You only live once, and there are a lot of puzzles lingering from ancient times, and a few modern ones that also need solving. So I spend a fair bit of my time trying to determine answers.
I genuinely feel that these are the best solutions to date (and AFAIK they are original ideas), but clearly I am biased, so make up your own mind.
To be conscious requires memory and enough intelligence to make informed decisions based on the past, and predictions of the future. Basically that’s the nuts and bolts, but some people might want to involve spiritual angles as well.
The Internet is a major part, now, of everyone’s memory. It is not conscious itself, it is a not a “being” – it is simply a repository. Even so, it is entwined with our collective human consciousness.
According to Rupert Sheldrake somewhere in the aether is morphic resonance, where species store shared experiences and are informed by them. A memory of a species. That repository, just like the Internet, is not conscious, but it is entwined.
In subtle ways human consciousness has changed and adjusted because of the memory the Internet provides us, just like if each of us somehow got better at remembering things personally. It is the same machine, but different inputs means different outputs.
Like books before it.
Wikipedia might be the closest to a man-designed morphic resonance, because we (some of us anyway) contribute to it, and many of us feed from it.
Morphic resonance is an unconscious Wikipedia, that we feed into and pull from without knowing it. But it binds us together as a species. And because each species uses the same system, it is like each species has their own page on Facebook – alone and together.
Gaia itself is not conscious. But we are more than just individual consciousnesses – we have shared information that we give and take from, share memories, shared decisions – we are all one, all living things, deep down. We just need to start recognising it.
I have been very fascinated by DMT, by how people taking it can seem to have interactions with actual alien beings, and how the experiences are far more consistent than any other hallucinogen. It seems to be the closest we have found to connecting with entities from another dimension.
Now we have a very new mushroom (in terms of identification and studies) that seems to have similar properties, across multiple cultures. So far, from limited information, we know the following about Lanmaoa asiatica.
It is used as food in China, with chefs knowing it has to be cooked for 15 minutes or else it can be bad news
A trip can take many days and land people in hospital, which scares people away from trying to use it recreationally
The “hallucinations” have a primary aspect, seeing little people!
They can be seen in the real world, or with eyes closed.
The patients come with a strikingly odd symptom: visions of pint-sized, elf-like figures – marching under doors, crawling up walls and clinging to furniture.
…The patients saw these figures “moving about everywhere”, the researchers wrote – usually, there were more than ten tiny beings on the scene. “They saw them on their clothes when they were dressing and saw them on their dishes when eating,” the researchers added. The visions “were even more vivid when their eyes were closed”.
It is a legitimate fear that a “conscious” AI will take over the planet and destroy anything and anyone that gets in its way.
There are two aspects of being safe from this, and the same rules apply to alien takeovers or invasion from another country.
Be far away from the action. The further away from society and harder to find you are, the more effort it will take the bad guys to find you. Furthermore, try to control access to your property, such as a fallen tree or a bridge that is out. It is human nature to look for lower-hanging fruit that are not in the too-hard basket.
Don’t have anything they want. Extensive cropping or ideal pastures can be seen from above, so keep your operations small, not easy to spot, and preferably scattered. Have your shelter under the overstory of trees. Don’t be in an area where mining might happen, or trees are harvested.
It goes without saying that you need to be self-sufficient, and not rely on anything modern from the outside world.
A number of locations in the UK have long barrows (for burying the dead), causewayed enclosures (no certainty of purpose) and stone circles (no certainty of purpose. They arrived in that order, and were preceded by simpler burials for the dead, such as cairns.
A common theme is defined areas, via causeways, enclosures, henges and stone circles. I am thinking that being inside the defined area is what matters most.
When long barrows were built, they typically had ditches alongside them, the result of digging up building material. At the same time, presumably, burials started to become ceremonial, and may have incorporated aspects of what would become pagan magick ritual.
My idea is that being inside the ditches was considered to be safe from whatever those people feared, possibly something like demons or bad spirits. Combined with now appreciating how people could adjust the landscape to their needs, this led to the development of enclosures. Those enclosures could have had differing functions, maybe a temporary village, maybe pens for animals, or a marketplace. The point is that the demarkation of the enclosure was not to keep anything physical out, just the spiritual.
