Taboo – Traou an Dour

Musings, Questions, Quotations

What is your Background?

Yo Ren

Whassup?

Tell em where you from!

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Straight outta Compton, another crazy ass nigga

More punks I smoke, yo, my rep gets bigger

I’m a bad motherfucker and you know this

But the pussy ass niggaz don’t show this

But I don’t give a fuck, I’ma make my snaps

If not from the records, from jackin or craps

Just like burglary, the definition is ‘jackin’

And when illegally armed it’s called ‘packin’

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Damn that shit was dope!

O’shea Jackson / Lorenzo Jerald Patterson / Andre Romell Young / Eric Wright

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Today I learned that “packing”, in our weird and wonderful times, can have another meaning for those claiming to be trans male. You can even “pack and play”. I wonder what do the woke brigade and the purveyors of vagina scented candles make of N.W.A. or Niggaz Wit Attitudes?

Are they taboo?

People can get easily offended. I have a t-shirt like this and it does from time to time attract attention usually from black people.

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People can be very concerned about where people come from and what is their background. I can say with accuracy that I have not been employed by a recognised organisation for more than six weeks in the last seventeen years. My background is as an unemployed person who did some private teaching of “A” level physics and chemistry for about five years. I have been retired for a few years now and live in rural Brittany.

If I were to apply for a job, this is what a prospective employer would see first listed chronologically on my CV or application form. Anything else is “ancient” history.

In academia it is customary to say who your Ph.D. supervisor was, as depending, this can give an aura of kudos.

We did a course “Ph.D. to Professional” at Cambridge University when asked to introduce themselves they all said, “I am in the Bloggs group” and then some extremely jargon laden title about their Ph.D. subject. Their identity seemed to be tied to the research group supervisor. I had never heard of any of their supervisors as I am not a biologist, so it meant nothing to me.

But just like for the guys from Compton, it seems important to have a “rep” in modern society.

Because I lead an itinerant childhood when people ask me where I am from. I tend to pause. “Nowhere” is a tricky answer. They don’t really want chapter and verse, so I say Cardiff, even though I only lived there for my first two years.

One cannot say. “I am an individuating identity cleaved off from and out of the source of all life. I am incarnate here on the physical plane to learn. Thence to follow the journey of the prodigal, home to my father’s house from whence I came.”

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If somebody asked you, what is your background and where are you from, how would you answer them?

Would you give a short off pat socially-conditioned answer?

Or would you endeavour to answer what, in truth, is a very probing question?

Musings

Being Problematic

Over the last three weeks or so the UK news has been dominated by the search for a lost person. They have searched “everywhere” for a lost body and now one has been found. This means that, in time, there will be some media resolution on this issue. The family and friends will still suffer. The TikTok detectives will have had their five minutes of “fame”. It will pass and fade for most, not for others.

This is a metaphor for “problem solving” in society. People are often looking for a lost body, a skeleton in a closet or a scapegoat. Someone to blame. Once one of these has been found all the drama and the emotion can come to a crescendo and then start to fade. For some reason, people need something or someone to pin things to. It is a primitive dynamic rite of passage. Psychologically in days gone by, human sacrifice was perhaps used so as to appease the Gods. It was an act of futility, by the collectively powerless to give the illusion of making a difference. The catharsis was cathartic, but nothing changed materially. It was a bit of a con by the powerful priesthood, it helped them keep their power over. The dead person did not go into the waiting arms of the loving Gods.

Because I am a retired “old fart” living out in the middle of nowhere, I can write things like I just did, without someone, a “superior”, calling me in to have a discussion, a quiet word, about my on-line opinions. I have no contract concerning my on-line comments with my employers. I am bringing nobody else other than myself into “disrepute”. Thus, I am not strictly speaking problematic to anyone else. But this cover-all is not exact.

For example, when I applied for a Ph.D. studentship around ten years ago, I was being “problematic”. I satisfied the educational requirements but for some societal reasons an ex-academic with 50 science publications applying for a Ph.D. studentship was problematic. Why?

