Pink Feldspar: philosophical frappe

As mentioned yesterday, sometimes I take a cue from stat traffic, and today I think it's very pertinent to pull this over from April 30, 2016, which I shouldn't need to point out is pre-Q.

you know you're all a bunch of gerbils, right?

Skipping all the blabby stuff at the top of the post.

Screeching around a corner into a wildly different topic, have you guys ever wondered where we get this automatic idea from that pandimensional beings either root for us or plot against us? Angels protect us (from what?), devils whisper in our ears (for what purpose?), fates taunt us while destinies call to us, and we oscillate betwixt guilt and glory in our tiny little minds. What in the world started all this?

I'm a Lewis fan, so of course I think The Screwtape Letters are the bomb, and Dr. Weston becoming a shell for that horrible evil thing in Perelandra was about the truly creepiest thing I ever read, but when it all boils down, I have found that the negativity of the dark side, as it were, can be brain-trained out of one's automatic response system. Why does the brain play these tricks? What is it about society that trains the brain to play these tricks? Is this a necessary survival mechanism for maintaining culture in general, and whose bright idea was it to incorporate it into mainstream cognitive programming of our species so many millennia ago? Because if you want to debate that with me sometime, I'd love to point out the all new brain training going in in current media, with Lucifer and the antiChrist and dark angels and whatevs being held up as entertainment icons. Is the general public now being calloused to the old ways through repetitive story bending, or is this a mass brain training at an all new level of doublethink? I see way too many 'Christians' and other spiritually minded people out there slurping up every sloppy splat of blood and angst they can get on the networks, and I'm wondering how empty some of you are to be this thrilled with 'new' ways of thinking. I'm watching the old open minded Star Trek fandoms being dumbed down to devil fans and wondering just who's in charge here.

I don't believe in accidents of fate, but I believe in synchronicity. One could argue this is basically the same thing, but not really. Just as the universe is webbed with dark matter and our brains are webbed with neural pathways, so the human race is webbed like a network around our globe. The pattern is the same, no matter how big or how small. We are all part of each other, and we are all part of the whole thing. It would be one thing if we moved in tandem with our own species, but we don't, we continually disrupt each other with negativity. Some postulate this negativity was introduced by dark forces that beguile and deceive us, some are convinced it's just part of our nature. The dark forces have been explained as everything from fallen angels and demons to aliens who once visited our planet and may still walk among us, and the nature explanations throw babies out with baths unable to take sides on justice and moral principles without begging all kinds of questions.

I won't go over everything I've ever read, which is quite a lot, going back thousands of years, studies from every conceivable angle (including science), and even the new medical philosophies. I'm just asking where it comes from. No one knows. It's still just a guess. Our brains haunt us, and we are trapped in them, an existential horror that no one can grasp enough to say why it's even happening. I personally think it should be impossible to be this aware in a universe where the only thing that happens is cause and effect. The observer thing only confuses us. I think we're still not looking deep enough. Our minds are still too tiny.

So, back to in the moment. What is right and what is wrong in any given moment and what we do with our time here is completely up to us. We can blame it on whatever we want, but in the end I think all our motivations boil down to whether we are selfish or selfless. I've said this before, a long time ago somewhere, that I think all our miseries really do boil down to this- selfish people ruin things, selfless people fix things. Human brains are natural problem solving machines. With good directives, humans do amazing things. With bad programming, humans do despicable things.

So I'm asking who is doing the brain training? Who is programming all this philosophical frappe into our entertainment? Who is breaking down the barriers and remodeling what is good and bad for our amusement? I'm not against it, but I'm a little surprised by the flocks that fall into it so quickly. I'm not seeing a lot of thought being generated about what our entertainment industry is slipping into our belief system cocktails. I'm all for shaking things up, but part of that shaking up needs to contain more than being upset that our favorite character died or that a show got canceled. I'm saying this across the board, not because of the Merlin thing up there. I'm seeing this everywhere, all around me. Are we really so spiritually bereft that we cannot handle dozens of icons almost being force fed to us (think about it- you pay them to let you beg for programming...) and then ripped away? We are practically drowning in heroic characters, or at least stoic ones. The fictional characters we idolize far outnumber the amount of people we know in real life now. We live in a dichotomy, lead double lives. What are we hanging onto, and why? It's ok to question what's in your head.