pandemic of self-diagnosed omniscience.

Things You Do Not Know

People have a tendency to conclude a whole lot from not very much. Their speculations can be mistaken for reality, their extrapolations unquestioned. I have joked about the phenomenon of self-diagnosed omniscience in this blog and I have introduced the concluding kangaroo, a being that jumps a great distance over chasms to form conclusions.

People also like to pontificate; evidence is rarely a major concern.

I first became aware of some oddities in my character, the summer of my 13^th birthday. We went to Butlins at Pwllheli and I spent a lot of time walking along the Llyn peninsula. I did not want to be there with my parents. I was able to persuade various bartenders that the beers I was buying were for family.

The average man of the street has never heard of three or four pronged nagal beings. I was very much with the question as to who or what I was / am that summer. I even had a jacket like this at one stage.

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While I was decorating this afternoon, it seemed to me that people may conclude about what I am up to and engaged in, based on the contents of this blog. They may be certain that they understand what is going on. They may forget that I choose what to put in the blog and what not to.

A long while back an American university was visiting the one that I worked at, with a view perhaps to forming an alliance. The delegation was “senior” and to help fill their diaries, I was delegated by the powers that be to talk about pastoral care, student support, transferable skills training, the tutorial system, science outreach and academic quality control. The delegation arrived at my office and we had an extended discussion which covered a lot of ground. They were a bunch of suits but very engaged in what I was saying. They started asking me if I had been to the USA before and made an informal invitation to come visit. Somewhat surprisingly they took my contact details and arranged a follow up meeting for the following day.

The next day two of them came to my office they had called the “mother-ship” and proceeded to offer me a job. They would pay for me to come visit for a fortnight to scope out. Then we could put together a plan for a new form of student liaison and care office campus wide. They suggested that I could have a big salary and choose my team.

While the negotiation about alliance was taking place, I was being head hunted spontaneously.

Nobody knew that this was going on, the seaside sounded attractive…

It was out of the blue…

People tend to conclude from within their own version of reality. As a consequence they do not include things which they do not know into their conclusion. They are unaware of the things which they do not know. This rarely inhibits conclusion forming.

Self-diagnosed omniscience if inaccurately or prematurely diagnosed is unaware of the things it does not know. It deems that there cannot possibly be any things which it does not know.

Hmnn…

Personal Development, Postulates, Questions

Assumed Understanding

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In our times it is possible to find “instant experts” keen to profess their assumed knowledge and understanding from the nearest soap box whether made from wood or electronic. You can buy little sachets of “Instant Expert” which you can mix with water, add a little Ego and a dash of encephalitis pop them in the microwave and “hey presto” you become an instant expert on whichever subject you choose irrespective of whether or not you have researched said subject. The “Instant Expert” sachets are the latest wisdom hack. It is the new shortcut to omniscience.

There are those who may actually be an expert in one area who might assume that said expertise is transferrable to others.

I have been very fortunate in this lifetime in that a very large number of people have told me stuff, presumably to educate me, they have offered me their expert opinion and told me what I am. Many, to my eyes, have deemed that they “know-it-all” and in their largesse have been keen to share.

If somebody desperately wants to be right, to “win” an argument, I am generally minded to let them. If they are so certain, so adamant, it would be mean of me to piss on their campfire. If their opinion is so concrete and set, why would I waste any energy trying to alter it?

I will make a postulate.

The phenomenon of assumed understanding is widespread and in many cases that assumption is invalid. People understand much less than they might imagine. This does not stop them from opining in an adamant and assertive manner.

Or a more concise version.

People are often loquaciously full of bullshit.

One of the things one learns in higher education is that smart people, when they tip up, assume that they know more than they do. One can spend three years {or more} altering this knowledge self-diagnosis.

What do you reckon?

Is assumed understanding prevalent?

Cause & Effect, Karma, Musings, Personal Development

Traps of Own Making – Soap Opera

The entertainment sector provides us with so-called “Soap Operas”. These pervade the societal consciousness to the extent that newspapers talk about what happens in them and provide “spoiler alerts” if there is to be a plot reveal. Soap opera “stars” can become part of our extended family. In these “operas” the protagonists get themselves into hot water, difficult situations, traps, and drama. They are like normal life but on steroids, amphetamines and in some cases hallucinogens. They are a mirror, a window on the trials and tribulations of modern mores, such as they may be.

