doubt myself as a comic strip artist. Eventually, I stopped drawing altogether. I gave up. I had nothing to say…

After two years of being alone and working minimum-waged jobs, I went back to my wife again. I just wanted love in my life. I didn’t realize that I wouldn’t any such thing from this woman or my children, just as I didn’t get any love from my parents. So I always searched for it… never finding it for long. Always disappeared over time. After another two years, I left the wife for good. Why, because I couldn’t stand her and wanted a single life again.

Of course, I didn’t meet anyone for a year, but then I met and went out with two wonderful women who both ended up dumping me. Both times I could see the end coming, which was interesting. I had Doubted my ability to “hold on” to them.

So I worked for years climbing up the ladder in the local print shops in town. I got to be pretty proficient within my skill set and was finally feeling good about myself, making money and eating out all the time. I eventually married again, but I DOUBTed the marriage would last because I secretly promised myself as soon as I wanted out, I would leave. After six years, I did just that. I should have left after four years, but I wanted to give her “another chance.” I left her because I wanted to get back with a former girlfriend who I thought wanted me back. It was a great surprise when I found out she had no idea that I wanted her again. She had no intention to get back with me. So I gave up in trying to get her back, and I  just went on…

I fought against the IRS because I found a flaw and an argument in the tax system. I fought for several years before I gave up. I DOUBTed that I could take on the system and win.

Eventually, I met two women on the internet dating sites. Very similar in nature and temperament. I ended up dumping them both. I Doubted that I wanted to be with them.

 

I got a job at a print shop that paid fairly well, but Doubt crept back into me because I had to do the work of three people some nights, and I kept making mistakes. The Doubt I experienced ended up costing me my job.

I ended up being out of work for six weeks before getting a very relaxing job at the Library. Exactly what I needed. Then, Desteni. Ka BOOM! I entered process, and the rest is history, as they say.

Doubt sometimess still plagues me. I can’t stand the Doubt anymore. Doubt has been with me for a long time, and in writing it all out, I can see why. I suppose the reason for Doubting some things I do is because everything in the past that I have tried has eventually turned into a fuckup, and I mean EVERYTHING. A legacy of failure. Which is what Society demands. But after working with the Desteni material, I am fostering much more self-belief, and it is quite a refreshing way to live, compared to my early, Doubt-filled days.

2011/01/18 – The Divine Plan?

I used to read all Neale Donald Walsch’s “Conversation With God” books back in the day. Loved them. It didn’t bother me that every time I popped into the New Age section of my local Borders or Barnes and Nobles I was assaulted by the merchandising colossus it became with the attendant CwG calendars, CwG notebooks, CwG cards, CwG meditation books and CWG videos and greeting cards and whatnot. I suppose I first got into the CWG books because I had read channeled material since the late 1980s and thought there was something to the things these “spirits” were trying to tell us. I wanted to absorb the information that was presented and do something with it, and I was looking for answers that were not forthcoming: why was the world such a horrible place for most people, and why did it seem that the good was no match for evil. There didn’t seem to be an answer out there that could change anything in any meaningful way at all. Only methodologies of self-improvement or being “at peace” in a fucked-up world.  By the time reached The New Revelations book around 2002 or so, I had already considered the idea that whoever or whatever was behind channeled books like Conversations with God were deliberately not telling the entire story, or even a story that made much sense.

King of the Angels: Kirael

I just couldn’t quite put my finger on it until I sent out for a book called Guide to the Unseen Self by Fred Sterling and “Kirael,” a “seventh-dimensional being who claimed to be King of the Angels. I listened to Sterling’s webcasts online from his Honolulu Church of Light, and he would always allow “Kirael” to speak. The topic of the day was the coming of the Great Shift , some sort of evolution of consciousness that would change everything. So I ordered the book due to the title, the Guide to the Unseen Self. But after I read it, I was totally disgusted. Were these beings twisting my melon, or what. There was absolutely NOTHING but recycled New Age – New Thought hooey. If i hadn’t spent 20 years researching esoterica, I might have been fooled by what was being presented was an original, pace setting book. I think I actually threw the book away. I felt like I had been duped. But I was too frightened to fully accept that there was some sort of deception going on. It remained a lingering doubt. The only reason I kept at it was by virtue of a single White Light experience that couldn’t deny. But I sure as hell doubted.

