fear_of_x Dafremen Indulge my mood this morning should you choose to read on: The more the moments of my life pass through my memory; the more I look at the choices I've made and the choices I've been told I should have made; the more I realize how truly tedious and overly prevalent fear of the unknown is in human society. This irrational fear of "what might be" seems to take two forms: "intellectual denial" and "superstitious overreaction." Both are like hyperinflated portions of what might be considered a rational range of response to the unknown. They are both blinded by the flaws inherent within their systems of guided perception. This first piece will be about the first of the two groups..the empiricists or consensual realists. The first group, the "intellectual denial" group, consists of those who attempt to wrestle with reality using their intellect. This group has embraced logical dissection as the safest method for exploring the world. We don't dive into the unknown, first we study the situation carefully, logically preparing for every contingency (thereby removing: all risk, many possibilities and hopefully any additional variables that might "skew" our observations. Ha! Excuse me..that was just too much. As if step by step execution of a lab plan isn't going to "skew" our observations. Back to my releasing my cerebral bowels all over the place...) Knowledge is our shield..where we are sure of our facts, we tread with confidence. It seems that the object, in this tromping around with confidence, is to find how things differ from one another, so that those differences can be catalogued. Our greatest hope, we say, is to create a compendium of all human knowledge. (Or perhaps it will be referred to as "How You Should See The World." We'll see.) I think it's a noble idea, that was never really thought out very well. "Once we've reached a consensus on how something really is...we'll brainwash our kids into thinking that way too." I give to you...the loss of our common imagination. I give to you the decline in Yankee Ingenuity and the death pyre of Creativity. Welcome to the same ideas, stuck in a box, being recycled over and over again. Nice..you brainy numb nuts jackasses. Maybe you SHOULD spend a day looking for unicorns you introverted gray-matter-centric savages. You've so focused on the rituals of science, that you've stopped the world around you from getting in, as it happens..in context..with all of the other variables that you never considered because you thought you shouldn't have to. You've stopped experiencing the moment, and are stuck in the the endless trap of your mental gyrations and manipulations. Your mind is as closed as any Bible literalist, for your facts are set in stone. And then you reach the unknown..the indescribable. Then you run into the immeasurable, and intellect fails you for a few reasons. The first is your inability to be open to experience for your own distraction by the rules you've indoctrinated yourself with. Discarding possibilities is as easy for you as checking it up against your mental catalog of facts. If the facts already taught to you/learned by you disagree, then the possibility is discarded, not the fact. (Even if the possibility discarded was the one that might have led you to discover a flaw in your "fact catalog.") The second is your illogical reaction when a possibility is discarded in this manner, (apparently agreed upon by the entire scientific community): "It's ridiculous..why waste time on that? We might as well go out and prove the existence of fairies and Easter bunnies (or unicorns.)" Well first off, Beaker, your whole religious movement (the scientific establishment), claims to be on some big noble quest for truth. And whatever it is that you do not understand, cannot measure...or are unable to wrap your thick, overstuffed heads around..represents unexplored territory..period. Each unknown area of the vast fabric that is reality..holds hope of teaching us something new. This is a fact. And it is regulary the return to unstructured reality, that allows for those random combinations that create TRUE inspirational thought. Yes, you really SHOULD spend a day a month going out to sincerely, with all of your scientific prowess, search for unicorns or loch ness monsters or UFOs or some ridiculous illogical thing..all of you hyper-logical-freaked-out-by-reality-more-than-you'd-care-to-admit types. It would do you a lot of good. (And now...back to the flask of SbF5 I left to stabilize en vacuo..time to add the hydrogen flouride and hope it doesn't eat through the glass. Later.) 070917 ... Lemon_Soda Well, yeah, if you completely dedicate yourself to being or thinking a certain way, it precludes being any other way. A similar rant could be wrote about any view or pursuit. Is it foolish to pursue ideals, knowing that no ideal can truly be fully realized? Should we all just "sit on the fence" until life pushes us off? Also, your usually very straightforward and brutally honest, but I sense some real venom in there, beyond the norm. You okay? 070917 ... dafremen Well you get tired of scientists claiming to be above the religious fanatics..and truth be told, they're both just as likely to stumble into the same traps. Paraphrasing my rant does not make it so, by the way. We're not talking about chasing ideals. There is nothing idealistic about the scientific method. It is clinical at best. It is limiting, base and mundane in its search for material advancements at the expense of other pursuits more beneficial to the human race. To fill our race with hope that material efforts might lead to our liberation as a people.. What I said is this: Scientific pursuit and religious fanaticism have a common enemy which they both deal with in irrational ways: the unknown and/or poorly understood..aka X. I did not say that idealism of one sort or another wasn't worth pursuing. (As for the venom..please read the disclaimer which composes the entire first line of this blathe.) Thank for your concern. 070917 ... Lemon_Soda Thank you for clarifying. I generally think more along the lines of how words make me feel instead what they actually mean. I've been working on getting over this but some times it muddles my perception of the whats going on. May I ask what a rational response to X would 070918 ... Lemon_Soda be? 070918 ... overcome your fear of it by doing some 070918 ... pSyche love_of_y 070918 ... daf A rational response to X? Curiosity? Wonder? Not too much to ask. Imagine being Creation...imagine being you...now imagine being greeted with rejection, fear, alienation and imagine being objectified then categorized then rejected or labeled.. Imagine being X. (Not a reference to daxle or in any way meant to reflect poorly on fluffy little kittens or the people who love them.) 070918 ... Lemon_Soda I get the wonder part, but how do I satisfy my curiosity with out offending X? 070919 ... dafremen You are X...or have been at one time or another. How should you have been approached at those times? How did you want to be perceived? Aren't your allies those that express concerned for your well being without controlling you..no matter who they are? Perhaps the mystery that is X will unfold before our eyes if we just nurture it's existence with sincere appreciation. 070919 ... dafremen see also: world_of_rippled_water 070919 ... tessa love_of_y that is love of the question not the answer thank you psyche 070919 what's it to you? who go blather from