In these the protagonists get themselves into all sorts of scrapes the extraction from which is never easy, there must be drama. Drama sells.

The common themes are sexual dalliance and sometimes coercion, deceit, manipulation, bullying, fraud, criminality, debts, revenge, one upmanship, lies, jealousy, money, resentment, babies, death, cancer, secrets, reveal of hidden secrets, family and property. Etc.

Many of these traps are made by the protagonists themselves. Knowingly they err for some short term perceived advantage or other and it comes back to bite them on the bum. The karmic boomerang is very evident in many soap opera plots.

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Their stuff can be found in real life on “The Jeremy Kyle Show” and in the newspaper columns of agony aunts like “Dear Deidre”. Sexual and therefore titillating problems are to be readily found for the salacious consumption of readership.

The simplest example of a trap of own making is the “expedient” lie. Faced with a difficult situation many tell a lie so as to avoid facing up to the reality of said situation. In an attempt to avoid; the trap, the hole, has started to be dug. When the subject to be avoided raises its head again, additional levels of lies, mistruth and spin are needed. The hole, the self-made trap, gets deeper. Soon the avoider is deep in a trap of their own making from which there is no easy escape. By seeking to avoid and deceive they have made the situation much worse. The trap deepens and there is now no escape. The trap then induces fear and paranoia about being found out. There is an additional layer of emotional angst associated with the trap, which many may carry with them to the grave. The drama causes dis-ease and suffering.

Occasionally the brown stuff hits the fan and the house of deceit comes crumbling down in full public view and the contents of the trap are revealed in all their glory for all to see.

This is a precis of many soap opera plot lines. One could say that life imitates “art”.

The classic metaphor is the plate spinning trick. Said spinner spins so many plates on poles. There are only so many plates that can be spun. If the spinner puts the straw on the camel’s back plate up not only one plate but many crash to the ground and break.

The problem with traps of own making is that people nearly always make the trap of own making worse by continuing to dig the hole. They cannot see beyond the trap. They just keep on digging. On occasion the hole then implodes upon them. The trap induces an egocentric myopia and the world starts to close in. People in the trap may imagine their behaviours justified right up until the jaws of the trap close and beyond. They may write come back articles for national newspapers seeking to re-affirm the very narrative which brought their downfall. They cannot let go of the trap which they have created for themselves. It lasts in proportion to the depth to which it was dug.

Nearly all traps of own making have a least a pinch of the flaked sea-salt of deceit in their seasoning. That salt may come from the tears of others.

The biggest commonality of traps of own making is the “getting away with it” mentality.

“I, the clever, the magnificent, am sufficiently skilful that I can wing it and get away with it…I do not have to pay for my dalliance. I am all powerful.”

Unfortunately, the universe is bigger than our egos and self-diagnosed omniscience…

The karmic boomerang is a genuine phenomenon of our current manifested universe. It is real unlike many of the things which humans say and are adamant about.

Musings, Personal Development, Questions

What if Anything is Beyond Your Ken?

If there was/is anything beyond your ken you would not know about it, because by definition it is beyond your ken, your ability to cognize and assimilate.

Perhaps a better question is “where does my ken end? Am I aware of the step function change from within my ken to beyond my ken?”

Can you expand the boundaries of this ken? Yes.

Not so long ago someone asserted to me that the guardians of the race do not exist and by extension there is no spiritual hierarchy. He was always a bit of a gobshite prone to being adamant and making assertions beyond his ken.

There are a lot of people like him. If something is beyond their ken then it cannot, must not exit. They do not know where their ken ends yet are prone to soap box.

If you work in higher education as I once did, part of your job is to extend the ken of young people and from time to time to mess a little with their heads. An undergraduate level only goes so far, nuance and depth are found after a few more years. Most people who do an undergraduate degree forget the bulk of it in a few years.

I am married to a non-scientist and although she can manage well in the world, she lacks a physics understanding. This physics understanding has improved. When I say let gravitational potential help us shift this downstairs, she knows it means let it go, let it fall.

People by and large are unaware about their lack of understanding.