The Joker in the Pack: Crimson Circle’s Tobias

Kirael and other channelers promised the Great Shift was near. The Crimson Circle site which promulgated Geoffery Thoppe’s spirit guide,”Tobais,” promised  their followers a “Quantum Leap” would occur for years before stating in 2007 that the Quantum Leap (of consciousness) had indeed occurred. Only it was the “Old Energy” being removed in favor of the “New Energy” which would somehow provide “new potentials” for beings. I began following Crimson Circle in 1999, shortly after it appeared online. Again, it took years of going through all the extended New Age baggage and symbols before I got sick of it as well.

I remember the day I stopped taking Tobias’ message seriously. I was sitting in my wife’s room listening to the latest CC podcast when Tobias suddenly described a dimensional scene of spirits feeding off the energies of those present within the gathering. “It’s okay. Let them feed,” he slowly intoned. I was thinking to myself, “What the hell is that about? Why are these guides allowing entities to feed off of people?” I listened to one more podcast and then stopped. It felt pointless, and I didn’t trust any of it anymore.

Which brings me back to Walsch. Over on the Spirit Library site, he has a running blog; the latest is something called “Way to the Soul.” In it he makes a remarkable claim:

The problem with Life is that we do not understand it. And that it why it has become so problematical.

Very little in Life is working the way it should be working, do you know that? I mean, it wasn’t meant to be this disruptive, this disjointed, this disappointing. It was never intended to be this difficult or this injurious or this challenging.

“It wasn’t meant to be this difficult?” You see, that’s what I thought, too! Surely this hell hole we laughingly call planet Earth wasn’t part of God’s Divine Plan? What in the hell are all these alleged ascended do-gooders doing with making this world a better place?

Short answer: nothing. They talk to certain people and some of them become fabulously well-to-do. Like Mr. Walsch. Who after all these years talking to and writing down the transcendent wisdom of Almighty God,  and he doesn’t have any more of a clue to do about this world than you do. If you return to the CwG books, you will why; because there’s really nothing there but recycles platitudes and recombinant and discredited spiritual teachings. It should bother you that God is so derivative and lame. And inconsequential.

2010/10/22 – Deceived by Belief

The Persistence of Consciousness is one of the major beliefs of the New Age and other strands of modern metaphysics. This belief proposes that consciousness continues to exist after death. In Ancient Greece over 2500 years ago in the West and centuries earlier in the East under emergent Brahmanism, the idea arose that a single principle was behind and supported reality. The Divine Mind. A Celestial Consciousness so vast and encompassing, all objects, including you and me, move through its endless halls as its thoughts.

The Divine Mind

The history and metaphysics of the Divine Mind has given being who have heard of it, a foundation to rest upon the myth of consciousness, and the parade of philosophers going back to Xenophanes,  complained that gods were not necessary to explain the natural world and that men merely fashioned gods after their own image. He remarked that if horses or oxen possessed hands, they would create gods after their own image as well. Against the Pythagoreans, Xenophanes said the doctrine of reincarnation could not be verified since no man had ever proven such a process to exist and thus was just an opinion based on hearsay to be rejected.

What Xenophanes wanted was a God without human qualities. A god that was perfection and singular. But what other qualities could Xenophanes God would possess?

For one, this God would have Perfect Knowledge of all things. Another attribute would be that this God was immovable and within this motionless state and without any effort, caused all other things to move with It’s Mind. Xenophanes’ God was a God of Supreme Consciousness, much like the deity Brahman which had long been worshipped in post-aryan India and very similar to the rational and organizing knowledge of the Logos of Heraclitus or the divine intellect of the Nous of Anaxagoras. There was never any direct experiences of the Divine Mind. The philosophers presented it as a theory.

If a theory sounds reasonable enough, people tend to believe in the theory as truth. For example. many proponents of the Theory of Evolution miss the theory part and wholeheartedly embrace Darwin’s idea as fact. This essentially human talent of confusing fact with fancy was even known to philosophers like Xenophanes who, ironically, just went along and did the same thing of producing a theory of the Divine Mind that sounded logical enough to later influence Plato, Aristotle in constructing their own imaginary systems along the same lines, repeated and modified and elaborated upon up to the present day.