Then when the pagan magick developed further, it was decided that a safe space just for magickal ceremonies would be good to have, so they developed henges and stone circles. The henge for protection.
And today, pagans still “cast a circle” to perform ritual inside of. The broom was part of that, the concept of sweeping anything bad from the circle. The demonising of witchcraft in more recent times could be why they switched from permanent circles to temporary ones.
Protection magick is perhaps the oldest of all magick, and exists in every ancient culture. And in the UK they protected parts of the landscape by digging and shifting the land.
Needs an explanation catchphrase, something about we are all on our own, but together we are stronger…
Australia doesn’t have militia. Primarily because Australia doesn’t have guns.
I am envisaging a concept the combines the following:
A members only shooting range, fully compliant with firearm licenses. Basically a prepper-friendly version of a gun club. Push what a “shooting range” is to the limits.
A prepping club. Not too different to the Country Women’s Association. Open to all but will become, essentially, a place for trad wives to hang out
A farm, provided by a benefactor. Staffed by WWOOFers and Squad volunteers. One week of volunteering is “well regarded”
Members are squaddies or squaddettes.
A food co-op.
Discounted solar power etc
Business networking.
Monthly retreats.
Serious survivalist courses. Perhaps 20. It is unspoken but everyone wants to complete the lot
Each chapter is based in a regional city of 20K+ people. Membership fees are minimal, say $100/yr per family. Everything else is cost only. Outreach, school visits, merch, sponsoring local sports clubs are all possible. Not secretive!
At every entrance it will say “No Politics, No Religion”. That is set in stone.
The big picture is a framework that encourages prepping, and being outdoors, and self-sufficient, and networking with like-minded others = maybe when the SHTF, the bonds created can help everyone involved.
I can’t believe I have only just now stumbled upon this – evidence for an alternative to the mysterious dark matter and dark energy. They might not be needed to solve anything!
The problem is that this model uses a simplified equation that assumes the whole Universe is smooth, and expands at the same speed everywhere. But it’s far from smooth out there: we see a colossal cosmic web, criss-crossed by filaments of galaxies separated by vast voids emptier than we can comprehend.
Timescape cosmology takes that ‘lumpiness’ into account. More matter means stronger gravity, which means slower time – in fact, an atomic clock located in a galaxy could tick up to a third slower than the same clock in the middle of a void.
When you stretch that over the huge lifespan of the Universe, billions more years may have passed in the voids than in the matter-dense areas. A mind-boggling implication of that is that it no longer makes sense to say that the Universe has a single unified age of 13.8 billion years. Instead, different regions would have different ages.
And since so much more time has passed in the voids, more cosmological expansion has taken place there. Therefore, if you look at an object on the far side of a void, it would appear to be moving away from you much faster than something on this side of the void. Over time, these voids take up a larger proportion of the Universe, creating the illusion of an accelerating expansion, without needing to conjure up any dark energy.
Mexico and the US are dismantling government roles at a great pace, based on the idea that a “balanced budget” is necessary. It isn’t – look into Modern Monetary Theory.
But it sounds right, like balancing your household budget. Except the US “household” gets to print money when it needs it.
Regardless, we are heading towards a scenario of less governance, which means a lean towards anarchy and self-reliance. That mindset should be amenable to any attempts to promote self-reliance. For example, no restrictions on pasteurised milk, or gathering rainwater. Potentially fewer codes regarding the home you build, or what you do on your own land.
As much as I am against Trump et al, this is an opportunity for the the adventurous to get more rights and fewer restrictions. For example, in Australia a bedroom must have windows – that doesn’t make it easy to build a bunker…
I’m thinking that the number we call one is so basic and intrinsic to everything that we haven’t really considered that it might not be mundane. It could be the key to everything!
I began thinking about this when I saw a mention of the square root of minus one being impossible, and thinking about how meaningful to life and the universe are irrational numbers like phi and pi.
It is the weird and mysterious numbers that make everything tick, and one is a weird number. It is the only number aside from zero which is the same as its primes.
The primes of 1.00001 and 0.999999 are different from the numbers themselves. But not one, not a pure one. We can approach one by being very, very close to being one, say to a gazllion decimal places, but they still behave like regular numbers. Pure one does not.