From my point of view, I would have been very good value for money. I would have hit the ground running and helped to advance the project. The money was more than I was making as a private tutor. But…

The project supervisor might have had ego problems, they might have been insecure, they might have imagined some kind of scandal and besides the science funding body, whose mission it is to get value for money from investment, forbade the funding of a second Ph.D. {doh}

I was / am problematic to the way people think, their expectations, and mental “rules” about what is and is not “acceptable”.

Snobbery plays a big part in what is perceived as being problematic.

Because I have no power, am not famous and am not associated to any body august or otherwise, I am relatively free to write what I wish. Were I a head of a university department, an Oxford college or a learned society I would have to watch my Ps and Qs. I would not be allowed to express freely and I would be subject to being censored and to censure should I stray. Although I have no positional power, I do have an enhanced apparent freedom of speech over those who do have power.

If Dishy Rishi or Keir Starmer wrote what I just did, it would erupt all over the media, like a pandemic.

What an eccentric old fart {This language maybe offensive to your reader} says is unlikely to cause any ripple whatsoever. Computer programmes however still want to admonish me.

From time to time I get the notion that the way I live remains problematic for some. Why?

What is so very wrong with a retired old fart, doing some gardening, some DIY, some photography and rambling away here on the internet?

There is no problem unless there are expectations, notions of should and notions of ought.

A lot of the things which appear problematic are only problematic in the minds of men, not it reality. When there is a divergence from the “accepted” socio-political construct the error checking software says “problem”, “problematic”. It should not be like this, “we have a problem Huston!”

So, what does one do with a violent double rapist who has a penis and who is claiming to be she? Is this being a problematic one, or has the socio-political construct created a “problem” for itself. Whose fault is it?

Common sense suggests that putting a penis holder heterosexual rapist into confinement with beings with vaginas is not a smart idea. Whichever way you look at it, it does not smack of wisdom. Not a very good cunning plan. It is asking for problems down the line.

Why is this problematic?

Because some people claim it is discriminatory.

It is taboo to mention common sense, these days.

It is problematic if one prefers reality and common sense…

Personal Development, Quotations

Taboo Quotes

Whenever a taboo is broken, something good happens, something vitalizing. Taboos after all are only hangovers, the product of diseased minds, you might say, of fearsome people who hadn’t the courage to live and who under the guise of morality and religion have imposed these things upon us.

Henry Miller

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I’ve always been attracted to things that are taboo. I’ve never been afraid to go to that dark place.

Ricky Williams

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The type of fig leaf which each culture employs to cover its social taboos offers a twofold description of its morality. It reveals that certain unacknowledged behaviour exists and it suggests the form that such behaviour takes.

Freda Adler

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Taboo has a lot of hidden meanings. We’re going to leave that up to your imagination.

Jeff Gaulton

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Western society has accepted as unquestionable a technological imperative that is quite as arbitrary as the most primitive taboo: not merely the duty to foster invention and constantly to create technological novelties, but equally the duty to surrender to these novelties unconditionally, just because they are offered, without respect to their human consequences.

Lewis Mumford

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Life is liveable because we know that wherever we go most of the people we meet will be restrained in their actions towards us by an almost instinctive network of taboos.

Havelock Ellis

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It (cremation) used to be kind of taboo, but not anymore it’s become real popular. It takes up less space, and you’re dead anyway, so what’s the difference?

Bob Young

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Mental health needs a great deal of attention. It’s the final taboo and it needs to be faced and dealt with.

Adam Ant

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The most strongly enforced of all known taboos is the taboo against knowing who or what you really are behind the mask of your apparently separate, independent, and isolated ego.

Alan Watts

Cause & Effect, Personal Development, Towards Freedom

Towards Freedom – The Corporeal

Unless you are some dis-incarnate being wandering through space-time it is likely that you are, as yet, corporeal. And this meatiness of being corporeal presents a major challenge for the times I live in. We have the new phenomenon of body dysmorphia and the ability to surgically alter outer appearance. Thanks to the availability of leisure time and high definition photography we are surrounded by images of people, bodies and food. Due to the decline of manual labour and the availability of food, for the first time in history, humanity has a problem with being overweight. The advances in modern medicine together with its magic bullet hint at an increased longevity and a panacea for old age. People can compare what they look like to those held to be exemplar and beautiful. The obsession with corporeal image is at the root of much unhappiness and dissatisfaction. The simple truth remains, as things stand, all humans face the prospect of growing old, losing their faculties and dying. It comes to us all. There is an identification with form, with body and a hypochondriacal worry about its workings and the imminence of death. People are shit scared of dying, by and large. This corporeal identification is a part of the fear, as well as fear of the unknown.