The reflexive nature of  consciousness would seem to be limited by its own mechanics and properties. projecting itself into infinite space, magnified into titanic proportions and reflected back to self as an image of what some have called “God,” who would then be the mind looking at itself from the void.

Over the centuries, various philosophers have tried to take seriously the conception of a Divine Mind and map out its attributes and powers. But they had one, little problem. They were just making it up as they went along! That is, essentially, the problem with the philosophy of the mind (and the Abrahamic religions) within its metaphysical aspect. Doomed ideas floating about within the infinite oceans of consciousness, unprovable abstractions taken as truths by generation after generation, given life through texts and academic traditions.

New Age Beliefs

The New Age has been taken in by this myth of the persistence of consciousness. The idea of the Divine Mind comes directly from New Thought tenets formed in the middle of the 19th century by Phineas Parkhurst Quimby and later by his former patient and student, Mary Baker Eddy, who went on to found the Christian Science movement. But it was the Indian sage Swami Vivekananda, Rudolph Steiner, Helena Blavatsky’s and Alice Bailey’s channeled material and others who provided the foundation of the myth of the Divine Mind for the modern New Age Movement. Figures such as Jane Roberts and JZ Knight became famous and 1987′s Harmonic Convergence burst onto America’s media landscape to such an effect, that be the end of the 20th century, the New Age was America’s third largest religion.

In the 21st century, the New Age has become known for its cheesy commoditization of spirituality. The New Age belief that Indigo Children are special, exceptional children with ‘spiritually-evolved” natures, has made lots of money off of books and videos despite the absence of any empirical evidence that such children actually exist. The term, Indigo Child, was first coined in 1982, by Nancy Ann Tappe in her book, Understanding Your Life Through Color. [1] How did Tappe  come to write her book? On the”belief that color influences every aspect of life” [2] From this belief, a whole market was formed that is unnecessarily affecting the lives of an untold amount of children who are going to grow up thinking that they are some master from a planet that’s going to deliver World Peace. Hey, that would be nice, but it’s just another way beliefs can fuck things up for everybody.

An older belief that nobody can ever prove (Thanks, Xenophanes), is that once we die, we will enter a spiritual plane filled with enlightened beings and angels and masters and whatnot. In the New Age movement, this idea comes chiefly from channeled material. The problem the New Agers don’t seem to have noticed, is that the positive-sounding, mystically – delivered words such as, “Love is the greatest force in the universe,” come from a place where we cannot verify the truth of such claims. These “beings” also claim (among other things) that Ascension of beings from the physical to the supernatural actually happens. But we have never seen this take place with our own eyes. The channeled messages propose a belief of a spiritual realm that cannot be proven, especially by the channels themselves, who have no recollection what the being channeling said. No recollection and no verification. When one realizes that most channelers receive training for years (like Abraham’s Ester Hicks), one can’t help being suspicious. Maybe what’s channeling is the result of  a split personality. Maybe what they’re saying is what the channeler wants to believe. Maybe none of it is real. Maybe we create myths to believe in and amuse us so we don’t have to take responsibility for the world. Maybe what we are talking to is our own reflected consciousness. How unfortunate for the believers; they were deceived by belief.

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[1] http://www.skepdic.com/indigo.html

[2] http://www.sentienttimes.com/04/feb_mar_04/color.htm

2010/09/16 – The Failure of Philosophy: the Legacy of the Sophists

The sophists have gotten a bad rap thanks to the successful smear campaign of Plato and Aristotle. They were actually the first professionally paid teachers in Classical Greek times. The Pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles (ca. 490–430 BC) lived just before the sophists did charge money to people who wanted to obtain “Divine Wisdom,” but the sophists weren’t metaphysicians…they were orators and persuasive speakers who were indispensable to the Democratic political life of Athens.

