Monday, February 24, 2014

Don't Mess Me Up: The Tao of Paranormality


 "Looking for a sign that the Universal Mind 

Has written you into the Passion Play"
-Jethro Tull -Skating Away On The Thin Ice of A New Day

A Comedy of Errant Contradictions As An Off Topic Focus

In my life experiences there is a thread of encountering resistance to overt or indirect open ended questions or for that matter open ended answers that more resemble placeholders than definitive and conclusive arguments. Established science and the paranormal community may have more in common than is recognized if one eye follows the trajectory of science and the other follows the same travails in the para-normal "community". One could say the difference between the two has been marked with what is considered taboo lunacy versus acceptable lunacy. In the end there may be placed a pox on both houses.
It may be a growing possibility that what constitutes evidence is becoming a moot point as we have defined it to date that both skeptics and believers who endlessly parse the details of which will find the cutting edge of science cuts both ways ...equally undercutting toward the rules of the dualistic game field that has postulates that perhaps don't have a footing as we define foundational postulates.
Now you see it, now you don't.
These leading edge scientific forays into undiscovered country fold into  Valle's "Theory of Everything"  covered previously which may be an implication that both skeptics and believers have lost their ping pong paddles. it may become a matter of "Which delusion do you prefer?"
The three little bears may face a philosophic conundrum in the near future when nothing fits but then again, did anything ever fit?

Further in this essay I provide an example of this specific hall of mirrors.
More times than I have the ambition to count there is a presumption that for every Yin there is a Yang for "every season under heaven". 
Often times this resistance to saying A. I don't know or B. Perhaps or C. I suspect....all this becomes a farce worthy of Abbott and Costello's routine of "Who's On First?"
Then again where does this proclivity to suspect there is more to the story of life than what appears on the surface originate? Is there a innate gene that is activated in the neurons upon birth that persistently second guesses any causation? Perhaps pragmatic optimism saves the would be cynic who insists upon repeatable and demonstrable material evidence to create just enough of a gap in self knowledge to consider alternative beginnings or endings should there be such things.
There is a strand of self obscuring fog in this....that is to say, the nature of whom is looking at the nature that one is contained in.  The rationality of logical causation has failed to decipher the para in normal, and so there is a ongoing turbulence of the skeptical applying a ruler to the illogical as a conclusive religiosity of abhorrence contrasted with the superimposition of imagination to create castles in the air and the middle ground of open ended questions and answers is set aside in a sort of tribal competition as if if interpretation was a soccer match rather than both sides recognizing there are limitations and weaknesses in each others strategies.
An electrical circuit of Yin and Yang.
One pulls while the other pushes as a dynamo to roll it in circles generating a great deal of heat without light.
This game theory applied to the field of the paranormal has it's roots in the paradox of human behavior that arises from our own shared nature of deconstructing the foundations of nature itself while creating architectures to control it in a sort of tool making frenzy without one pause to consider the why and wherefore we have positioned ourselves as bees in this hive, not having a clue as to where this leads.
That in of itself is an open ended question as one thing leads to another.

The Unimaginable Loss of Religion

There is one writer whom I personally like and consider a good friend from a distance who would get very upset when I mentioned such things as contradictions to rational logic and causality as being directly unobservable within comments I posted on his essays. He would label such comments as obtuse because they recognized they undercut and underscored the fallacies of not mixing physicality with the intangible as to say the former drove the latter. More Yin than Yang, or more accurately, everything can be attributed to one aspect without the attribution of the other.  As if the realities we inhabit could be captured on a Kodachrome slide.
Which is the more obtuse? The Yin or the Yang?
Then there is provocation in the paranormal field inserted as a barbed thrust to garner provocation which is a point without a point that perhaps could be considered either a heat sink or a attention getting magnet that eventually takes both sides of Yin and Yang to create the nullifying effect of a sort of perpetual motion in action...using rational causation to create chaos.
An engine mechanic would advise not stepping down hard on the gas while the transmission is in neutral. otherwise the engine will overheat and blow itself up. Call this an analogy to what was formerly called Ufology.
Oddly, this individual became so enraged on my commenting this way I gave up making any further inadvertent "upsetting" remarks while thinking how ridiculous some extreme behaviors are that are off topic to the subject at hand and so one could write an entire post on the emotional aspects of fixity of any sort and where they derive from.
In other words the experts become the phenomenon in a sleight of hand.
The contradictions of sociological postures are in the mirror of the paranormal field as if a slide has a negative image to produce the positive and recognizable and yet there is no duality in this....
That being said, the emotional reaction to contradictions and paradox could fill several volumes. Perhaps it's due to the context of the illusions and delusions of willing the disorganized into a recognizable pattern that could just be a paradox that we have critically assumed to be a normal state of affairs...it's own form of logic.