It feels like it has the same qualities as infinity, which we can also get close to and it will act normally, but actual infinity is special and different.
Infinity appears at either end of the list of numbers, it can be infinitely small, beyond 0.0000000001 and infinitely big, like 210000000. And it is part of phi and pi which are infinite in their decimal places. And it is in the number one, a black hole that acts like infinity.
Phi and pi are almost the opposite of infinity, because their functions become more accurate with the precision gained from their longer versions with more decimal places. Infinity brings perfection.
One might also be related to how quantum mechanics works. Spooky action at a distance applies to singular things that are in an entangled pair. Not groups of things, not parts of things.
Experiments have been made in recent times to see if “macroscopic quantum entanglement” can happen, instead of just sub-atomic particles. And the answer is yes, with a test made on ” two tiny aluminum drums one-fifth the width of a human hair”.
I reckon entanglement can happen for anything that is what nature considers a one, and it will be interesting what future experiments find out.
Zeno’s arrow paradox is about how small time can get. When something is moving, technically it is a sequence of locations where it is stationary, one after the other. Right down to planck scale. Which is the one of time. You cannot have half a planck time. It too, feels like infinity, the insane idea that something cannot be halved.
As I thought about all of this I looked at an empty chair and how for an hour it did not change, it has no movement, no “life”. But of course if I observe it long enough, once upon a time it was not in that spot, and earlier still it was not made or was being made. With time it will break or decay, and in miniscule ways it is doing both, constantly, right down to planck time. Nothing is ever still except when measured the planck way.
A one thing is something we decide by how we can pick it up and it stays as one unit, and how we can separate it from other units the same as it. A drop of water is a one, as is a cat or a chair or an egg. I can’t think of anything that is half of one that is as useful as the whole. If it is, then really there were two.
We know that numerous physical processes bond atoms together to make one thing like a piece of wood. But these forces are not random, otherwise the entire universe would be one solid lump. There is more to it, there is purpose behind the making of a thing, an object, a one.
Everything is moving, right down to subatomic particles, all the time. Regardless of whether humans can notice. Every single component of the entire universe is alive. There is not a single inert thing in the entirety of existence. A photon cannot stay still.
Although, there is the Quantum Zeno Effect where if you observe a sub-atomic particle repeatedly at a fast enough rate, all probability ends and it stays in one position. This might be a substantial key to life, the universe and everything.
As someone approaches the speed of light, their experience of time slows down towards infinitely slow. To the point where nothing changes and a oneness is happening.
The most likely culprit of sophisticated man-made crop circles, getting the patterns so precise, is from an aerial device using infra-red beams or whatever. The crop circles are just tests.
Enough crop circles with cheeky, knowing designs have occurred for us to know that they are designed by people, and they are into esoteric stuff, even just for fun.
National Reconnaissance Office has fun with its logos, and they are very good at sky tech. Satellites etc.
It was speculated on Twitter that this logo points to a weird Earth anomaly sometimes thought to be an Atlantis candidate:
The NRO clearly likes having fun with logos and mission patches (see some here), this is probably a nod to Lovercraft:
Billed as some to be the anti-WEF it is nothing of the sort. Possibly it is a platform for powerful people who were, for whatever reason, rejected by the WEF. Looking at their advisory board, there is a strong leaning towards being anti-woke and anti-climate change, two things that WEF see as not fitting in with the modern ways of the world.
It might be that it is financed by Legatum Capital, who seem to have ties with Russia (many rich people have had business with Russia, that doesn’t definitively make them bad), and the Middle East, where they are based. Their founder is self-made and his rise to the top is through either massive good luck in investment picks, or by going down pathways like bribery and skullduggery.
Alan McCormick, of Legatum, runs upstart right-wing nut job TV channel GB News…
This caught my eye:
we have an elite class in the West scaring the daylights out of us; always looking for the bad in things; undermining our self-confidence by trying to make us fearful of the future or ashamed of our history and our culture. Somehow their solutions always involve more power for them. Accountability and sympathy for the rest of us are not really their thing.
I read that as being proud of the imperialist days.
These aren’t Illuminati or Mysterious Elders. They are right-wing racist, imperialist, fossil-fuel investors wanting to network. They are probably wanna-be weapons dealers.
