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When dogmas lose their grip on believers, they collapse in spectacular fashion.

Karma covers a lot of ground, but it boils down to consequences: consequences not just from your actions but from your convictions, schemes, obsessions, and yes, dogmas.

The reason why Karma runs over Dogma is that nobody clinging to a dogma sees themselves as dogmatic. The true believer never sees their conviction as dogma, but as Revealed Truth, as self-evident, a view that is buttressed by all the other True Believers who surround the believer, reinforcing their conviction and soothing any nagging doubts by mocking, “debunking” or marginalizing heretics and critics.

In our society, the mass media serves as a soothing echo-chamber of dogmas. It must be true, the news anchor said it on TV, etc.

Dogmas generate power and profits. Trillions of dollars flow into a few pockets because people believe the dogmas that “you need a college diploma to succeed” and “America’s healthcare system is the best in the world.”

As evidence-based doubts seep in, those at the top of the “faith” who have the most to lose become increasingly fanatical and rabid, pushing an increasingly restrictive Orthodoxy on true believers and establishing an Inquisition to excommunicate or eliminate any heretical doubts or dissenting views.

As the increasingly detached-from-reality leadership senses their power waning, they double-down, exhorting the faithful to support the orthodoxy even as the orthodoxy reaches new heights of fanaticism.

As moderates drift away (or sneak away, loudly proclaiming their fealty to cover their escape), the leadership triples down, demanding unwavering loyalty of the remaining believers, who themselves triple-down by reassuring each other that they really are on the right track and the world is about to awaken to the correctness and righteousness of their cause.

The problem with dogmas is that they are detached from the real-world consequences of dogmatic convictions.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How To Awaken From The Matrix Using Self-Enquiry

August 24, 2019

How To Awaken From The Matrix Using Self-Enquiry

I talk about the power of self-enquiry a fair bit in my musings about enlightenment and human consciousness, so I thought it might be good to tap out a simple how-to on the subject in case anyone finds it useful.

Self-enquiry, or self-inquiry, is a practice popularized in the west by the circulation of nondualist teachings from the renowned Indian sages Ramana Maharshi and Nisargadatta Maharaj. It requires no faith in any teacher, teaching or tradition, nor even in the practice itself. Self-enquiry is a method for inquiring for yourself into your own nature and discovering in your own firsthand experience what lies at the end of that investigation.

Most of our suffering and confusion (which is what the propagandists I write about rely upon to manipulate us into believing establishment narratives) stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of the way our experience is actually happening. Partly due to culture, partly due to language, and partly due to the fact that we begin life as helpless little things at the mercy of an often terrifying world, we develop mistaken notions about ourselves, about our minds, and about the world, and we form conditioning patterns around those mistaken notions. Self-enquiry works to correct those fundamental errors and habits of perception, which allows for the possibility of a serene mind and an efficacious way of functioning.

Self-enquiry is a practice that you can engage in all day, every day, to whatever extent that you’ve got attention at your disposal for the endeavor. You can do it at work, while driving, while eating, in the shower, whenever. There are many different approaches to the practice, but here’s the way I’ve found useful, broken down into its five distinct steps. If it speaks to you, bookmark it and refer to it as often as you find useful:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

‘The Reality Bubble’: Or Pretending Ourselves to Death

July 11, 2019

‘The Reality Bubble’: Or Pretending Ourselves to Death

Our illusions and blind spots keep us happy. And could doom us.

We create a bubble that lets us be blind to the world around us, writes Ziya Tong. And we like it in there.

We are also richly endowed with metaphorical blind spots, which enable us to deceive ourselves even about what can see perfectly well.

Tong, a very experienced science communicator, was the co-host of the Discovery Channel’s Daily Planet for a decade. Her book, The Reality Bubble, illustrates its argument. It begins with interesting little factoids. Your face is crawling with tiny eight-legged mites; the alarm barks of prairie dogs, analyzed by computer, reveal “words” defining the nature of the threat: coyote, hawk, tall guy in a blue shirt. We may keep consuming such factoids like salted peanuts and begin to lose the point of them.

But Tong uses every factoid to back up her thesis. We never knew about the mites until the microscope let us examine ourselves up close and very personal. We thought we were the only language users until we used computers that could detect every nuance in a prairie dog’s bark. Our unaided senses operate in a very narrow spectrum, and the “real world” we perceive is just a reconstruction in our brains of electromagnetic and sound waves that impinge on our eyes and ears.

