It's fun to read fringe cosmology. Time Cube is one thing, incoherent drivel that forms a coherent picture of a happy madman. Then you get to the next level (still very low level, mind you) of like, Ancient Aliens or... Billy.
I had a teacher's assistant once that presented myself and a whole group of friends with Billy. So get this, Billy was an old man - I think Welsh - who used his stub arm to hold a UFO model on a fishing pole and film it. He published these with volumes of writing about "Pleyarans" from the Pleiades constellation, and it was basically space alien epistle with greeting card wisdom throughout. My poor teacher took it really seriously, to the point he asked some of the smartest students in school to come check it out for an evening and try to "convert" them. What I took away from it was that I really liked San Pellegrino and those Petit Ecolier things from Safeway, since he even provided snacks. I was the only one who talked to him for a bit afterward and very carefully signaled to him how off-base he was. He literally believed that different races of humans were different factions or something of Pleyarans - basically Scientology Lite™.
I had already had my journey with conspiracies by the time I was 16 and was put into that situation. For a minute there I had started to look for the "inside job" factor in everything. I perused AboveTopSecret daily, a forum that was a weird mix of teenagers like me and dudes of dubious age and background. The best thing about the site was the owner, they loved their UFO stories as much as I did, but they also had a keen eye for politics. One of the most influential pieces I read in high school was the owner of the site visiting the lobbying centers of Washington D.C. They enjoyed underground tunnel access - including an underground cafeteria, and painted a very clear picture of what was to come. This was in about 2009, post-financial crisis, and it was clear there had been a steadily increasing lobby to deregulate markets for oligopolies and stymie progress in policy reform. These lobbyists focused primarily on the right, and knew the politicians would basically take all the flack while their funders run awry. Citizens United came a year later. Many of the issues that caused the 2008 meltdown have still never been fixed, and we literally elected one of the benefactors of it president, but I'm pretty much done with any doom-saying.
These moments of brilliance from these far-flung corners of the internet sent fireworks off for me. There was a substance to these random acts of journalism that eclipsed the endless drone of Kennedy assassination "analysis" or UFO sightings. New sightings were always a load of fun to see photos of, I've seen some weird stuff myself, weirder than the Marfa lights, but never anything inexplicable. I've also seen weird drones and disassembled things on-base in Edwards, real UFOs yet also nothing controversial. Then came the real journalism and it set me on fire to learn more and in a meaningful way because of the real impact that real, reality-tested choices had on the world - rather than the endless chatter that added more needless labyrinths in my mind.
Where was I going with this? I didn't really have a plan when I started. I've made most of these blogs through many late-night self-indoctrinating streams-of-consciousness. I've felt it should only be curated by impulse, and lay bare my process but never say too much. Half-journal, half-expository, ideally minimal BS yet all tongue-in-cheek. Right now I'm also watching a Down the Rabbit Hole episode about TempleOS, an OS by a schizophrenic programmer who believes he can talk to god through it. Fucking tragic. Reminds me of others.
Quick side note.
Look! I made a thing! It's an HEG that'll cost me less than 10 bucks per unit in bulk. It syncs with your phone, too, and a battery should last weeks before needing charge. Yup, if I don't get sued I should help a lot of people. If I do get sued, you heard it here first that there will be middle fingers flying. Ideally the Biofeedback Institute will back me, they enjoyed my DIY version and this is all going to be open source forever. Just a couple more hours of coding and bam, we got a product. My secret god-complex-driven motivation here is to tow a line for as many people as possible to help them recover from brain-related illness and injury, learn about themselves, and improve their physical foundations for all their "higher" functioning. I ain't gonna sugar coat any of it either, we're on a global bender of brain health and stress-related disorder and I'm clawing at the walls seeing the numbers increase so rapidly. You all realize it's a time bomb, right? We'll see if this defuses anything.
Back to what we were talking about. I noticed that I defaulted to the Next Available Narrative (now called variable NAN) as soon as the first one disappointed me. My education began with all the same cherished myths of America we all know, and got firmly shaken thanks to books like A People's History of the United States which I was exposed to young since my brother had it in a poli sci class. That damn professor is who got me into conspiracies, too, now that I recall my brother showing me Loose Change college student-produced video about 9/11 - also from his poli sci class. Humboldt hippies, man.
One NAN breaking down leads to a search for the next, and so on. A sense of isolation pervades the whole process, and everywhere you find islands of sympathetic, agreeable people, forming ritual circles to perpetuate and reproduce their sensibilities. You see, somewhere along the way I was told I had to believe something, yet I didn't even realize people took religion seriously until I was 12. So I believed momentary fantasies and dreams, but only for the duration of their fun. Movies and music would pepper my brain with impressions and reenactments to potentially experience "authentically." That also produced a distorted sense of reality, but an important one nonetheless for understanding others in this Hollywoodified world - where people start to conform to only the spectrum of people presented by their media. Life becomes a series of episodes, where time is disjointed and everything is closely choreographed farce. The only difference between those conspiracy theorists and ufologists, and those who tune into E! for celebrity gossip, is that their searches for truth follow slightly different impulses. One NAN train is a more individualistic type (and they all even tend to call themselves "libertarian," lol), the other a more grazing type.
There is still something painfully clear between these two groups. It's not just the over-reliance on media, but a very misguided search for truth. I can't say their compasses are broken, because somehow I found my way despite once holding very much the same lacking in rational and I suppose trope wisdom. And being fooled and making an ass of myself - consciously - is what guided me through. How, then, does someone lose a decade to a cult? Half a century to evangelism? A lifetime to fear? Why that hair style, dude? I never stuck to some terrible idea for more than a few months, some conspiracies a few years but nothing that interfered with my health and ability to be sociable. Others aren't so lucky and get drawn away, encouraged to isolate themselves around their supposed golden goose or simply deprived of everything meaningful for some sick programming attempt by another.
I'm still painting a very loose picture here of what conscience development is like in the here and now, and I believe the narrative component is very important (like valves for thought), at least in a society as dramatized as ours, but I'll have to continue that thought later. For now, we need to consider the processes of health & development, language, place, and time as omnipresent among all the different scenarios of people and their NANs and where they attempt to embed themselves in some insecure, cultish sociological organism. It's a primitive in-group out-group sort of thing. Tribalism is timeless and unbounded by species. What percentage of humans spend what percentage of their lives in these cultish modes of being, to the point that it totally dominates each step they take and place they go? What scope does one need to be able to handle at what age to avoid that? And when we learn to arbitrarily craft those motive forces for ourselves, beyond fear, beyond lies, beyond very small but necessary jumps in logic that belie a much vaster, more beautiful picture of life -- just how much farther can we, together, get with language and creation? And when is it too late to start?
The last bit I'll leave with is the thought that began this train and didn't get an opening for a smooth practical metaphor insert. It's the fact that no matter where you look or where you stand in the universe, the laws of physics are always the same. This niche of the vast cosmos is populated with 7 billion+ human minds and countless minds of other species (though rapidly dwindling with climate change and human encroachment). The laws of physics, and thereby of the energy driving evolution, apply evenly to each and every one of us. Less abstractly, my experience really isn't so far from yours, and our brains are mostly the same. Once you learn how to communicate based on that logic, you can resist the tropes and become a tropist! Don't let someone tune your antennas for you! Trust your gut! It's a parade of fools out there, and around here, and anywhere else I guess. Question is, who's leading? And do they want you to know?
