The Middle Way

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Poland has actually experienced invasion and mass murder by both the left and the right. Their response is well-illustrated in the image below.

The image in the middle of the banner stands for the Polish nation state, which Poles lost to foreign invaders for some 200 years.

Generally, Eastern Europeans stress the importance of the nation state because they have recent experience with both Nazi and Communist violence and mass murder.

The nation-state, when based on sound principles, is the Middle Way and the best way to avoid either the extreme right or the extreme left.

In America, our mainstream media leans much too far to the left, frequently distorting the news. If you have not looked beyond MSM for news of what happened in Charlottesville, here are some perspectives that are closer to the middle and to the truth:

When Liberals Club People, It’s With Love in Their Hearts

I Don’t Care About Charlottesville, the KKK, or White Supremacy

Narrative Collapse: Is Charlottesville’s James Alex Fields the Next George Zimmerman?

Edit 11:20: I am not completely sure about this one but it is well worth viewing (4:41): Boom: Charlottesville Police Officer Tells All!

Individualism and ideology

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The American Constitutional system protects the rights of individuals. These protections could be called the traditional American political ideology.

Generally, a political ideology is characterized by having goals (a sense of how society should be) and methods (the best ways to achieve those goals).

The basic goal of traditional American political ideology is a well-functioning society arising from the free enterprise of the individuals comprising it.

The problem with this system is it is hard to understand and requires some governmental intervention to prevent abuse.

Since the American system is hard to understand, it has many competitors that are easier to understand. Communism was one of those.

The author of the following excerpt uses the word ideology to indicate political thinking that is too idealistic, without real-world understanding.

Like the Soviet Union of yore, contemporary America is in the grip of an ideology, a system of ideas not derived from any empirical study of the world around us, but which provides an account of the world, establishes an aim to be pursued and rules for pursuing it, and (most importantly) legitimates the power of some men over others. Another essential element of any ideology, as of any religion, is its demonology—an account of the enemy whom adherents must forever struggle against. Unlike personal enmities which arise through concrete social interaction, ideological enmities are established a priori by the ideology itself. In the ruling ideology of the Soviet Union, e.g., enemies included the bourgeoisie, revisionists, kulaks, and one especially nondescript class referred to simply as “enemies of the people.” In the ideology which prevails in present day America, the ideological enemies are the abstract groups denounced in Trump’s second Charlottesville remarks: racists, supremacists, haters and bigots, Nazis and the KKK. Ritual denunciation of designated enemies is an essential aspect of ideological rule, and leaders of an ideological regime cannot be considered legitimate without periodically making them. In the Soviet Union, communist politicians learned to spit out denunciations of communism’s demons in their sleep. (Trump’s Tergiversations on Charlottesville and Their Significance)

The linked essay is well-worth reading in full because it clearly describes the problems idealistic ideologies can cause and, by implication, why the traditional American system seems so open to attack.

Complex mind, simple thoughts

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I strongly believe a major cause of neurotism, emotional agony, and mental illness is our minds are more complex than much of our thinking and most of our communication.

This causes us to be like prisoners trapped in small space when we are capable of much greater freedom.

A new study illustrates why this happens.

The study show how auditory hallucinations can be induced in people who are not otherwise prone to hearing them.

Pairing a stimulus in one modality (vision) with a stimulus in another (sound) can lead to task-induced hallucinations in healthy individuals. After many trials, people eventually report perceiving a nonexistent stimulus contingent on the presence of the previously paired stimulus. (Pavlovian conditioning–induced hallucinations result from overweighting of perceptual priors)

Since this effect can be induced fairly simply it shows that:

These data demonstrate the profound and sometimes pathological impact of top-down cognitive processes on perception… (from the study itself: Pavlovian conditioning–induced hallucinations result from overweighting of perceptual priors)

Note that these hallucinations “result from overweighing perceptual priors.”

A “perceptual prior” is, in these cases, a mistaken assumption about reality.

If our auditory and visual “realities” are susceptible to mistakes like these, how much more is our psychology?

Due to our generally very simple ways of interacting with other people, we are essentially forced to hallucinate who they are and at the same time who we are.

That is, our complex minds are essentially forced to see ourselves and others in simple, hallucinatory terms that cannot possibly be true.

I believe this is the cause of great mental and emotional distress for all people everywhere.

