Author: White Whale

If you’re like most people, you have never heard of Jainism, which is a sect typically folded within “Hinduism”, and in which all life is sacred.  They believe all life is sentient, even plants.  Different types of life have a different number of senses.  Plants, if memory serves, have one, which is quite consistent with Cleve Backsters finding.  They are not oblivious to the world around them.  They can’t see, and can’t think, but they can feel.  Just think back to Backster’s initial finding, in which the plant more or less got excited when it was watered, in a manner not entirely unlike dogs when they are about to go for a walk.

The ultimate act of charity in this creed is to starve yourself to death, so that you do not live at the expense of ANY other form of life.  Their holy men sweep the roads ahead of them, lest they inadvertently kill an insect.

You can read more here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/jainism/

Maybe take a break from the news for a bit.  Learn something new.

You could do a simple experiment in which a plant is hooked up to a polygraph machine, and a researcher gets a series of notes, 5 of which say “Do not burn the plant”, and a sixth of which say Do burn the plant.  You could randomize them per whatever protocol is currently in vogue.  You could even put the researcher in a separate room, from which no conceivable hormonal transmitter could emerge to affect the plant, although I think it might be important for the researcher to be able to SEE the plant.  You could ignite the flame remotely.

I think the results would be strong and consistent, and utterly inconsistent with current biological paradigms of life.

As I say often with regard to our political world., there will come a time, hopefully, when we wake up and wonder how so many people could have been so stupid for so long.

Christ famously taught that “all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.”  What needs to be pointed out is that we need not revile ourselves, we need not hate ourselves or others.  Certainly, we need not judge others.  What we need to understand is that if we were already relatively perfected, we would not exist on this planet at all.  The simple fact that someone is HERE, ALREADY implies a relative lack of spiritual development.  This is a remedial education camp.

Sin is separation from God, which happens when we fall short of hearing the call of the best within us, when we cloud our true perceptions with rationalizations, and emotional coverups, to justify doing what is expedient but not right.  Life on this planet is already separation from God, who is much harder to see here.

These are my intuitions.  I want to be clear that I base them in part on experiences I have had, but in part as well on things I have simply read.

Everyone should know this name. Watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGRluepFwdg

What you will see there is a simple, EASILY replicable experiment WHICH CANNOT BE EXPLAINED WITHIN A MATERIALISTIC PARADIGM.

What so-called skeptics do with data like this is not refute it–they can’t, as there is no conceivable explanation for this within traditional paradigms–but ignore it.  They have successfully ignored this work for 40 years or more.

Why? What is the benefit to thinking of man as machine?  What advantage accrues to anyone in defending an idea that is not just empirically wrong, but pernicious morally?

Myth Busters apparently replicated his research.  So too can any contemporary researcher with simple courage and curiosity.

I want to be clear: most large paradigmatic shifts have come from very small outliers, things which could not be worked into existing theories, which could not be explained by existing theories.  In almost all cases, existing theories were modified with radically new CONTEXTS.  One could almost say they were supplemented.

Newton did not become wrong when Einstein proposed General Relativity, nor did General Relativity lose its usefulness when it was falsified as a final explanation by Bell’s Theorem.

I remember Carl Sagan talking about the significance of how Mars moved within Ptolemaic astronomical models.  They could make everything but Mars work.  But in the end, a heliocentric view of the solar system had to be adopted to explain, what?  The DATA.  The stuff which REAL scientists rely on, rather than fashionable prejudice.

Einstein predicted light would bend around the sun.  It did, and we adopted his theory.  He predicted that quantum theory would imply information transfer at faster than light speeds, which within his model were impossible.  He was wrong.  Such transfers have been measured.

Science is in theory always advancing, always willing to kill its intellectual children–to which concrete human beings are in psychologically comprehensible ways quite attached–in search of a better idea.

Who out there has the courage to pursue this avenue of investigation?

From here  I can’t see it, even though it should have gone up, so I’m reposting.

Just as many children would have died had he used the two pistols as
originally reported.  The worst school massacre in American history
happened nearly 100 years ago, when someone bombed a school.
 
Banning
“assault rifles” will accomplish NOTHING, just as it accomplished
nothing the LAST TIME they were banned.  This is all about the
government eroding, one by one, all the rights which constitute
freedom. 
The Constitution exists to PROTECT US not just from one another–that is properly primarily the role of State and Local law–but
to constrain a Federal Government which was seen as a necessary evil,
and whose primary role was the protection of the United States as a
whole, and regulating the relations of the sundry States.

