I don’t want to scare you away, dear friend, but it has been so long since one as you has come, and I have so much to share with you. It might be overwhelming at first. So how to start? Perhaps with a warning.
Going against the flow of the current of human knowledge is a ballsy act, especially when the specific knowledge you are pushing back against is masquerading as ‘proven scientific facts’. It is also alienating when you see things differently than the culture you live in. Just read Galileo’s book, “Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Ptolemaic and Copernican.”
But discovering that so much of what you have been told is true, is solely based on someone’s brain-fart that has been assimilated into the culturally-accepted body of ‘true’ knowledge simply because it sounded true to people, breaks your trust forever in what you are being told by even those closest to you.
If you haven’t yet had an epiphany about why this happens, you can become severely damaged by the falseness of it. But if, through effort, or by chance, you have had an epiphany about the ‘emperor’s new clothes’ aspect of so much of human knowledge, you have officially arrived at having a ‘mental illness’, according to the DSM-5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders version 5) which says that:
A false belief based on incorrect inference about external reality that is firmly held despite what almost everyone else believes and despite what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence to the contrary. The belief is not ordinarily accepted by other members of the person’s culture or subculture (i.e., is not an article of religious faith). When a false belief involves a value judgment, it is regarded as a delusion only when the judgment is so extreme as to defy credibility.¹
Thus, a false belief is one that goes against what almost everyone else believes. This does not distinguish between fact and fantasy, it just relies on the beliefs of the majority. “All black people are stupid!” Yes, that was a belief held by the majority of European descendants in many areas of the United States for a very long period of time, so it must have been true. “Native American peoples are sub-humans!” Did you know they had scholars that visited Europe and critiqued European culture? Need I go on? I could fill a shelf full of books with the shit the majority of people have believed…
A false belief is also one that goes against beliefs that are based upon “incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence to the contrary.” Incontrovertible means it cannot be disputed, but of course, this definition of “false belief” is necessary because some of us do dispute the majority truth. Some of us even go so far as to believe that we have refuted certain bits of established scientific dogma. Many scientists do that in their daily work — it’s the Scientific Method in practice!
So by “incontrovertible” this manual means there is scientific evidence, but by the very nature of scientific knowledge, which by definition is always controvertible, there is no “incontrovertible proof or evidence.” There is only current agreement on the usefulness of some bit of knowledge. The Scientific Method imposes the character of “refutability” on all scientific knowledge, thus it is always necessarily controvertible. If some ‘truth’ is irrefutable, it is religious dogma — i.e., a belief held to by trust or faith. Which brings us to: the ‘obvious truth’ of something — which is my point here.
Take Galileo’s ‘proof’ of the Heliocentric theory that the Earth orbits the Sun. First off, he didn’t prove that this theory was true, he merely asserted that his subjective experience of the phases of the planet Venus, which he observed with a telescope, was proof that it was true. But he was using the old standard of proof of Science, before he changed it for all of us. That was his most significant accomplishment, not proving that the Heliocentric theory is true. The evidence for that actually came 227 years after Galileo; and in any case, the Earth does not orbit the Sun. As every modern astrophysicist knows, the Earth, like all the other planets — and the Sun — orbits the Barycenter of our solar system, and that center of gravity moves around as the various bodies of mass move through their orbits. Look it up!
So the truth is that people just belief what they want to believe — and very often they want to believe what everyone believes just so they can fit in, and not be some alien freak with no friends.
And I am not talking about ‘crazy’ new-agey metaphysical ideas about reality, I am talking about basic things, such as, what sound is. Or what light is.
For example, we all ‘know’ today that light consists of photons, which can be like a particle sometimes, and a wave at others; but this likeness doesn’t mean it is either one of those two alternatives. Most people don’t realize that last bit. So they think of them as bullets or beach waves, those being the more common understanding of particles and waves. “Load photon torpedoes!” Kirk orders.
But, perhaps because they are blinded by this useless misleading knowledge, they don’t seem to notice, let alone understand what may be obvious to others who do not agree with that depiction of light. It is possible to see light differently, as I described in “The Peculiar Nature Of Light, the Universe, and Everything.”
The correct answer is that light, as experienced, only exists in our mind. Color, as experienced, only exists in our mind. Oh, yes, there is something there, outside us, because we sense it through surface structures on our body (and yes, this includes inner ‘surfaces’ within our body that we can sense certain phenomena with, such as pain). But what that something is, cannot be experienced the way a beautiful sunset on a beach is experienced by weary New York commuters on vacation.
And if it can’t be experienced, whatever we are told it is, is just someone’s attempt to explain how it is, and more often than not, it is just someone’s brain-fart confusing what we experience with whatever it is that we perceive, that everyone is smelling, not understanding.
But if it seems true, it is true — and this very human failing does not discriminate, as it is an equal-opportunity fault of any unwary mind — for that is all this amounts to, and it completely undermines the methodology of science, which needs to be rigorously applied. Because experimental data, and brain-farts are not the same. This is not an anti-science position, it is, rather, seeing things clearly.
But that is considered a sign of mental illness today, just as having beliefs that stray from that of the majority have always been seen.
Now, you and I both face a challenge: can you accept what I say as meaningful and follow me as I show you the path I have taken, so that you too can benefit from training your mind to be wary of received ‘wisdom’ until you yourself have directly experienced whether it is true or not? If you do this you may well lose the trace of your own path toward clarity, which might have led you to a different way of seeing reality. And do I pause on my way forward in order to let you possibly catch up? Because one, or both, of us may abandon the effort along the way, having wasted both our precious time.
Or do we become spiritual lovers, celebrating our shared and unique beauty, while intimately learning from each other — a spiritual intercourse whose epiphanies bring great leaps forward for us both, fueled by the touch of our energetic presence to each other’s mind — while honoring our own needs, along our own path?
It can be like this, in my experience. Celebrating our differences, while keeping true to ourselves. Becoming something better than our solitary selves can achieve.
I have no desire or liking to be a modern guru, and while being a spiritual friend to each other is comforting — which should not be underestimated — I have known the profound blessing of a shared whole-being epiphany that comes when two minds merge together as one for even just a brief moment.
I put the challenge in these terms because the intimacy of actually being nakedly present to each other, is beyond skin-on-skin contact, and even coupling, during which reciprocal pleasuring is the only goal. This intimacy, which suddenly leaps over our seemingly physical containment, is a profound shearing away of all our illusions, stories, and beliefs, that merges our very be-ings in a way that forever changes us both, until we stand nakedly present — as deity.
This was the practice of Rumi, the mystical Sufi poet — “Gazing at the Beloved” he called it — merging with the presence of the divine which is within each of us, and which is beyond all understanding and all depictions.
Consider it.
Footnote:
¹ American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association, 2013 via GoogleScholar, pg 819, as cited in: The Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, “Forensic Psychiatry versus the Varieties of Delusion-Like Belief,” by Joseph M. Pierre, September 2020, 48 (3) 327–334; DOI: https://doi.org/10.29158/JAAPL.200013-20, retrieved 24-Dec-2022 from: https://jaapl.org/content/48/3/327