Blind spots aren’t just physical. Leeuwenhoek developed the microscope in the 17th century, and promptly discovered microscopic life. It took two more centuries until Louis Pasteur identified microbes as causes of disease, and another century before we began to realize that not all “germs” are bad: most help keep us alive and healthy.

Tong writes that we can be blind to the obvious individually, and as a society.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Perhaps It’s Time to Believe the Impossible

February 2, 2019

PERHAPS IT’S TIME TO BELIEVE THE IMPOSSIBLE

“Alice laughed: “There’s no use trying,” she said; “one can’t believe impossible things.” “I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” – Alice in Wonderland.

It is often said, usually by those who wish to “educate”, control and manipulate us, that we are defined by what we believe. I submit it’s the other way around. We are defined, or more accurately confined, by what we disbelieve and think impossible, or at a minimum, improbable.

Once we consign something to the impossible, unbelievable, farfetched, unlikely, preposterous and unreal cognitive file, rarely, if ever, do we fish it back out of the garbage bin for reassessment and reconsideration. And why would we do so since it clearly belonged there to begin with, otherwise we never would have discarded it in the first place.

That right there is a perfect example of circular logic and emotionally comforting thinking.

From the point in time when non-religious standardized thinking was institutionalized, more commonly known as the scientific revolution of the 16^th and 17^th centuries, we have been conditioned to believe everything and anything can (eventually) be cataloged, quantified, qualified and confirmed…or denied. More importantly, the scientific method insists “real” truth can only be verified by way of uniform methods that produce repeatable results.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

So, You Think Science Will Save the World? Are You Sure?

August 29, 2018

So, You Think Science Will Save the World? Are You Sure?

I understand that by publishing this post I may be giving ammunition to the anti-science crowd. But we can’t just hide in the ivory tower and tell people that science is perfect as it is. We need deep reforms in the way science is done.

In Italy, we have a term for those who engage in a task much too big and too difficult for them. We call them a “Brancaleone Army” (Armata Brancaleone), a term coming from the title of a wonderful 1966 Italian movie where an Italian self-styled knight tries to lead a ragtag army of incompetent fighters. The sad conditions of science nowadays sometimes look to me like the story of the Brancaleone army.

What is truth? These famous words come not from a scientist but from a politician, Pontius Pilate, governor of Palestine in Roman times. As a politician, Pilate knew very well how truth could be twisted, stretched, sliced, cooked, flavored, and rearranged in many ways in order to be sold to people. Things are not different, today. In politics, truth is what you perceive to be true. After all, isn’t it true that we can create our own reality? (a US government official is reported to have said that at the time of the invasion of Iraq, in 2003).

Eventually, the Roman Empire drowned in its own lies, it was an epistemological collapse. Something similar may happen to us: we cannot continue for long to ignore reality, believing that we can manufacture our own, and deceive everyone in the process.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Why do we need to think and act more systemically?

June 26, 2018

Why do we need to think and act more systemically?

The power and majesty of nature in all its aspects is lost on one who contemplates it merely in the detail of its parts and not as a whole.

— Pliny the Elder

An increasing number of people are beginning to understand that the world we participate in is too complex, magnificent and changeable for any single perspective to do justice to its diversity and complexity. There is more to life than a ‘theory of everything’ that reduces the awe-inspiring diversity, creativity and beauty surrounding us to a series of abstract mathematical equations.

We live in networks of relationships defined by qualities that make life worth living. Most qualities escape quantification and mathematical abstraction. We need to acknowledge and value multiple perspectives and find ways to integrate their different contributions into a framework of thinking that can inform wise action.

In order to achieve a collaborative way of acknowledging, integrating and evaluating multiple perspectives, we need to move beyond dualistic either-or logic which suggests that, if two perspectives seem to contradict each other, one of them must categorically be wrong in order for the other perspective to be right. Yet, at a time when our cultural belief in the ability of science and technology to fix all our problems is beginning to wane, we also need ways to evaluate and compare different perspectives.

Science might not offer us the ‘objective’ picture of reality we were taught in school, but it remains a powerful method of inter-subjective consensus-making and constitutes a fairly reliable basis upon which to act — more so, say, than the opinion, intuition or spontaneous insight of a single individual — in most but certainly not all cases. We should neither exclusively favour inter-subjective ‘rational’ reasoning nor only rely on individual insight and intuition, but let ourselves be informed by both, as and when appropriate.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The (Mind) Games People Play

February 9, 2018

THE (MIND) GAMES PEOPLE PLAY

Fair warning! This is a long and dense read and not intended for the faint-hearted

While most of us would accept there are two states of mind when it comes to perceiving reality, belief and disbelief, I posit there are three. And this third state of mind, the suspension of disbelief, is employed by nearly all of us most of the time when interacting within our own perceived reality.