Are you your body or your thoughts?

This simple question points at the fact that the essence which makes you a being is more than either your body or your thoughts. It is possible to observe your body and let people stick needles in it. It is possible to observe your thoughts. This means that there is something more than these, something extra or maybe less, doing the observations, your essence. If a partial non-attachment is possible, then it follows that this degree of detachment might be enhanced, with practice. If you are going to vacate the form, the body and are unpractised, when the time comes it is going to be harder. Now here is the weird bit, many understand that they are not simply a body full of thoughts at an intellectual level, but that is as far as it goes. The thinking isn’t joined up, or clear.

If you are going to drive a car, then it is best that the car is looked after, serviced and checked out from time to time. There is nothing wrong with taking care of the form you inhabit, but when it becomes an obsession that is unhelpful. When you are continually worrying about the next MOT test, you can forget to live. It doesn’t matter if someone else has an Audi, you have the car you were born into. You can’t swap cars, but you might be able to add a spoiler and change the exhaust. So long as the car functions it can still get you from A to B, from birth to death. The car may have a few tantrums and with the help of a mechanic (doctor) you can get it back on the road again. Changing the badge on the car does not change what is inside the car or the car itself. When you get to B, you will have to leave the car at the breakers’ yard. There is no choice in this. It may be used for spare parts or simply torched or buried.

In order to have more freedom, it is necessary to lessen the corporeal attachment and reduce the levels of drama about both its appearance and how it works. Not everyone can run as fast as Bolt. The body has certain biological functions, and these are necessary, it has reproductive drive, it has hunger. Associated with these functions is a mass of mind stuff where the mind makes up a whole bunch of drama to indulge in. The primal reproductive desire is overlaid with pleasure seeking gratification and indulgence. People can fuck themselves stupid. To be free is to have these urges in balance and not to be slave to them. One must see them as they are and not as some glamorous thing, some competition. Remember freedom is increased by reducing the number of things which have power over you. If sexual lust controls you, there is no freedom, simply a commanding basal urge.

In our antiseptic times there is a tremendous squeamishness about bodily function and phobias against bacteria. Whilst some prudence is good, it can get out of control. And to have a taboo about basic bodily function is to be hung up by them. Just like death we all have some commonality in the need of these. Anything which you have a hang up about, impinges on your freedom. To be precious is to be constrained. In the west we have the luxury of modern sanitation which renders life easy and lowers health hazards. Being a little more earthy about the body demystifies it and frees up. I am not going to delve into the psychology of bodily function here, but the mental drama so associated is widespread and unnatural. In this respect modern western living, largely detached as it is from nature, lends a hand to phobia.

If one over exercises in order to sculpt a body, there is a very real danger that body identification increases. This worry in comparison to others does not liberate. The wretched pass time of comparison is at the root of much dissatisfaction and suffering. You have the car you were born with, learn to appreciate it and treat it reasonably well. Find out what it can do instead of comparing it to the Joneses all the time.

If one has invested heavily in the body and the intellect thereof, the degree of attachment increases, as does the fear of loss. But if you are not your body or your thoughts, both of these are simply on loan and impermanent. Everyone knows that they will die, yet this emphatic evidence of corporeal impermanence is set to one side and ignored by most, at least for the first four decades or so. It is only when the body starts to malfunction and grumble that the reality of death starts to knock. The gift of a body is taken for granted and imagined eternal.

Along with materialism, corporeal obsession works to decrease freedom. If someone can take away your possessions, they can take away your life or injure your vehicle. Fear of this is rife. Thinking a little it follows that if fear has power over you, then you are not free. And so many human fears are associated with this, the corporeal. These meat fears and social faux pas fears both inhibit freedom. I am not here advocating a reckless disregard, rather a decrease in identification with the form side of life. If your essence is not the form, then why be so overly concerned about the form? Treat it with some respect but do not let it dictate.