Protagoras (“Man is the Measure of All Things”) was a master of oratory and rhetoric. It is said he was the first to call himself a “Sophist.” For a fee he taught young men how to argue a point by taking the `’weakest part of that point and make it the strongest.” (In the Phaedo by Plato you may recall Socrates facing the same charge in the trial which sentenced him to death). Protagoras is represented as putting forward the relativistic thesis as itself an objective truth; everyone is a measure of the truth of their beliefs, whether or not they believe that they are. We can really only state that which appears to be so. Protagoras noticed that different people experiencing the same event perceived the same event in different ways, thus he claimed knowledge is relative to the knower.

Another sophist was Gorgias. Gorgias, a Sicilian ambassador who came to Athens in the middle of the fifth century who had a nihilistic approach towards knowledge which was essentially different from Protagoras. Where Protagoras claimed nothing could be known and truth was a relative and subjective thing, Gorgias claimed that nothing was real. Never mind proving the existence of the Gods, he said, nothing in existence can be ascertained, knowledge cannot be shared and the only thing left to do was to practice the art of persuasion of the sophist.

Where Protagoras said everything should be taken for what it seems to be, Gorgias claimed that there was no reason at all to assume things exist in the way we perceive it does. Gorgias and other rational skeptics held that their position was reasonable due to the human being’s capacity for making mistakes. If mistakes can be made, is it possible that everything that can be conceived by the human being is a mistake?

Since the world was full of change, what could really be said of it? One could only offer reasons for the “truth” of something, yet the reasons still could be false. Thus the skeptics like Gorgias, using  an inexorable logic claimed that the best one could hope for was to state how things “seem,” but never arrive at certainty because there existed no valid criterion to measure anything, only reasons given and imaginative conjecture.

And there was Cratylus, mentioned in passing by both Plato and Aristotle, apparently was an admirer of the Pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus and his notion that existence consisted of perpetual change. Again, since things move, change, come into existence and pass away, what use could knowledge be? Cratylus was so convinced of the worthlessness of knowledge that he took his own teaching to the extreme, refusing to even speak, content only to “move his finger” this way or that.

The sophist’s belief of the relativity of truth, their intellectual skepticism that nothing could ultimately be known and their pessimism of human nature (not to mention the sophist’s maddening charge of the infinite regress of uncertainty) were considered by Socrates, Plato and later Aristotle, as a metaphysical and conceptual anarchy that had to be opposed and overturned. Thus, Plato developed his Theory of Forms and Aristotle constructed his Prime Mover as the foundation of the of existence and the validity of knowledge (and overturning the sophists for 2500 years in the process). The mysticism of Plato and the academics of Aristotle solidified the and gave legitimacy to the notion that reality could be explained by rational means alone. While the sophists had some pretty interesting ideas and were not afraid of admitting that there was a limitation to knowledge, they became victims of the time. After Athens revolted after the overthrow of the Spartan – aligned “Thirty Tyrants,” the sophists, including Socrates – being blamed for the downfall of Athens, were hunted down, tried and sentenced to death. The sophists were not “Good Guys,” as they sold their knowledge to anyone willing to pay, using deceits and conceits in training the young men of Athens to be skillful, amoral politicians without considering anything else. They chose to rightly believe in nothing, seeking only to enrich themselves. But they did point out the Illusion of Knowledge, and dared to say what thinkers like Socrates, Plato and Aristotle must have thought at times – that the objects of their knowledge were just the figments of their fleeting imaginations. The sophists receive one point for wondering aloud what is profitable trying to guess at what can’t be known, but then pretend you know the answer?

I posted all that to say this: I agree with the sophists that knowledge is limited by an infinite regress of predicates and premises. This strongly implies determinism and denies free will. For myself, free will is a social theory that can’t be proven because of the forces and feedback of the environment and society places one in a specific box of determinants. For example, if one were born into a family in the poorest country in the world, those forces are likely far too strong to exercise enough “free will” to become a highly trained physicist. Especially so if one’s physical body has been compromised by malnutrition.

What practical value is this intellectual process where minds attempt to replace common sense with mental projections we ‘think’ are ‘important?’ The failure of Philosophy is that it has never produced a practical application in world that is best for all. Instead we imagine, ponder, project and reflect on matters we will never get to the bottom of, and surely, when speaking of Philosophy, the point hasn’t moved in over 2500 years. I agree with Hegel’s observation that all philosophy travels in a (if I may add; pointless) circle.