If we are to recognize the prevailing global cultural insanity as a long duration event, meaning it started many centuries ago and will last many centuries beyond today, being logical and rational, while an essential component of survival, can only be viewed as a significant disability when trying to make sense of an insane world.

This is particularly true when we closely examine group and individual psychology and how it affects everything from culture to money to politics and all the prevailing memes in-between. Any sober assessment of the human condition leads to one conclusion only. Everyone is insane, including you and me. It is only a matter of degree, not if.

That said; for the sake of this article let us assume one can be sane enough to recognize his or her own insanity. While nearly all will point to the actual behavior of the insane as proof of the illness, I tend to focus on the driving force behind the behavior. My experience shows this to be our horribly distorted belief system(s) which propel us deeper and deeper into our madness.

But belief is a misnomer for what actually occurs in the real world. The word belief implies action, intent and effort, as in a verb or adjective. However this should be differentiated from passive belief, which is a subconscious and conscious embrace of a thought or idea which we embody in whole and absolutely.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Can We Ascertain the Facts of Reality in Economics by Means of Mathematics?

February 5, 2018

CAN WE ASCERTAIN THE FACTS OF REALITY IN ECONOMICS BY MEANS OF MATHEMATICS?

It is generally held that by means of statistical and mathematical methods one can organize historical data into a useful body of information, which in turn can serve as the basis for the assessments of the state of the economy. It is also held that the knowledge secured from the assessment of the data is likely to be of a tentative nature since it is not possible to know the true nature of the facts of reality.

Some thinkers such as Milton Friedman held that since it is not possible to establish “how things really work,” then it does not really matter what the underlying assumptions of a theory are. On this way of thinking, what matters is that the theory can yield good predictions.

According to Friedman,

The ultimate goal of a positive science is the development of a theory or hypothesis that yields valid and meaningful (i.e., not truistic) predictions about phenomena not yet observed…. The relevant question to ask about the assumptions of a theory is not whether they are descriptively realistic, for they never are, but whether they are sufficiently good approximation for the purpose in hand. And this question can be answered only by seeing whether the theory works, which means whether it yields sufficiently accurate predictions.^[1]

For instance, an economist forms a view that consumer outlays on goods and services are determined by disposable income. Based on this view he forms a model, which is then validated by means of statistical methods. The model is then employed in the assessments of the future direction of consumer spending.

If the model fails to produce accurate forecasts, it is either replaced, or modified by adding some other explanatory variables.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast

February 22, 2017

Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast

Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said. “One can’t believe impossible things.”

“I dare say you haven’t had much practice,” said the queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” –Alice in Wonderland

We live in an age when the level of deceit and propaganda is at an all-time high. Joseph Goebbels, Vladimir Lenin, and others did their best to force-feed propaganda to the masses, but they were rank amateurs compared to the spin doctors employed by the political leaders of today. They’re masters at convincing people of impossible things.

Whenever I listen to Americans discuss their country, I find people that are eager for more news and information, yet most, without even knowing it, accept much of the dogma they’ve been fed on a daily basis by their government and the media, even if, to outsiders, the assumptions are preposterous. Only those who make a concerted, ongoing effort to see through the smokescreen seem to keep clear.

Here are six impossible things that many seem to have little trouble accepting as reality.

Yes, the country’s in a mess, but that’s because of opposition-party meddling. If the party I favour could get a majority, they’d sort things out.

This seems to have been a popular belief for decades. It’s believed by Democrats and Republicans alike. But, in 2001, the Republicans held both houses of Congress, plus the presidency, yet even then they failed to deliver on what they claimed were their party’s fundamental goals. Between 2009 and 2011, the Democrats controlled all three, yet they, too, failed to deliver.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Manufacturing Normality

December 7, 2016

Manufacturing Normality

Sometime circa mid-November, in the wake of Hillary Clinton’s defeat (i.e., the beginning of the end of democracy), the self-appointed Guardians of Reality, better known as the corporate media, launched a worldwide marketing campaign against the evil and perfidious scourge of “fake news.” This campaign is now at a fever pitch. Media outlets throughout the empire are pumping out daily dire warnings of the imminent, existential threat to our freedom posed by the “fake news” menace. This isn’t the just the dissemination of disinformation, propaganda, and so on, that’s been going on for thousands of years … Truth itself is under attack. The very foundations of Reality are shaking.