The more control over your mind you gain, the clearer you see that the corporeal is not tantamount, it is not the be all and end all. Perhaps you can see the degree of interrelation of mind and body, beyond mind there is essence. It is with the essence that authenticity lies. Getting to this essential core does not happen overnight. Glimpses of it loosens corporeal obsession, which increases freedom. And when the time comes you are much more ready and willing to let go of the body. This transition is less fearful, and you don’t live with the cloud of fear overhanging.

In this sense the body is but a vehicle used to explore the earthly reality of our day-to-day world. It did not ought to be master. One can enjoy the use of the body but to over indulge in it is unhelpful. Equanimity arises out of an increasing objectivity, where corporeal function is seen for what it is and no more. We are here to learn, and the means is corporeal.

Cause & Effect, Esoteric, Esoteric Psychology, Magic, Personal Development, Questions

Are You Susceptible to Evil?

This is a question which most will never consider. As I mentioned earlier evil has managed to get the whole subject of evil taboo. It is a feat of some considerable trickery.

In the very early part of this century, I encountered on the physical plane a number of individuals who with the benefit of hindsight I now consider to be evil and who practised the dark art of forceful manipulation. One of these was the CEO of the company I co-founded. Luckily, I did not get overly tainted by his acquaintance. Around that time, I was offered many temptations, the vast majority of which I did not take. Another character was very nasty and prone to growling and being generally unpleasant.

I’ll speculate. The more insecure you are the more susceptible to evil you are. If you want to take shortcuts and be cunning, evil will tempt you and you will find it hard to resist. If you want to hold the trump card, the joker up the sleeve, evil may appear to offer you these. If you desire the upper hand the advantage because you don’t think you are not good enough, evil will whisper in your ear. If you like secrets and playing secret squirrels evil will offer you, its cloak. Do you like to persuade or manipulate others to do your bidding, if so, evil will show you how. Evil is always willing to negotiate and to strike a bargain, it likes to offer rewards. It believes in sticks and carrots.

There is a basic question. Which do you prefer Sun Tzu or Lao-Tse? One is force the other is flow.

Evil likes to possess, enslave and have power over beings. Evil likes binding contracts. Many think that they are being good leaders when in fact all they are doing is trying to satisfy their lust for power. They will have many justifications for why they are a good leader, why they know best. Power tempts and can be the thin end of the wedge whereby evil permeates. For those susceptible to evil there is always a path of least resistance and evil knows how to find it.

In the previous post the Tibetan suggests that it is lower concrete mind, where evil if effective. Lower concrete mind out argues what remains of conscience and intuition. It silences the still small voice of calm.

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It in using justifications can find reasons for heinous acts, weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Nazis in Ukraine. Evil twists and perverts. Trump lost his battle with power; he could not admit he lost the election. The King of Rohan listened to the whispers of Grima Wormtongue. Smeagol was twisted by the ring of power.

But evil does not need to be so dramatic. It can just be deep selfishness, ambition and greed. Evil is often about material acquisition. Most would find this notion of gaining material goods as normal. But in excess and in an unfair distribution there is evil. Occultly speaking matter has remnants of evil in it. Lust for money, is evil. The word ME can found somewhere in the motive for all low level mundane evil practices. Me, me, me, me is an evil mantra. Evil is jealous and vengeful.

Balance is not evil, excess often is.

Having read the above, are you susceptible to evil?

Musings, New Age, Photography

Science and Taboo

There are some things, in certain circles, that are effectively taboo. If I said something like, “I remember catching and locking up wayward nagals on Atlantis” or “we came here from a planet in the Sirius system, which had two suns, 18 million years ago” there are those who might think me a nut job. There are others who might mock me behind my back. I will wager if I was still an academic and the science undergraduate students found out, there would be gossip.

If I were to criticise people in new age circles for misusing scientific nomenclature, I would be a mean nasty person, to some not all.

I can’t win, it seems.

