Mar 2, 2022
The story is what lasts
Reality is a story it’s telling itself
My very favouritest YouTube channel is Kurzgesagt. Their videos fill me with a joy and wonder unlike almost anything else I’ve ever seen in media. I’d like to give them all many high-fives. They have amazing content exploring things like Neutron Stars, Black Holes, the Fermi Paradox, Consciousness, Dissatisfaction, The EU… all sorts of subjects! They approach these subjects with a mix of playfulness and rigorous scientific analysis so perfectly.
They released a new video today and the subject they chose blew my mind (More precisely: the fact that they chose this subject blew my mind)
The team at Kurzgesagt does a spectacular job in this video of highlighting what we can and can’t know based on what we know we can know.
It’s worth noting I’ve never seen an episode of Ancient Aliens or any of those other shows. I watched Unsolved Mysteries when I was younger and then no other show in that genre. I see the appeal but I struggle with the sensationalism required by television.
Everything about our amazing civilization is terribly impermanent when considered from the scale of the history of life on our planet. The pyramids will only be around for hundreds of thousands of years. They will fade and decay into nothing over the duration of a planetary timeline.
There are hundreds of millions of years where complex life existed and yet there are big chunks of the planet where we have no real record of what would have existed. There isn’t data but there is the absence of data and an understanding of how much data there would have been.
What’s impossible?
This brilliant line appears near the end of the video:
In the end we shouldn’t use our imaginations to trick ourselves into thinking we know anything about our blind spots. Just assuming a thing happened because we don’t have evidence against it is a trap we should avoid.
I like that. It’s an important perspective. It’s why I say things like “The scope and magnitude of the Richat Structure dumbfounds me.” instead of “The Richat Structure is where some future-tech blew up all the way back in the past.”
A similar thought to the one quoted above from the video:
In the end we shouldn’t use our lack of imagination to trick ourselves into thinking we don’t know anything about our blind spots. Just assuming a thing didn’t happen because we don’t have evidence for it is a trap we should avoid.
Yes, obviously, that’s just the opposite of the Kurzgesagt quote, but sometimes we have to imagine the impossible into existence in order understand reality. You have to look at what’s around what’s not known to see what there is and what can be intuited. That’s where innovation happens. The trick is to do it well.
There’s a bunch of weird “science” at the fringe of science that looks as much like science as science does and it’s not getting enough attention. The fact that it’s not getting attention is bad for us because it looks like some of it is real. The fact that it’s not getting attention means that some false and easily disprovable stuff keeps circulating because there isn’t enough subject exposure to convince people to abandon it.
Some of this weird science at the edge of science looks like it’s pointing to a bunch of weird shit going on in our history and reality. Ignoring that stuff doesn’t make it any less plausible. It’s just ignoring where we must look in order to discern the biggest and most spectacular truths of reality.
Many reputable and intelligent people are telling us that something metaphysical is real, so it’s real or it’s wrong and I want to find out — or at least find out how we can find out and then wait while people do the work to find out.
For most of our history in most of the world some sort of energetic spiritual capability has existed within humans except for the period of time when a bunch of Very Smart People came along and measured what they could see, guessed about the rest, decided it was all settled, and then we built a materialistic civilization around those measurements.
You may suspect this article speaks a profound and unsettling truth. If you do you probably know it needs to be addressed and understood for progress to happen.
Look at how much of reality isn’t available to us that plainly exists beyond the edge of where science can see — science can only see where our senses tell our minds to look and our senses don’t know about stories. Our mind is our sense for stories but we don’t see the space of ideas as a real place. We’re staring into a vast expanse of knowledge and telling ourselves it’s a wall. It’s beautifully naïve but we need to stop.
Consciousness is a story and that’s a hard thing to science
The above line is one of my -isms that I threw out at some point in response to something — probably only tangentially related — which has stuck with me ever since. There’s something to it. It’s important. I think maybe it’s how Jacques Vallée and those like him find their answers.
When I drew the above image I needed to convey that it wasn’t a serious thing. It can’t be serious because trying to explain something like that in a serious way is impossible to do on a whiteboard. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong — it’s just inaccurate.
The above image is an attempt to discern what exists, not an attempt to place it in an accurate representation of how it exists. My current story I tell myself for how it exists is that consciousness is an ocean and the material universe is islands that arise from the ocean, briefly and beautifully from the perspective of the ocean but at the scale of infinities for the inhabitants of the island, before eroding away back from where it came from.
This relates to Unidentified Aerial Phenomena
Lots of things do. Sorry not sorry.
One of the most bizarre things around UAP is the concept of High Strangeness. It’s basically the weird sci-fi shit that you just know isn’t real because it’s so fucking crazy — except that the credible people who are saying credible things about UAP (which are real objects that defy our understanding of the laws of physics) are also saying that something about High Strangeness is real.
High strangeness seems like it can be explained by technology which influences the part of reality where the information transmitted during whatever physical process is represented by ESP takes place. (I’m sorry to say once again that ESP/Remote Viewing is real, as evidenced by the CIAs research and findings into it.)
The nuts and bolts of UAP control some of how the Woo happens.
In the above story if the ocean is consciousness and a particular part of the island is our planet then there’s no reason to think that SOMEONE won’t eventually develop technology capable of traversing those oceans of consciousness in order to jump from one story to another.
Obviously I could be wrong and am crazy buuuuuuuut…………..
That all seems to make sense to me.
Don’t stress out about it too much. It doesn’t matter as much as what’s right in front of you. None of the big stuff does. Take care of yourself and the people you can take care of and do your best. Shit’s hard. We’ll get through it.
Thanks for reading. I am the unofficial Wizard of Canada. You can support me on Patreon. We should put Greta Thunberg in an advisory position related to as much of our global infrastructure as she’ll allow.