Who’s behind this “fake news” menace? Well, Putin, naturally, but not just Putin. It appears to be the work of a vast conspiracy of virulent anti-establishment types, ultra-alt-rightists, ultra-leftists, libertarian retirees, armchair socialists, Sandernistas, Corbynistas, ontological terrorists, fascism normalizers, poorly educated anti-Globalism freaks, and just garden variety Clinton-haters.

Fortunately, for us, the corporate media is hot on the trail of this motley of scoundrels. As you’re probably aware, The Washington Postrecently published a breathtaking piece of Pulitzer-quality investigative journalism shamelessly smearing hundreds of alternative publications (like the one you’re reading) as “peddlers of Russian propaganda.” The piece, a classic McCarthyite smear job perpetrated by the Post‘s Craig Timberg, was based on the groundless, paranoid claims of what Timberg unironically describes as “two teams of independent researchers,” The Foreign Policy Research Institute, a third-rate, former anti-Communist think tank, and an anonymous website, propornot.com, that no one had ever heard of prior to its sudden appearance on the Internet last August, and which, based on the tenor of its tweets and emails, appears to be run by Beavis and Butthead.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Seeking Calm in the Middle of Chaos

November 12, 2016

SEEKING CALM IN THE MIDDLE OF CHAOS

“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” – The version of the Serenity Prayer adopted by Alcoholics Anonymous.

“Do. Or do not do. There is no try.” – Yoda

A lie repeated often enough becomes the truth, both for those who wish it to be the truth because it fits their (programmed) mindset, and those who practice what I describe as ‘garbage in, garbage out’ non critical thinking. Setting aside the desire to expand upon the definition of ‘truth’, if the purpose of the lie (and the intent of the liar) is to shape reality via propaganda dissemination (basically to gain advantage) might not the lie also be directed towards those who know it to be a lie?

As silly as that statement may appear on the surface, it is reasonable to inquire exactly how a known or suspected lie may significantly shape the reality of those who at a minimum may not know the truth, but can smell a lie a mile away. The answer comes by way of how we react to the lie and not the lie itself.

If we are consumed by the lie, either by accepting it as ‘truth’ or by obsessively and forcibly exposing it, particularly to those who could care less or to those who are of like mind who need external affirmation of their alternative reality, we are effectively disempowered by the very lie we reject.

Most assume a lie is used primarily to hide the truth. And for this purpose it is most effective, particularly when it fits neatly within the overall controlling narrative. But the lie is also purposefully directed towards those who know a lie when they hear one.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

According To Deutsche Bank, The “Worst Kind Of Recession” May Have Already Started

May 8, 2016

According To Deutsche Bank, The “Worst Kind Of Recession” May Have Already Started

One week ago, Deutsche Bank’s Dominic Konstam unveiled, whether he likes it or not, what the next all too likely step will be as central bankers scramble to preserve order in a world in which monetary policy has all but lost effectiveness: “It is becoming increasingly clear to us that the level of yields at which credit expansion in Europe and Japan will pick up in earnest is probably negative, and substantially so. Therefore, the ECB and BoJ should move more strongly toward penalizing savings via negative retail deposit rates or perhaps wealth taxes.”

Many were not happy, although in reality the only reason why the DB strategist proposed this disturbing idea is because this is precisely what the central banks will end up doing.

Today, he follows up with an explanation just why the central bankers will engage in such lunatic measures: quite simply, he thinks that economic contraction is now practically assured – and may have already begun – for a simple reason: contrary to popular belief, this particular “expansion” will die of old age after all, and won’t even need the Fed’s intervention to unleash the next recession (if not depression).

There is an old saying amongst market watchers that economic expansions do not die of old age. Rather, during the course of the business cycle dynamics emerge that threaten to become unacceptable from a policy perspective. In the context of economic expansion, that dynamic has been inflation. The conventional pattern has been that as expansions mature, demand for labor outstrips the available supply, creating upward pressure on wages. In the presence of pricing power, higher wages are passed along to end consumers through higher prices.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Saudi Foreign Minister Repeats Warning To US Over Sept 11 Law

May 2, 2016

Saudi Foreign Minister Repeats Warning To US Over Sept 11 Law

The biggest financial and geopolitical story from mid-April was Saudi Arabia’s threat that should the US pass a bipartisan law which would take away immunity from foreign governments in cases arising from a “terrorist attack that kills an American on American soil” and specifically could hold the Saudi kingdom responsible for its role in the Sept 11, 2001 attacks, then the Saudis would retaliate by selling up to $750 billion in American assets.

