Baddogma's Other Meta Cafe- Polite Discussions About Scientific Mysticism and General Weirdness

a reply to: TEOTWAWKIAIFF

The light was way up there as the orange ball was pretty close to the ground (around 2,000 feet).

Weird to see both...

a reply to: TEOTWAWKIAIFF

You are in that flow.
I love that you know

a reply to: Reverbs

I was trying to wrap my head around your question and then I remembered you're like my brother, and son, in that you can picture stuff vividly. I can't. My subconscious doesn't 'show' me anything, that faculty is missing or faulty or something or other. That's where the painting and the such-like come into it for me.

It's not so much that I don't think in words anymore or as much though that's certainly part of it. It's more that I am aware that the information that I am receiving isn't in words and that I don't have to turn it into words to understand it unless I want to communicate it. And that that process, as with any system of translation, doesn't always perfectly express the original information perfectly. You know, you sit in a green, open space, a few tree, the sun shining, a gentle breeze and just look, watch how the light interacts with life. The stiller you are, the more you just silently absorb, nuances manifest themselves and the tiny becomes audible then visible. You get to feeling that this is what we are all about, then our stomach rumbles or our mouth gets dry and it's time to move on.

A big thing for me, in the psychosis, retrospectively, was the literalisation of metaphor. I think I have mentioned before that, during that episode, I at one time was desperately trying to catch a fledgling pigeon that I thought was the Holy Spirit. It is somewhat hilarious, feel free to laugh as you picture that one. Even doing it I knew it was silly but I also had 'received' a 'message' to nurture the Spirit, and then, lo and behold, this poor bird had clearly failed to launch right in my church yard. Surely this was a sign, lol. Two days later a cat got it, I found it decapitated and enviscerated. I had utterly failed in my quest and the Holy Spirit was no more.

Metaphors are a communication tool, a way of sharing meaning in short hand, just as pictographs are and some of them are embedded, we react without knowing to a certain set of stimuli because we have been doing so for generation upon generation. The written word has enabled transfer of knowledge over time and space but it remains supplemental. It is a purely human thing, our environment isn't. Our environment is without words, and so is our relationship with it. We have this capacity to preserve information beyond our own life span but, in terms of survival, it's also what is killing us because in doing so we abstract ourselves from our environment, words become barriers to hide behind or attack from.

Perhaps?

Long story short though, for me it's being able to be still. For such a long time I couldn't do that. I've lost some stuff. My memory for some things is non-existent, I tend to assimilate information without the details cluttering up the forefront however. Swings and roundabouts. As a unit, a whole, I'm pretty well-rounded, balanced and somewhat content. Old age and senility aside, I have absolutely no concerns about losing my mind ever again. I'll always be able to find it and before anyone else does.

I'm watching American Horror (season two) which is set in an asylum. It's really good, I'm totally in there with them. We've spent millennia spreading that kind of darkness, the kind that crushes individuality and difference. I think that a healthy system is diverse, the Western way of thinking has only achieved dominance by crushing diversity everywhere it meets it and that sort of system renders difference fearful to the different thinker. Being here, with you guys and all the people I've crossed paths with on ATS over the years, helped me address that fearfulness and that really I am just learning to live with me now. I am no less fighty but I am far less reactive to the world in general than I was. I can choose my battles now, and as the I Ching keeps telling me, I know all that I need to know to act now.
That's definately something. And I like me, I haven't always been able to say that. So I think we get samesies there. Differently. That's the beautiful thing though. It doesn't need to be the same same, that's thoroughly boring, but enough so that we can all lift each other onto our shoulders and share the view. See further.

a reply to: TEOTWAWKIAIFF

Talking of views - your corner of the world is utterly stunning. I love mountains. Have no desire to climb them just because they are there but they do something to my heart, make it flutter a little, tiny wing beats as though it wants to fly up there and look down. I didn't know that about myself until I went to Crete. I think that there is something hardwired into us that tells us that the mountains offers safe harbour in turbulent times and it was that that my heart responded to.

If you think about the 'old days', when settlement was temporary, largely seasonal state of affairs, the role of the leader and or shaman was to protect the people from predictable dangers. Dangers that came with signs that could be read and responded to. Failure to do so would result in death for the leader if not from the disaster itself at the hands of their own people for failure to serve their purpose. Failure to predict a flood, or drought are the problems of permanent settlement. Nomads move on long before such threats arise and because they are generally following their food, have the benefit of the animal's keener senses of impending danger. It's probable that we never had to learn about the signs that appear in relation to earthquakes and volcanos until we settled permanently, built towns and cities on sporadically unstable ground. You don't learn the rhythms of your environment if you don't think that you have to. If something is rare and irregular you fail to absorb it's meaning, until you notice that it keeps calling back. Then you know it's important.

You could be standing there in the middle of the ball of light," says Friedemann Freund of NASA's SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, US. "Maybe your hair would be electrified, you might have a halo like a saint. But it doesn't burn anything. You might feel a bit funny, but you wouldn't be harmed."

This is what it would feel like to find yourself in the middle of an earthquake light.

