Bcc: FYI
rkm website: http://cyberjournal.org
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Greetings,
I’ve been looking over your responses to the ‘core problem’ posting. You were offering your answers to the question, and your concerns about the question, and it was all helpful to me in getting a clearer perspective on the problem of engaging the 99%. I appreciate your contributions to the cause.
I’ve tried to get a start on sharing your responses, which would require selecting, condensing, commenting, etc. I really don’t have the energy for it, and I don’t think it would be that useful to anyone. It’d mainly be rehashing old ground, even though the ideas were of value for me and my work.
My highest priority project at the moment is to read and review
Jim Macgregor’s recently released book,
Hidden History – The Secret Origins of the First World War
. I’ve seen early drafts, and I know this will be a very important and widely-read work. Much painstaking research was required, and all claims are meticulously referenced. It’s a real myth buster and I can already tell it’s a good read as well. And it’s about more than just WWI. It’s about the origins, nature, and membership of the cabal that has been guiding world events ever since.
But before I get to that, I need to get some ideas off my chest that have been plaguing me ever since I learned about the universe being electric. It’s the link between Earth climate and remote galactic events that intrigues me. It turns out that events like supernovae send out current surges along interstellar plasma circuits. When such a surge reaches the Sun, that leads to a spike in solar activity, and it all shows up in our ice-core records. Climate history is a window onto galactic activity.
I’ve finished the first draft of an article, ‘Climate and why it changes’. It outlines a new model of short and long-term climate change; it summarizes the electric model of the universe in layman’s terms, and it reaches some surprising conclusions about how heat energy is transferred from the Sun to the Earth. I need to fix up a few things, and add lots of images, and I’ve got some venues in mind that might find it useful.
Meanwhile, let me share some ideas about beliefs and why they’re so stubborn.
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As you travel through life, your beliefs are your life-compass. They guide you in navigating around life’s obstacles and in charting a course to your goals. They give you your sense of orientation in the world, your sense of being in a safe place or in a dangerous place, a comfortable place or a confusing place. They define for you the meaning of your life, and the reasons why you’re doing what you’re doing.
If someone tries to persuade you to change your core beliefs, it is like some passenger trying to persuade a ship’s captain to begin navigating in a new way, in the midst of a voyage. Regardless of how logical the passenger’s arguments might sound, it would be irresponsible of the captain to put his ship at unnecessary risk by experimenting with new ideas.
You can make a list of your beliefs, in words, but that is not how they are stored in your head. A list is a logical left-brain thing, and your belief structure is a complex web of ideas, memories, and images whose home is in your right brain.
If someone challenges an important item on your list, your right brain will feel threatened – someone is trying to pull the rug out from under your world. If your right brain feels threatened, then you will feel threatened, and your left-brain verbal response to the challenge will be devoted to defending yourself. The more persuasive the challenge, the bigger the threat, and the more defensive and emotional the response.
There is a path to becoming master of your beliefs, the Socratic path, based on examining your beliefs. But it’s a path few are drawn to. It requires a detachment from beliefs that would give most people vertigo; it’s like walking a wire without a net. It requires putting your world at risk, and questioning what you’re doing with your life. Not many people have either the time or the inclination for such pursuits. What, after all, is to be gained from such pursuits, in real world terms?
Cyberjournal is a place where beliefs are exposed for examination. My beliefs, your beliefs, and beliefs that are floating around in society. It’s my vehicle for traveling the Socratic path, and your vehicle as well to the extent you want it to be. Or you can just go along for the ride. Either is OK with me.
As regards making changes in the world, however, we’ve got to understand that it can’t be done by trying to change people’s beliefs. We can never achieve unity that way; belief structures are too diverse and too stubborn. So much of our activism turns out to be divisive rather than unifying, or else it wastes energy with choirs singing to themselves. We’ve got to get beyond that.
As I said in the previous posting, which no one responded to, I think the Connecting the Good movement is very promising as an initiative that is succeeding in bringing people together around collaboration, without beliefs getting in the way. Now that I’ve run across this movement, and established communication with Richard Flyer, I feel I’m switching from ‘searching for an answer’ mode, to ‘doing what I can to help’ mode. It’s a comforting feeling.
rkm
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