Similarly, if I say I have seen dead people, ghosts if you like. People might soapbox that I am making stuff up. I’ll wager that they would however be unwilling to come with me at night into a “haunted” house. With my vajra in hand I would be game. I see dead people from time to time or rather what is left of their sheaths.

The same people would start to get very uncomfortable if I started to speak of exorcism, even more if I started a rite of exorcism.

Is it taboo for a trained scientist to be an exorcist or is it just a taboo subject for conversation?

People who believe in exorcism by priest or voodoo, are unlikely to accept a chemical physicist laser jock as qualified exorcist.

Is it taboo for an exorcist to be a laser jock?

There are millions of people who believe in chakras but if I was to talk about the anja centre in a high resolution molecular spectroscopy conference it would go down faster than a lead balloon on a planet the same size as ours but with ten times the mass.

Scientists often think that they have very open minds and no prejudices. This is not necessarily the case.

I often wonder if I am, as a being, taboo. Or is it just my leper’s bell which puts people off.

Musings, Satire, Toltec Teachings

The Four Natural Enemies Simplified

The four natural enemies are fear, sobriety, power, and old age.

I think it fair to say that most people have fears, some of these are crippling. In our times we have a new fear, the fear of missing out.

In the context of evolution fear of the unknown and fear of changing from the way you were socially programmed by family and peers are big, as is fear of getting rid of your internal dialogue. If you have no inner critic, what are you going to do without all those circling thoughts? Fear of silence and being alone in one’s own company is also common.

Sobriety as an enemy means that you think you know more than you do and are sufficiently detached to have no pangs of conscience if you are mean to someone. If you are sufficiently detached and uncaring you can then exert power over other beings. This kind of power is addictive to some.

You could say we have, insecure scaredy cat, clever Trevor or Jeremy and Donald the bequiffed prince of orange, the very stable genius, as archetypes of people who have succumbed to these enemies.

The fourth natural enemy is old age, it means that you are exhausted and worn out by struggle, so you just want to pack it all in, get your slippers and a mug of cocoa, nanna and gramps.

One encounters stories of a lot of people who have succumbed to power in alternative circles. It often involves copious shagging by the “guru” of people who have handed their power and wealth over to said guru, so that he can have orgies and Rolls Royces. How many people in Westminster sexually interfere with their junior staff? Power is an aphrodisiac to those who are power hungry. It is a vicious circle.

If you work in higher education, you will have encountered the young smart Alec type, who thinks that they get all the material you have been torturing them with. Thinking they know a lot, they are fond of showing off, whilst still an undergraduate. They are usually a tad more circumspect when it comes to Ph.D. viva having been disabused of their illusion.

The Toltec teachings are the only ones, that I know of, which tackle power as a subject. It is, to my eyes, implicit in Vajrayana tantra. To my opinion a discussion on temptation and on evil in a sane way, is absent in much “spiritual” material. Treating evil as a taboo subject, enables it. In the darkness strange things fester. If you can’t talk about evil in an adult rational way, you are handing your power over to evil by means of fear. Taboos are primitive and superstitious.

I’ll speculate that it is transcending the natural enemy power which is the gateway to the third initiation and thereby inevitable ultimate liberation or if you succumb becoming ever more deeply embroiled with the dark adepts and thereby not achieving liberation, not in this kalpa. Overcome the natural enemy power and in the fullness of time there is no hasta la vista baby, no au revoir.

To overcome power is tiring. If you do this, you feel knackered. Then you have to start all over and with a newfound sense of trying hard not to be a complete arrogant dickhead, rather a harmless and humble being trying their best, and with little or no drama.

Cause & Effect, Karma, Musings, paradigm, Questions

Is it Taboo to Talk About Evil?

I’ll preface this by saying that what is socially acceptable is a time varying thing. For example, both heterosexual and homosexual sodomy are perhaps way more fashionable now than they have ever been before and are in many countries no longer criminal offences.

Now there is much handwringing about macabre and brutal colonial pasts and there is a movement to redact this from history, statue by statue. There is a redact functionality in Adobe Acrobat. Pretending that the evil did not exist does not deter future evil. Having slaves, was in some circles, socially acceptable. The child of a master and a slave was often born a slave.