These lights are a plasma discharge that happens when a particular type of rock is under stress and builds up an electric charge, Freund says. "We think that when we push the rocks together very fast, the charge is relieved through a plasma discharge up from the rock."

They can come in many different shapes, forms, and colours.

Coseismic earthquake lights, which happen during an earthquake, are bursts of light coming out of the ground over a space of a few kilometres. They rise 200-300m into the night sky in a fraction of a second, one after another.

In recent years, the abundancy of security cameras has led to beautiful videos of earthquake lights.

"Some of the best records are in Peru," Freund says. "A friend at a local university secured footage when a magnitude 8 earthquake hit the south of Lima. The shock waves were racing through, and as the later waves arrived there was an explosion of lights."

www.bbc.co.uk...

On 12 November 1988, a bright purple-pink globe of light was recorded moving through the sky along the St Lawrence River near the city of Quebec, 11 days before a powerful quake.

Seconds before the 6 April 2009 L’Aquila, Italy, earthquake, people reported seeing 10 cm high flames of light flickering above the stone-paved Francesco Crispi Avenue in the town’s historical city centre.

www.sciencelearn.org.nz...

I'm not saying that that is what your lights are - how could I know, I wasn't there - but being observant, paying attention to your environment, listening to it and understanding what it is saying, including the human element has more to do with shamanism than the psychedelic drugs do. They can only enhance what is already there. All things considered, I'd be surprised if there weren't any lights over, and rising from, the inlet, there's a lot of friction going on around there, 'lights' are the product of that. So are earthquakes, which means for me, that while the light can be whatever you want it to be until otherwise identified, it could also be a sign of stress occuring beneath your feet, so if the lights do intensify, don't just stand there and wag your fist defiantly, unless you're on safe ground.

a reply to: Reverbs

So I've read up on the history of philosophy and I think/hope I got a better understanding now what you might have meant with simulation theory.
I'm still not convinced that's what's happening, but I apologise I brushed it off like that.

a reply to: KilgoreTrout

Talking about the literalization of metaphore. And me too with the psychosis or whatever.. Nothing doesnt have to mean anything. But if nothing means anything we are all doomed lol. psyche cant be under constant stess without release.

back to why I dont like words.. words are metaphors. angles away from truth. But the best thing about being here with you guys is our relationship and understanding does go beyond the words. We have history of relativity that is sort of like gravity that we can see each other better.

Trust is a very important thing.
in math people trust the mechanics.. there are proofs of the more intense concepts..
Trust in people with abstract thoughts is not provable' except through community over time.

or in other words LOVE.

but its too simple a symbol, for such a connected diffuse power.

and I do so much love that you get it.
Especially from both sides of sanity.

originally posted by: Peeple
a reply to: Reverbs

So I've read up on the history of philosophy and I think/hope I got a better understanding now what you might have meant with simulation theory.
I'm still not convinced that's what's happening, but I apologise I brushed it off like that.

"simulation theory" are two words.
I think I remember that you like the idea of information being at the base of reality.

To me that is correct, but I wonder why you think that.
?

Love you Peeps.


quantum mechanics is seeming to say gravity cant collapse waves... lol. We are still seemingly stuck at either information or consciousness "deciding" reality.
I feal like artsy me should call it realism instead of reality.

a reply to: Reverbs

I'm actually nowhere near being convinced of or having faith in any theory or thought system. I guess I'm agnostic in every way, but not by choice but by experience.
And I was talking with Tzar Chasm in another thread (I'm too lazy to find that now) where I realised I can't even define what information is to me. Because it's on one hand the very materialistic "state of existence" but also the potential including the plan the "thing" has for what it wants to be if it materialises.
And the "plan" I believe is largely in what working relation it wants to stand with everything else. Like with DNA where the cell is mostly the same but if it's a liver or a muscle is decided by what system it's embeded into.

What I mostly don't like about Plato and descendants is that concept of organisation being achieved by a superiour intelligence, that's just not how I see it. There's no outside organizer, there's just a certain harmony because everything with the weight of every potential thing behind it becomes "real" because of the push and pull of the other things and potential it has a relationship with, which is basically everything, just maybe not immediate but 2nd, 3rd, ... level.

The thing with QM and the wave collapse is to me just a mechanism of measurements. It's that "less than 1*10^-43seconds" (I believe or was it -34?) problem that's a #ing epical (I mean long where a lot is happening) time for a quanta. And then you measure it which reduces t to 0 and that is the only thing that collapses, the "observed time interval".

a reply to: KilgoreTrout

We have very opposite feelings about a lot of things.
I come from the Chiemsee and the mountains, the alps in my case are a place of adventure and mostly danger. They're definitely no safe space and basically inhabitable for the larger part of the year. But I bet in England you never had the experience of being wet, up to your hips in snow, unable to find your path and every step can be your last...

originally posted by: Reverbs

Hehe...I saw that on my phone's news feed yesterday morning and I was going to post it for you. You beat me to it. One of your favourites combined with one of mine. He didn't do too badly by it either.

a reply to: KilgoreTrout

That is a beautiful and eloquent statement about something tnat neither of us can explain!