Consider that our lives are positioned within the tensioning between animal drives and instincts armed with technology while having a blank canvas as to the why and wherefore of existence as we define it ourselves for our own purposes. Science makes the claim of objectivity whilst in the midst of a tug of war. This situation is transparent enough to see that tool making as an existential purpose to self awareness is a shallow canal.
However, it is said that the former Ufology was a pseudo-science and yet in institutionalized science the same Yin-Yang phenomenon of ping pong takes place in the halls of objectivity.
From the below linked essay, an interesting commentary on the state of science is placed. An excerpt from that essay asks pertinent questions that apply to the potential fallacies of argumentaion in the paranormal "community"

..."If true, this would mean that “reality” as we understand it is an illusion, with the action actually going on at the cosmic horizon. Baggott ingeniously compares this to a sort of reverse Plato’s cave: it isn’t the three-dimensional world that is reflected in a pale way on the walls of a cave were people are chained and can only see shadows of the real thing; it is the three-dimensional world that is a (holographic) projection of the information stored at the cosmic horizon. "

 http://www.science20.com/rationally_speaking/information_physical_what_does_mean-130300

Broadcasting ability lacking the capability to receive seems to be a growing movement revolving around another duality of being sold or selling. Products with appealing packages whose axis is bias as a fundamental price point in a competitive marketplace. The universe of Versus.

Avoidance, Denial and Controls

Factoids versus rolling definitions. Yesterdays feeding of the Gods of earth by human sacrifice to avoid ecological damage to tommorrow's crops....accumulating massive armaments as a factoid to avoid conflict, wars on everything from drug usage to poverty..all having an axis of contingency, of making all this up as we go along pretending we have expertise in our back pockets, a magic formula of avoidance, rather than posing open ended questions in the face of predictive failures. The old stanzas of "not letting go of nurse to find in the bushes something ten times worse" comes to mind. Entrenchments versus reinvention.
Load up the crutches and bandages in advance of a demonstrable need.

The Parody of Normality

“Those who know do not speak. Those who speak do not know.” 
-Lao Tze

An odd sort of arrangement.


The last subject I wrote about was the transience of coherence and chaos and so this entry seemed apt as a follow through as a view looking back through several frames, a proverbial workshop of telescopes and microscopes than begin with simplicity run through differentiation only to return in migration to simple questions. Rational logic need not apply beneath the surface, or more apt perhaps "human logic".

 Squares attempting to be round pegs end up as octagonal cubism.

The inbred animal instincts as the "Beasts" superimposed upon repeatability in the triad of 666 even divisible numbers of prediction within a pathology of presumptive control systems based on skewing surviveability in their favor whilst deconstructing reinvention...damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead.

I think that on the menu this could be called the combination platter.

Perhaps labels, terms of contract, familiarity, convenience as benign markers when fleshed become parasitic within the body politic in the face of the presumptive ensuing chaos in their absence, the fear of change, the fear of open ended questions and answers creates a pause, a gap that the anomalous drives through on a turnpike as through a  toll booth. The prosaic poses "the para-normal" as the "normal" is para which seems to be the Tao of the anomalous.




2 comments:

  1. You wade into deep water, as you always do, when you suggest that there is basically no difference between the believer and the skeptic. Asserting they are one in the same, both with positions based upon beliefs that are at best inflexible makes both of them ready to burn you at the stake and label you either a heretic or a lunatic. An outcome that would add even more weight to your proposition.

    One of my favorite questions and I think a reasonable one to consider is the following. Why do you believe what you profess to believe? It seems like a very simple question but I find it can be a most difficult one to answer.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I wrote this in the context of the study involved with anomalous phenomenon where I neither believe or disbelieve one theory or another. I suppose that leaves room for other possibilities. The opposite seems to be true if you mention these other possibilities to those in either camp.
    I think belief runs deep in folks beyond religiosity, its a requirement of survival and it develops with experience one way or this way. Repetition seems to have a place in pinning beliefs.
    I think most folks including myself yearn for a sort of predictability, assurances, buffers....life can have a quiet brutality about it.
    I think there is a sort of spiritual chivalry of not intentionally upsetting someone's apple cart but then again, its been my experience they would shoot to kill me if did..I think our species is much more dangerous than we give ourselves credit for..this kind of smiling one moment and organizing murder the next without even a flinch.
    This is the sort of para in normal I refer to. What is interesting to me is how much of the prosaic is in the theories surrounding some paranormal events, as one seems to mirror the other.

    ReplyDelete