The weather has not been great this week.
I light a candle for the people in my circle of acquaintance who are feeling suicidal right now. Hang in there!
At a friend’s urging, I watched What the Bleep do we Know. It was in spots really entertaining, but I preferred Mindwalk, which covered a lot of the same ground. Also, when one of the people being interviewed turned out to be a medium channelling a star-being, Ramtha, and another one of them was a sex scandal star, I was getting steady pings from the baloney detector. This whole create your own reality thing is great, but I have a couple of comments.
Clipper ships did not exist during the time of Columbus. The story about the First Nations of the Caribbean “not being able to see the ships” – nice story, but bogus. That was actually the point where I got lost. I will watch Marlee Matlin in practically anything, and I enjoyed her performance, and the special effects were fun. But, and this is a big but, quantum physics as we (and I mean we in the sense of a small number of human beings) currently understand it does not change anything about the world. It doesn’t. It may make certain kinds of technology or cosmology possible, but it will do dick all about the mess the world is in or feed anything actionable into the hopper of possible solutions.
You can say – as they frequently did, in the film – that we’re all deeply intertwingled “We are One”, and intention is everything. Then they wisely pull out the rug, and take it all away by saying our minds keep us separate because of addictions, and if your intention isn’t perfect you can’t manifest a better reality or the reality will be flawed by your lapses in intention. We are one hundred percent responsible for our own reality. Ka ching. I don’t mind the notion of personal responsibility, but a) you have to be in a position to think about that responsibility and b) you are issued at birth a number of possibilities, none of which have anything to do with responsibility or intention, and which directly impact your ability to be able to even form these ideas. Whenever I see people twittering on about intention, I feel like showing wards full of AIDS babies and starving children in camps overtop of their words so we can see how incredibly egocentric and lacking in compassion the whole “You can create your own reality” shtick is. And talking about addictions?? Christ, there are times when I think that we aren’t “meaning” machines as much as we are “stimulus response” machines.
Now, I don’t know a damned thing about philosophy – I leave the heavy lifting to the experts – so I stick pretty close to Allegra’s Law; everything about human beings points back to breeding rights and the acquisition of entitlements which allow you to extend, control, contribute to or benefit from your kinship network. Evolution is conservative, imperfect and slow, and there’s chunks of the human genome which no longer appear to point to breeding and extension of kinship networks. But when I look hard enough I can see the connection, thanks to books like the Third Chimpanzee and Sex, Time and Power.
I dream of being a perfect and enlightened being. Then I wake up and worry about my kids. So be it.