I also believe that this problem can be largely overcome by practicing FIML

FIML allows us to remove our psychological hallucinations about our FIML partner as they remove theirs about us.

FIML works because it allows partners to escape the simplicities and many hallucinatory traps of ordinary communication.

As far as I know, there is no other method for doing this. FIML is practical psychotherapy that will optimize your mind and psychology by providing the data you need to overcome hallucinating most of your life.

Consciousness as reality itself

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In Buddhism the idea that consciousness is reality and reality is conscious is called “mind only” or Yogachara.

David Ray Griffin, a process theologian, has come to similar conclusions—that reality is fundamentally conscious.

As has Donald D. Hoffman, a professor of cognitive science at UC Irvine.

Hoffman came at this subject from a mathematical angle, but arrived at a similar conclusion to Yogachara Buddhism. Hoffman says:

As a conscious realist, I am postulating conscious experiences as ontological primitives, the most basic ingredients of the world. I’m claiming that experiences are the real coin of the realm. (The Case Against Reality)

I tend to reach similar conclusions when I think about everything in terms of signals.

The advantage of thinking in terms of signals is we get a good picture of “reality” without needing to say what is real beyond the signal itself.

This kind of thinking is helpful for metaphysics but it is also extremely practical when it comes to human psychology.

Rather than posit personality types and what goes wrong or right with them, we analyze how people send and receive signals instead.

In thinking along these lines, I have come to the conclusion that most psychology as most people understand it uses “arms-length” language, the language of meso and macro signals rather than the much more precise language of the micro signals that actually comprise our shared “realities.”

The difference can be illustrated in this way: Rather than explain your most recent signal (sent or received) in terms of personality, explain it by accessing the micro-signals of short-term memory to find its true antecedents.

If you do this again and again by using a game such as FIML, you will probably come to conclusions similar to the above—that there is no deeper substance to psychological reality than your consciousness of it.

Military thought experiment Part 3

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In Parts 1 and 2, we discussed how a well-organized group could: Gain control of a large society by using a small number of clandestine military operatives.

In this post I want to explore what may be indications that this already has been done to American society and how it may still be going on.

The following video explains two important refinements in our usual understanding of MKULTRA.

The first is the use electromagnetism and electromagnetic fields (broadly EM) to control people and the second is that MKULTRA did not end in 1964 as generally believed.

The video:

I would add the following point to this video: The main reason most individuals are harmed or controlled through the use of clandestine techniques is to control their communities.

Besides the clandestine use of drugs and EM as discussed in the video, psychosurgery is another way to destroy an individual’s productivity and harm their community. A lobotomy, for example, can be done with a hypodermic needle filled with ethanol. An operative with little training would be able to do it in a few minutes.

If the time is well chosen, the victim will wake up feeling they have a terrible hangover or that they are disoriented and may be getting sick.

This post is a thought experiment. I invite readers to use their imaginations to consider how easy it would be to accomplish these goals.

Furthermore, I think it is only rational to consider that something like this may already have happened in many/most societies in the world, including the USA.

Part 1

Part 2

Seymour Hersh says Wikileaks DNC leaks provided by Seth Rich: audio

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This is a must listen. According to Hersh, Seth Rich provided the DNC emails to Wikileaks and Brennan and others in the US government knew this. The entire Russian angle on those leaks was bullshit from day one.

Edit 8:00 AM: According to Jerome Corsi Seth Rich was the LEAKER – insider report – MURDER was John Brennan CIA operation.

Edit 10:00 AM: Wikileaks tweeted the Hersh audio and this adds credibility to it while basically confirming that Assange knows Seth Rich was the leaker. See this: Audio tape of Seymour Hersh discussing WikiLeaks DNC leaks and Seth Rich.

How do you talk to yourself?

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A new study seems to show that addressing yourself in the third person can relieve anxiety without you doing any other work.

Third person means your name or your third-person pronoun of choice.

Jason Moser, lead author of the study, says of it:

Essentially, we think referring to yourself in the third person leads people to think about themselves more similar to how they think about others, and you can see evidence for this in the brain.

That helps people gain a tiny bit of psychological distance from their experiences, which can often be useful for regulating emotions. (Talking to yourself in the third person can help you control emotions)

The study is here: Third-person self-talk facilitates emotion regulation without engaging cognitive control: Converging evidence from ERP and fMRI.