Say for example you are shit hot at maths and quantum optics, it does not mean that you have the faintest notion of the interpersonal dynamics of “Love Island” or the market at Electric Avenue in Brixton. Your ken of humanity might end at the door of the Physics department. Under certain circumstances your lack of ken could be dangerous for you. I had an ongoing banter with the weed dealers at the bus stop in Brixton. They asked me if I was a copper, because of my short hair, no. It was our little joke. They knew my face and I theirs. I was safe.

Unless you can turn off your internal dialogue at will, your ken does not extend to quiet mind, much less to the point before thought. You may be a smart cookie, but you have never known mental silence, it is beyond your ken.

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Do you know where your ken ends?

When your ken ends do you have the humility to act accordingly?

Or in you self-diagnosed omniscience is the end of personal ken a notion which you cannot countenance, after all you are an omniscient being are you not?

buddhism, Quotations

The Four Stages of Attainment

Excerpted from Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_stages_of_enlightenment

The four stages of attainment

The Sangha of the Tathagata’s disciples (Ariya Sangha) can be described as including four or eight kinds of individuals. There are four {groups of noble disciples} when path and fruit are taken as pairs, and eight groups of individuals, when each path and fruit are taken separately:

(1) the path to stream-entry; (2) the fruition of stream-entry;

(3) the path to once-returning; (4) the fruition of once-returning;

(5) the path to non-returning; (6) the fruition of non-returning;

(7) the path to arahantship; (8) the fruition of arahantship.

Stream-enterer

The first stage is that of Sotāpanna (Pali; Sanskrit: Srotāpanna), literally meaning “one who enters (āpadyate) the stream (sotas),” with the stream being the supermundane Noble Eightfold Path regarded as the highest Dharma. The stream-enterer is also said to have “opened the eye of the Dharma” (dhammacakkhu, Sanskrit: dharmacakṣus).

A stream-enterer reaches arahantship within seven rebirths upon opening the eye of the Dharma.

Because the stream-enterer has attained an intuitive grasp of Buddhist doctrine (samyagdṛṣṭi or sammādiṭṭhi, “right view”) and has complete confidence or Saddha in the Three Jewels: Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha, and has removed the sankharas that force rebirth in lower planes, that individual will not be reborn in any plane lower than the human (animal, preta, or in hell).

Once-returner

The second stage is that of the Sakadāgāmī (Sanskrit: Sakṛdāgāmin), literally meaning “one who once (sakṛt) comes (āgacchati)”. The once-returner will at most return to the realm of the senses (the lowest being human and the highest being the devas wielding power over the creations of others) one more time. Both the stream-enterer and the once-returner have abandoned the first three fetters. The stream-enterer and once-returner are distinguished by the fact that the once-returner has weakened lust, hate, and delusion to a greater degree. The once-returner therefore has fewer than seven rebirths. Once-returners do not have only one more rebirth, as the name suggests, for that may not even be said with certainty about the non-returner who can take multiple rebirths in the five “Pure Abodes”. They do, however, only have one more rebirth in the realm of the senses, excluding, of course, the planes of hell, animals and hungry ghosts.

Non-returner

The third stage is that of the Anāgāmī (Sanskrit: Anāgāmin), literally meaning “one who does not (an-) come (āgacchati)”. The non-returner, having overcome sensuality, does not return to the human world, or any unfortunate world lower than that, after death. Instead, non-returners are reborn in one of the five special worlds in Rūpadhātu called the Śuddhāvāsa worlds, or “Pure Abodes”, and there attain Nirvāṇa; Pāli: Nibbana; some of them are reborn a second time in a higher world of the Pure Abodes.

An Anāgāmī has abandoned the five lower fetters, out of ten total fetters, that bind beings to the cycle of rebirth. An Anāgāmī is well-advanced.

Arahant

The fourth stage is that of Arahant (Sanskrit: Arhat), a fully awakened person. They have abandoned all ten fetters and, upon death (Sanskrit: Parinirvāṇa, Pāli: Parinibbāna) will never be reborn in any plane or world, having wholly escaped saṃsāra. An Arahant has attained awakening by following the path given by the Buddha. In Theravada Buddhism the term Buddha is reserved for ones who “self-enlighten” such as Siddhartha Gautama Buddha, who discovered the path by himself.