That are not ‘artifice’ in any shape of the word as they happwith no seismic activity happening at all.

I see this stuff on a regular basis.,.. and that has nothing to do with seismic activity.

It just happens!!

And I am as just amazed as the rest of you that I can see it!!!

My long range eyesight is horrible but my peripheral eyesight is ridiculous (I always get a 1000% on my peripheral vision test)

I see glimpses of them. For fractions of seconds,

But the fact is... I still see them!!

I have not talked myself out of that fact.

I see them till this day.

It has been decades...

a reply to: Peeple

We have some very large hills that barely qualify as mountains, and we have that whole Gulf Stream thing going on, so no, hip-swaying my way through snow is not something I have experienced. But nor have I experienced particularly turbulent times and the hill I live on is high enough to protect me from the riser waters round here. I live in a reasonably stable environment. The whole island it slipping eastwards into the sea but slowly.

Sometimes the place that is considered most dangerous in normal times becomes the most defenseable place. Just think of the Italian partisans in the second world war, similarly the Polish partisans taking to the deep dark forest. Places that are easy to get lost in are the places you want to hide in when you're being looked for. That's more what Crete is about. Earthquake, volcanos, tidal waves, fires, wars, the plateaus nested in the ring of mountains provide shelter and safety from them all. You know there are places in the Caucacus and Carpathians that have never been invaded, people living totally sustainable lives for centuries and centuries while war, pestilence and famine raged around them.

None of that was what I was saying though, I was just trying, a little less prosaically, to point out that the very earth beneath his feet might be talking to him and he should take note of how the landscape is how the landscape is if he wants to understand what it's saying. You know the physical forces that make mountains, the constant friction. I'm not claiming that the lights are earthquake lights. They're considered an exceptionally rare phenomenon, theories are still being worked out. Statistically other explanations may be more likely, I don't know. But the geology is terribly interesting.

originally posted by: TEOTWAWKIAIFF
That is a beautiful and eloquent statement about something tnat neither of us can explain!

Haha...I'm coming over all Barney Stinson - Challenge accepted.

Only kidding

ETA. That Carole King song I posted came up in the final episode of season two of American Horror. Maybe I'm the simulation that doesn't know it's a simulation after all choosing to ignore all the signs that it's ALL about me. Great TV though, Kit Walker (Evan Peters) is the loveliest person, just wanted to give him big hugs all the way through it.

Also, reminds me, @Peeps, that DEVS I mentioned watching, way back, that plays with some of the simulation theory ideas.

a reply to: KilgoreTrout

That is a beautiful and eloquent statement about something tnat neither of us can explain!

That are not ‘artifice’ in any shape of the word as they happwith no seismic activity happening at all.

I see this stuff on a regular basis.,.. and that has nothing to do with seismic activity.

It just happens!!

And I am as just amazed as the rest of you that I can see it!!!

My long range eyesight is horrible but my peripheral eyesight is ridiculous (I always get a 1000% on my peripheral vision test)

I see glimpses of them. For fractions of seconds,

But the fact is... I still see them!!

I have not talked myself out of that fact.

I see them till this day.

It has been decades...

a reply to: KilgoreTrout

I wonder what your theory of everything would be like? If you'd start with existence and work your way up to what the universe is via religions, politics, ethics?
You seem to have a lot of interests and interesting details stored in your grey matter, but I can't figure out what you think or who you are?
It's also maybe not my business and a lot to ask, but I'm curious.
May I please ask for a glimpse into the wonderful world of Kilgore?

My past has caught me...



My family tragedy is now the topic and it occupies my mind. I thought that I escaped. My half-sister had horrible news about what I suspected (and heard in rumors and whispers when I walked in the room).

The past sucks! I love my sister so can’t leave her in the wind. But the whole thing is a huge rewind on what I thought was over and done with...



And this kind of symbolizes my dilemma..



m.youtube.com...

Who do you love more...

a reply to: TEOTWAWKIAIFF

We good.

We have problems but I is OK.

We also love each other (weird, huh?) asi was told something that I never k new...

a reply to: TEOTWAWKIAIFF

Sorry to hear that. Hope you're fine and if not now it will be ok.

My sympathy I wouldn't want my past to catch me...

a reply to: Peeple

I don't think that there is a wonderful world of Kilgore. I'm interested rather than interesting. Very disappointing in person but there are few things that don't interest me which makes me a good listener, so I have my uses.



Do you have a theory of everything? I don't think I do. I think that it is rather likely that this life we have is all we have - though I can't be certain - and that as such we should make the most of it without taking that very same right away from others. That's about as far as I go ethics wise, the rest is largely circumstantial IMO, I and it can bend according to the way the wind is blowing and the choices available, I know the lines I will and won't cross, what I can and can't live with.

I really don't think that there is anything about myself that I haven't talked about here. Perhaps I'm just an open book with blank pages? Nothing to see here.

a reply to: TEOTWAWKIAIFF

As long as you love each other...

Take care and very best to you and your sister.