I am guessing that some people might consider the Inquisition as evil, even though it was initiated by the catholic church. Perhaps the protagonists genuinely believed that they were doing good when they held witch trials or tortured to gain confession. It was, at least at one level, socially acceptable.

It is possible to be deluded as an individual and deluded as a group.

Social acceptability therefore is no reliable barometer for good or evil. People can do some unpleasant things and kid themselves that they are just dandy.

People go on about the glory of ancient Rome and Greece and conveniently forget about all the brutality. We have movies about Spartacus and the mass crucifixions. The British invented concentration camps.

I know from the statistics of this blog that any post with darkness in it gets less hits. People it seems do not wish to discuss / get informed about evil.

In our times it is possible to execute an adversary from an upgraded games console which directs a heavily armed attack drone. We may not smell the explosion or get splattered in blood and bone, but we can kill from an office chair. Death becomes sanitised by distance and technology.

Which is worse crucifying a rebel slave or killing your religious enemy with high explosive?

Which is more evolved and civilized?

Modern conventional munitions, destroy, maim, and slaughter yet this can be dressed up as regime change and sold with the fake news of weapons of mass destruction. This is some very evil stuff. Yet people justify it to themselves as for the greater good…deluded? People who imagine themselves the “goodies” are not nice. They are bellicose destroyers of human lives for their own, often petty, aims.

I reckon that one of the tricks about evil, is to make even the notion of evil, a taboo subject. People are afraid to mention evil in case it rubs off. As such evil hides under a cloak of its own making and thereby festers. Evil has brought about a trick of invisibility and a cloak of justification. Evil sells itself via concrete mind through the means of the word justifiable. It was justifiable to invade Iraq and kill Hussein {who we don’t like much} because he had weapons of mass destruction.

If that is the logic, why hasn’t the USA invaded North Korea or Israel?

Evil is insidious, once it has the thin end of the wedge in the threshold of mind it starts to open the furrow along which it permeates. Soon people are justifying things that they would never justify before because the moral compass has been put into a spin by the magnitude of reasons that evil uses to justify what it wants. Evil starts by tiny steps, sets a precedent and soon the steps are bigger and less savoury. Look it says, there is a precedent, this is not too big of a step, we have done this before.

Evil is alive and operational in our times and people use lower concrete mind to justify its ends and goals. Reason and justification are so often the legerdemain used to enact evil. You may for example believe that you are a “goody” when actually you may be a selfish, self-advancing and grasping individual who stops at very little when it comes to advancing your own agenda, no matter what it may cost others. You may justify this as simply being ambitious, striving after what you want and perhaps believe you deserve.

Are you sure you are a “goody” and not a “baddy” in disguise?

The wife and I have a little joke about exorcism. I occasionally like to mention exorcism in public, some people actually shiver when they hear that word. 😉

Cause & Effect, Musings, Personal Development, Questions

Beyond the Lens of Social Conditioning

Most people interpret their surroundings and their interactions through the lens of social conditioning. There are a largely unwritten set of rules for this conditioning, and it has variance between generations. The youth of today are conditioned differently to the youth of my Jurassic days. My generation did not grow up with either the internet or mobile ‘phones. Because I was an aspiring academic I learned about FTP and supercomputers in my early twenties. Strangely enough I was amongst those with relatively early uptake of a tri-band mobile phone.

This social conditioning is conditional and has many shoulds and oughts. These are foisted onto others in a you must conform judgmental way. Right now, there is some bizarre hullabaloo about choice of pronouns. Would people let me use it and its? What longevity this folly has, remains to be seen. Trying to condition others to behave the way we think they ought to, they should, is not liberation it is about a kind of herd like slavery. It is inflicting onto a another being one’s own prejudices and dogma.

Whilst people subscribe to things like “I must have huge expensive house” and implied, a mortgage, it is difficult to escape social conditioning, because conforming to social conditioning makes it easier to have and keep a job that pays sufficiently well to cover mortgage costs. People are beset with the fear of missing out and thereby in general are very busy. There is little time to stop, to pause and reflect. There are a lot of time wasting escapist activities. This is because people, in general, cannot hack being alone by themselves, with themselves with nothing to occupy and divert their minds. The silence of an empty calendar and lack of Pavlovian response to incoming text messages, is terrifying.

