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- Written by: Rod Boyle
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This trying to beat the Casino, gathering numbers, sorting them, trying to find the patterns, it's leading me down the rabbit holes of madness. Hours of spreadsheets, finding the similarities, discovering the underlying commonalities - they're anything but random, clock a few wheels a few times and you'll see, but while I can shoot an arrow backwards in time and make 100% accurate predictions, going forward it isn't proving so easy...
I obsess over them, spreadsheets, graphs, tables, I'm beginning to see numbers like Neo did in the Matrix at the end when he started flexing and the numbers started bulging, only my epiphanies merely convert to extended losses and defeats and weeks where I regroup and consolidate, over which time the numbers will have changed...
I''m becoming the very picture of the disheveled genius, unkempt, I'm not the only one out there, there are others, a little Chinese man at the wheel with his own system, a dozen little recipe cards, I scoff, "a nutter" I think to myself, but I've got my own recipe cards and I doubt very much he's any crazier than me.
Facts, Counter-facts, theory, speculation, probability, odds, statistics, there's the "Probability of winning 4/5 times X% percent of your stake of C$ at Y# of spins", or other such nonsense, and I'm finding, every time I go, that the theory grows, now - "Probability of winning 4/6 times X-Z% percent of your stake of C$ at Y-Z# of spins", my theories nothing if not adaptive...
It's the quick route to madness and there's no quicker way to assess somebodies sanity than ask them about their roulette theory...
I need a bulletin board, cork, yarn, I'm going to map out my theory, with pictures of Elvis, JFK, Marilyn, Epstein, Clinton, Crop Circles, Bigfoot, Contrails, pictures culled from the Voynich Manuscript, The Beale Cipher, Lottery Tickets, other errata and miscellania, all joined by bits of colored yarn, color coded thumbtacks, bits of tape and post-it notes, "I'VE got a THEORY..." ...
All the other lunatics out there, others like me, you see them with their notebooks, scribbling, trying to make sense of the numbers, find the patterns, predictive, they're always there in hindsight - but this year, the future, the year of the rat, this year is going to be 20/20 vision...
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Most of the tradition is lost in translation and obfuscated by our culture, but you can give it a shot and try to imagine their worldview:
https://downloads.newcastle.edu.au/library/cultural%20collections/pdf/elkinjan1937.pdf
https://www.aiprinc.org/aboriginal/
I find curious the suggestion that they communicated over great distances using telepathy, although this is almost (*) certainly due to 1 or 2 sources being repeated again and again.
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It's generally understood that we are the first "civilization" on earth, but I had a friend once propose that what if we weren't? Would anything have survived deep time and the churning of the continental plates to prove that we weren't? Now I dismissed this as preposterous, when later I examined the evidence and gave it a little more thought I realized my dismissal was preposterous, that, from an evidentiary point of view there was nothing to justify my presupposition that humans alone had developed civilization. "Absence of Evidence...." and so forth.
Considering that the fossil record is supposed to preserve only the tiniest fraction of a percentage of the life that has existed on earth, think of what might yet to be discovered? And what would we have to discover to convince us that there were civilizations that preceded us? What extraordinary conditions would be required for these artifacts to survive deep time? Food for thought.
Links:
- https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/267855-silurian-hypothesis-what-if-humans-arent-the-first-civilization-on-earth
- https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/are-we-earths-only-civilization/557180/
- https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/could-an-industrial-prehuman-civilization-have-existed-on-earth-before-ours/
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Considering, (not surprising, given my reading), the evolution mankind has undergone in terms of his thinking. (I use the terms "his", "him", "man" etc. in a gender-indifferent fashion, please don't waste my time with any politically correct gender-fascism.)
First - there is language. "In the beginning was the word...". Nothing we have done before or since has come close. Language both defines ourselves, our world and our place within it. This beginning with the word, common not just to Christianity and Judaism but a thousand different creation myths across as many cultures - this is not an accident.
Think - there are tribes (some still in existence) - that cannot distinguish between green and blue, and have to be taught the difference gradually with colored cards, have to be taught that there is a difference and then to discriminate between them.
There are arguments that even as recently as a few thousand years ago humans didn't "see blue", or not certainly as we see it today. And think of how language has evolved - across different cultures, to reflect our current epoch. The evolution of language since the invention of the World Wide Web, even, a relatively short span, how many new phrases have come into vogue? First - uncommonly to describe things that were imagined, yet not in existence, and then again commonly to describe them when they had been brought into existence.
And there are other languages, of which most of us know nothing - the language of musicians, notes, keys, clefs, of painters, whose language must naturally encompass a richer vocabulary for hue and texture, whose eye must discriminate, the jargon of a thousand unrelated professions from Priest through doctor, computer programmer, lawyer, each with a common tongue, but each as well with his own unintelligible vocabulary that allows him communion with his peers.
Language - note - not written language - but oral traditions, folklore, is what defines us, changes us, Christianity an excellent example of a myth destroyed by writing it down, in it's innumerable translations having lost almost all of it's symbolism and meanings, lost - through history, distance, through a general inability of the written word to convey over time the breadth, magnitude and symbolism of living experience.
Math, which I had considered separately but reconsidered - it's own language - but language as well, Math, the invention of (was math discovered? Or invented?) which facilitated architecture - the building of the pyramids, of Ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, of spaceflight and - if we should as a species live to see it - interstellar travel. And each addition to Math's language - for example the 0, Pi, then negative numbers, prime numbers, and a thousand other concepts beyond the scope of this post - each led on to countless new discoveries and achievements. And - marvel then, that each discovery or invention follows almost as a matter of necessity from the one before it.
"In the beginning was the word...", and if you are to believe it, this makes us Gods.
How, then, can we make it better? What changes in language will improve our lot?
Now, this is a good jumping off place, considering the different cultures across the world, and how their language shapes them, defines experiences that you can't have or recognize unless you speak their language, think of what is lost when a language goes extinct, and think of what we can add to ours to make the future a more interesting place...
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I came across this a long time ago when reading up on Tibetan Mysticism, and had need of the word a few weeks ago but couldn't remember or find it. But - no sooner do you put the question out there than the internet reflects the answer back to you...
Tulpas:
Any doubts I had were allayed by the fact they have their own website. And the "For Science" slogan in the upper left. Uh-huh. In any event you can't broach a topic like this without incurring a fair bit of "woo-woo", so you have to sift the "evidence" and "testimonials" with more than a grain of salt.
But seriously, this has some curious ideas embedded within it - as in, this voluntary creation of another personality in a way resembles multiple-personality disorder, only the one is the willful creation of someone the creator wishes (and presumably can get along with), the other is the involuntary creation of a personality that often isn't liked by the principal conscious inhabitant. And the idea of projecting it into the wider world around us, that it can assume it's own corporeal shape and grow independent of the creator, well, there's some serious food for thought.
Note: We do this otherwise, with people, children, technology, etc - but there is always the intermediary step of physical creation, with Tulpas there is not.
Related: Golem, Frankenstein's Monster, Shamanism, Spirit Guides, Psychopomps, Alexandra David-Neel oh, once you begin this one you can be led down a great many rabbit holes...