There is ZERO evidence indicating ANY of these laws will accomplish anything meaningful.  On the contrary, gun bans in many other countries have led to ESCALATED
violence.  Britain has over 3 times as many violent crimes per capita
as we do.  Chicago sees hundreds of murders annually.  There are
hundreds of millions of firearms in circulation, and if they are banned,
it will only affect law abiding citizens.

By DESIGN these
laws ONLY hurt law abiding citizens.  They will do NOTHING to curtail
crime, and I am of the mind that ALL limits on gun ownership need to be
opposed because it is clear that the end game of Obama and his cronies
is to vitiate the Second Amendment outright, which is a necessary step
on the road to the global tyranny powerful elites are trying to foist on
us simply because they want to and think they can.

Generally speaking, they seem to censor all posts to do with Global Warming and any editorials written by celebrities determined to exercise their mediocrity in public.  Matthew Modine is a celebrity, so I assume it will not get through, so I’m reposting it here. Here’s the original article.

If someone is trying to rape you, you WANT something “specifically
designed to kill people” don’t you? Or is the concept of self defense
something that never enters your mind? Why do cops carry guns? Because
they are effective.

You seem barely able to see 1789 through the mists of time. What about,
say, the year 900 in Spain, when only Muslims were allowed to carry
swords? What about 1650 in Japan, when only Samurai were allowed to
carry swords? What about most of British history, where only elites and
the military were allowed to carry guns? What about the Jim Crow era
in the American South where only white people were allowed to own guns?

History is clear that a monopoly on the effective use of force leads to
and supports tyranny. That fact had not changed in 2,000 years, much
less 200.

Logically, if there is a psycholiterary field of study, there ought to be practitioners.  These would be people who prescribe art.  Could art museums be segregated by emotive outcome?  Could literature generally?  Music?

I think everyone should watch “The secret life of plants”, which should be a part of all core curriculums, or at least the part dealing with Cleve Backster’s work.

In moving through life, there is really no more important initial question than whether we are machines happening to possess apparent sentience, or actually conscious beings which interact directly with our surrounding universe. 

Once a firmly positive, and scientifically founded context of connetion is established, the way forward becomes subjective and unique to each actual in-dividual. Psycholiterary therapists can help with this.

I reject self pity.

I recognize that most happiness comes from choosing my work, or from accepting work which chooses me.

I dedicate myself to cultivating an ever-increasing capacity to take large pleasure in small things.

I resolve to regularly move between abstraction and personal observation, and to seek both the most concise abstractions, and the most perceptive and specific observations.

I resolve to always recognize that all reality exists on a continuum, and to place all observations in context.

I resolve to always remember that Acting For does not necessarily equate to Acting To.

I think a better word might be “effortlessness”, as in “unable to make an effort”. Or perhaps “optionlessness”.

If you think about it, if you are mowing your lawn by yourself, you are help-less.  No one is helping you.  But no one NEEDS to help you.  You can do it by yourself.

Or powerlessness, although given that I recognize both qualitative and quantitative power I would submit that you are never powerless when conscious.

As I think about it, it just seems to me that the word, itself, weakens people.

All of us have within us the capacity for irrational anger.  I say irrational, because the only rational use of anger is when you are actually under attack.  Often, though, we will be angry about one thing–one valid cause of anger–but wind up instead directing at someone or something else that has nothing to do with it.

I love babies, but for some weird reason I occasionally feel violent towards them.  I think it is because they are so small and innocent, and I was small and innocent once, and it got me hurt.  It’s a deep rooted psychological thing.

But all of us have a shadow side.  All of us are potentially capable of irrational violence, violence which appeases some inner demon.

Look at the success of the most recent “Texas Chainsaw Massacre”.  All I know of it is that they showed images on normal evening TV of a women bound and gagged, and a chainsaw poised to cut off her arm while she screamed.  This passes for “entertainment”: the solipsistic consumption of the pain of others.  For such people, some inner recess of their souls says that “what is out there, doesn’t matter”. They are alone inside.  Violence does that.

And the thing is in 3D.  Tell me this is not tweaking some young and impressionable minds.

I’m off topic. Ahimsa, to me–and I feel I’ve said this before, but I am not sure here–is the eradication both of pleasure in violence, and in irrational violence. The two are roughly the same thing, with the difference that I think all people are born prone to the second, and only eradicate it through constant vigilence.  I do not feel it need mean the eradication of violence outright.