An Infinite Regression of Premises Yield an Infinite Outflow

That digression aside, once infinite regress is taken seriously (thanks to the sophists and the skeptics that followed their lead), it suggests that no ultimate foundation of knowledge exists. It suggests no First Cause, Universal or Divine Laws will ever be found. It suggests no metaphysical force behind ‘morality’ will be found, and Free Will is confined to its rightful place as a dubious theological concept. Infinite causality destroys the concept of a free will, for if free will is to exist (as a principle or ‘law’) it would have to exist absolutely. Deciding on what sandwich to order on a menu is not free will. It’s fuzzy logic. Should we also assign free will to a washing machine?

How do you know in fact, that what you believe is true, is correct?

2010/08/29 – St. Paul’s Bluff

St. Paul wouldn’t lie to you. Or would he?

Whether Jesus existed or not is immaterial to the problem everyone has who makes theological claims based on “Faith,” or belief. Simply put, we were not there when the accounts were written, nor were we there when the books of the bible were assembled in a process which lasted centuries. What has been left to us is the legacy of theological “stories”  by men who claim what they have received is “true.” But they weren’t there either, so they are passing a story that is based on a claim of “truth” which can never be verified.

The clever men who realized this where also the men who derived great power in making the unverifiable story “true” to others. Thus Christianity became a religion based on “Faith,” that is, based on a story which must taken as true. The person or persons who wrote as the apostle “Paul” understood this weakness, so clever brains that spoke as “Paul” made it a strength. [1]

It was quite a trick. For if one is to hold a belief, one must believe in something. A belief cannot exist in a void without a context. “Paul” admits this in Corinthians where he bluffs his way through potential objections while making a fatal weakness of his argument into its greatest strength at the same time.

“[11] For whether I, or they, so we preach, and so you have believed.”

Here we see “Paul” admitting to his role in supplying the context for those who have listened to his story.

“[12] Now if Christ be preached, that he arose again from the dead, how do some among you say, that there is no resurrection of the dead?”

What Paul asks here is why, since they have been given the story presented as “true,” why are the Corinthians (or some of them) doubting the resurrection, or in other words, why are they still insisting that what’s dead stays that way? Here Paul is in serious trouble, as his implausible story has to contend with the magnitude of common sense and the laws of nature, where dead things never come back to life.

“[13] But if there be no resurrection of the dead, then Christ is not risen again. [14] And if Christ be not risen again, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain.”

I have heard this particular sermon many times. For all of “Paul’s” majestic bluffing, nobody seems to remember that he was not a witness to Jesus’ resurrection, either. “Paul” is guilty of relating a story as true about an incident he which he did not experience. If the Corinthians objected to “Paul’s” lack of verification, there is no mention of it in history. In the next verse, however, we possibly have the most honest statement made in this epistle:

“[15] Yea, and we are found false witnesses of God: because we have given testimony against God, that he hath raised up Christ; whom he hath not raised up, if the dead rise not again.”

Indeed. “Paul” claims that the validity of his entire mission is based on the impossibility that he would be a “false witness before God” and lie about such a thing. But all it would take to pull off the bluff is to not care if God was watching you. I mean, wouldn’t it be a thing if God actually punished those who lied in His name?

My question is why haven’t more people called “Paul’s Bluff” and demand that he justify his belief? Maybe the Corinthians did. We’ll never know. But by making the weakest part of “Paul’s” story (“Yes, it’s a crazy story that I can’t verify) into the strongest part, (but I wouldn’t be a false witness in front of God. Honest!”), “Paul” bluffs his way into acceptance through appealing to another equally unverifiable source, namely, “God” Himself.  People have bought Paul’s bluff ever since, but I say it’s time for believers to raise or fold, because I’m ready to put my cards on the table… and I’m calling.
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[1] I use brackets to indicate my position that Paul was not a historical figure, but rather a mouthpiece created to place words of doctrine by others intent on spreading the Primitive Christian religion beyond Palestine.

2010/06/18 – 12 Reincarnation, Dharma and Karma as Sources for the LOA