Today, the Saudi foreign minister Adel al-Jubeir, while speaking to reporters in Geneva after talks with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry which mainly focused on Syria, admitted this threat saying passage of the law would “erode global investor confidence in America” by which he was, of course, referring only to Saudi Arabia. However, to avoid another slap in the face of US foreign policy on the record, he denied that Saudi Arabia had “threatened” to withdraw investment from its close ally and instead called it a mere “warning.”

“We say a law like this would cause an erosion of investor confidence. But then to kind of say, ‘My God the Saudis are threatening us’ – ridiculous,” Jubeir hedged according to Reuters.

Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir talks to the media in
Geneva, May 2, 2016

“We don’t use monetary policy and we don’t use energy policy and we don’t use economic policy for political purposes. When we invest, we invest as investors. When we sell oil, we sell oil as traders.”

That said we are confident that Jubeir realizes very well that everyone else uses monetary and energy policy for political purposes – hence the Trasury’s brand new Friday watchlist for currency manipulators – which is why when he calls it “erosion of investor confidence” the world reads clearly between the lines.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

“We Haven’t Seen This Is In Our Lifetimes” – CEO Says “Alberta Is In A Depression”

April 25, 2016

“We Haven’t Seen This Is In Our Lifetimes” – CEO Says “Alberta Is In A Depression”

Regular readers know that we’ve covered Alberta’s decline at length (refresher here), so there is no need to give much of a backstory other than to say that the situation seems to get worse for the Canadian province as each day passes even as oil has rebounded in the past two months.

Toronto’s “Condo King” Brad Lamb tried to put things into context when he said the situation is “worse than 2008.” However, on Friday we received an even more gloomy (albeit realistic) description of the economic situation in Canada’s energy hub, Alberta. In a very blunt interview with BNN, Murray Mullen the CEO of trucking company Mullen Group, said that the situation has moved well past recession, and should be described as a depression.

“Well, if you’re involved in the oil patch directly, drilling activity or anything like that I think we’ve gone beyond recession and it’s more a depression. The facts are that this latest round of commodity price collapse that happened the first part of this year I think really put the nail in the coffin for the industry.”

“The damage has already been done basically for this year. Even though it seems like the oil price and even natural gas is starting to recover, there was no room for error because commodity prices had fallen so low in 2015, and then when it happened in 2016, and it’s not just crude oil, it’s natural gas also. We’re just kind of trapped in a difficult market dynamic that we haven’t seen in probably most of our lifetimes.”

“There’s no investment activity going on below $40, it just goes to zero.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

White House Set To Release Secret Pages From Sept 11 Report

April 24, 2016

White House Set To Release Secret Pages From Sept 11 Report

Over the past several weeks, the White House has been very vocal about its opposition to both the Bipartisan Bill that would allow families of Sept 11 victims to sue Saudi Arabia for its involvement in the WTC attack, as well as stonewalling when it comes to releasing the confidential “28 pages” that have been withheld from the Congressional inquiry report into 9/11 and which allegedly provide damning evidence about the the perpetrators of the worst terrorist attack on US soil.

As reported last weekend, none other than Saudi Arabia made its displeasure with any potential revelations quite public when it threatened it would sell up to $750 in US assets held by the kingdom should the White House allow more public scrutiny into Saudi involvement in Sept 11.

Perhaps in response to the spike in public interest following the resurgence to prominence of “Document 17”, Obama appears ready to make concessions. Recall that as we reported last week, according to a 47-page US memo known as document 17, written in 2003 and quietly declassified last year, the FBI learnt that the flight certificate of one of the Sept 11 pilots was in an envelope from the Saudi embassy in Washington.

Saudi Arabian embassy in Washington, AP Photo

And now, as AP reports this morning, the Obama administration will likely soon release at least part of a 28-page secret chapter from a congressional inquiry into 9/11 that may shed light on possible Saudi connections to the attackers.

The documents, kept in a secure room in the basement of the Capitol, contain information from the joint congressional inquiry into “specific sources of foreign support for some of the Sept. 11 hijackers while they were in the United States.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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