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People who do not know what they are interacting with can make a mistake, a boo boo, in their self-diagnosed omniscience. They can assume many things and succumb to group confirmation bias.

Personal Development, Quotations

Opinion Quotes

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People do not seem to realize that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Too often we… enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.

John F. Kennedy

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Don’t let someone else’s opinion of you become your reality.

Les Brown

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Opinion is the medium between knowledge and ignorance.

Plato

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Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.

Mark Twain

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The cleverest of all, in my opinion, is the man who calls himself a fool at least once a month.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

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The fewer the facts, the stronger the opinion.

Arnold H. Glasow

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Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.

Jack Kerouac

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Alcohol is necessary for a man so that he can have a good opinion of himself, undisturbed by the facts.

Finley Peter Dunne

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The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd.

Bertrand Russell

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The universe is transformation: life is opinion.

Marcus Aurelius

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At any given moment, public opinion is a chaos of superstition, misinformation and prejudice.

Gore Vidal

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Opinion has caused more trouble on this little earth than plagues or earthquakes.

Voltaire

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My psychiatrist told me I was crazy and I said I want a second opinion. He said okay, you’re ugly too.

Rodney Dangerfield

Dreams, Karma, Musings, personal, Questions

Respecting Others

I think if fair to speculate that I have had amongst the most comprehensive and varied sets of passive nocturnal dreams in our times. In the Toltec Teachings people are either stalkers or dreamers by predilection. This roughly maps onto extroversion introversion. I have a predilection for dreaming. You might say that I am a dreamer but I am not the only one. I have also dreamed up many things including personal and team development courses, decision courses and a big business plan.

I did for ~ eight years do active dreaming everyday sometimes several times. I got so that I could do this on the crowded Victoria line.

My passive dreaming suggests that I am a fully severed philosophical three pronged nagal being of the elephant, second ray, dreaming class. I also used to be a “kosher” scientist with over 60 published papers in the physical sciences literature. I’ll speculate that these along with the INFJ MBTI personality makes be quite rare. My dreams suggest that I am also a Toltec or man of knowledge, possibly amongst the last.

A while back a nurse was a little short with me, so I took her a write up about Imperial College in French for her to read. She listens to me a little more now.

It is possible that people have scoffed about me, gossiped about me and made fun of me.

We are effectively Brexit refugees. All the boring hot air about Brexit was a key factor in deciding to leave England. And guess what the palaver concerning Brexit still goes on.

Over the years many people have not shown me much if any respect. A couple came close to getting a Judo choke hold, much closer than they could ever have imagined. It is my favourite piece of groundwork. My face does not reveal if I do not want it to.

The chest nurse once gave me a twenty minute lecture including plastic lung pieces about smoking. The dead pan face in front of her did not stop her. I am not an idiot. I have looked at data. I did not ooh and aah in the right places.

Many people have told me what I am and been adamant as to the extent of their knowledge and wisdom. People it seems cannot resist teaching me. I must be in such dire need of education.

Ridicule is nothing to be scared of
Don’t you ever, don’t you ever
Stop being dandy

Adam and the Ants

I am not keen on arguing. If people want to assert their truths, I respect their right to hold erroneous views. It is not my job to correct them unless I am being paid.

I have joked on and off in the blog about self-diagnosed omniscience and it is my opinion that this is near pandemic. People soapbox without checking the level of their ignorance or the facts. Even “intelligent” people do this and in them it is more of a shame, they might know better.

My dreams suggest that I have had more than one Egyptian life and hint at me having been coming in an out of incarnation over a period of ~5000 years {Imhotep reference}.

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Have you treated me with respect?

Have you dissed me?

What are the karmic implications?

Musings, Quotations, Toltec Teachings

Types of nagal being…

This afternoon whilst walking through the orchard I was contemplating that many people are utterly unaware and ignorant as to the extent of their own ignorance. They are oblivious to it.

It goes along with my pet theory that the world is suffering from a pandemic of self-diagnosed omniscience.

Quite a while back someone told me that he did not think I was a nagal being. I said to him “it depends upon the way you look at it…” He insisted that he was right. I did not argue…

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