If your mind is like the Circle Line Underground Line with trains of should and ought endlessly circulating it is impossible to think. Your internal dialogue has you. If you are worried whether of not you are conforming to the social conditioning dictates of others, you are in no way free.

There is a template for social conditioning. For example. One should socialize and one ought to advance. One should have a partner; one should not be a loner. One should be hot; one should like sex. One should go down the gym, one ought to like yoga. One ought to explain every choice of action with a string of pseudo-rational justifications and bullet points. “We went to Malta because it is nice and warm and there is plenty to do and see and they understand English.” Is a more socially acceptable explanation than, “I went to Malta to try to restore my memories from my life as a priest/knight two lifetimes ago.”

Social conditioning has taboos. These taboos can be for the heinous or simply the mundane.

If I don’t doff my cap at someone who is a position of power and I treat them as an equal. That is taboo. If I say that many people are very selfish and egotistical {in other words normal} that too is taboo.

In hospital yesterday the wife was reading out a guide to negotiate a house purchase. It had the usual things. If you want fifteen grand off, make an offer thirty grand below the asking price and then negotiate. The vendor can meet you halfway. Why?

What is socially acceptable is a time varying thing. It is volatile and therefore not real. It is made up in the minds and by the gossip of mankind. In my days it was OK to wear a pair of budgie smugglers, taboo now unless you are an athlete.

Socially conditioning is demarcated by expectations. If you don’t conform to these made up things, expectations, then you are suspect. Twenty odd years ago there were a set of expectations about me. Things did not turn out according to that made up stuff. The expectations were demonstrably inaccurate.

There is this TV programme “Ben Fogle Lives in the Wild” or some such. He goes off to visit people who have apparently slipped the net {todatsu} removed the knot of society. The programme is formulaic. He explores the tribulations and the freedom and then nearly always concludes that the protagonists would be better off back home, in society. Go and put the kettle on and have a nice cup of tea.

You can live ostensibly adjunct to society and yet not be hemmed in by social conditioning. One does not need to make a drama. One can meet mankind in the midst of their folly. It is a state of mind. I can say that there are things that I might do which are taboo in the context of social conditioning. There is no point in showing off. If I sat down in the middle of the supermarket and started chanting, that would raise eyebrows and maybe a short call to the gendarmes. It would not bother me if someone did this chanting, I might even join in.

I mentioned before that the underlying cause which made my personal transferrable skills courses for Ph.D. students untenable was because I had renounced a career which many of them were aspiring to. I had broken expectations, people with a tenured job at a top university do not jump into virtual unemployment. In the social conditioned world this kind of thing does not happen. It is a non sequitur, a does not compute.

“Life is what happens when you are busy making other plans”, sung John Lennon.

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When you look at the world do you see it how it is or by reference to how you think it should be, ought to be?

Is your perception in any way coloured by your social conditioning?

Do you have expectations, if so, why, for what purpose?

Musings, Questions

Are Taboos Primitive?

Or does modern “society” and science have them?

In my lifetime homosexuality in the UK was legalised. Before that it was criminal and taboo, there was chemical castration. Look at the £50 note! Now there is law preventing conversion therapies. In some states in America abortion is taboo. People fought to allow abortions others are trying to ban them.

It is taboo to have public opinions which differ from various lobbies?

I have a T-Shirt with a rainbow-coloured psilocybin molecule on it. Would I be allowed to present a research paper at an august scientific conference on high resolution molecular spectroscopy wearing it? Or would that be taboo?

Chemists invented LSD and tripped out on it. But LSD is taboo by law now.

Is it taboo if you are a trained scientist to believe in homeopathy?

If I believe in the esoteric constitution of man, and yet can solve the particle in a box time invariant Schrödinger equation. Is that taboo, forbidden, verboten, interdit?

If I say that I have memory recall from my days in Atlantis, does that make me a dangerous whacko, a taboo being?

Are taboos time varying?

Is taboo merely another word for prejudice?

If taboos are things of primitive society, why are we so laden with them?