GENIUS FORUMS

Wise words are drowned out by insane drivel. Wise people are persecuted and ridiculed (and sometimes killed). The voicing of wisdom attracts hordes of vicious detractors, mockers and dissipaters -- and very few genuine seekers. Reason is derided, the value of logic degraded, and the very concept of Enlightenment is buried under landslides of ignorant opinion. Witness Genius Forums, witness the world.

Why is this?

Because, the deeper you delve into the world, the more magical it appears to be to a simple mind. And of course magic is impossible, so therefore they feel that the information is impossible to be true. This creates an argumentative state, but how can a simple mind out-argue a genius? The genius may be wrong, but he has the brain power to win an argument using powerful words, and mathematics. So the result is a pseudo-argument. An argument that can't lose, but can't win either. It feels better for them to at least draw in an argument against a genius. But to win means murder.

Carl G wrote:Wise words are drowned out by insane drivel. Wise people are persecuted and ridiculed (and sometimes killed). The voicing of wisdom attracts hordes of vicious detractors, mockers and dissipaters -- and very few genuine seekers. Reason is derided, the value of logic degraded, and the very concept of Enlightenment is buried under landslides of ignorant opinion. Witness Genius Forums, witness the world.

Why is this?

Group think affects even the rational if they dont pick up on it happening. I have gone onto lists to challenge the group think, and it is rarely, if ever, noticeably effective. And who getsta define the relevant terms like 'enlightenment'? When I went onto a wiccan list where they're always posting about spells and the Tarot, and mention the sacred psychedelic potions real witches used to achieve altered states of consciousness and meditative enlightenment, the silence was deafening. The fluff bunnies could not deal with it. So- I went away.

But now, a few years later, I see others have brought the issue up, and I have heard of it among the young women in my community wishing to study the Craft. That's the thing about wise words- you have to put them out there, and then abandon them for others to adopt as if they are their own. the Net is changing the zeitgeist, in that before new ideas needed some powerful authority to promulgate them. Jesus, Mohammet, Popes, Luther, Lenin, whoever.

But now, you can cast your bread upon the waters, and then a year or so later, see it washed up all over the place. You just dont get to take credit for it. Ideas whose time has come no longer need the sages, who can go back to working in the garden.

This Thanksgiving I'm giving thanks to idiocy. Without it there would be no Genius.

I think you have answered your own question, Carl. Also, I think your frustration is not the best choice, and there are alternatives.

I'll say what things look like from my angle, seeing as though I live in one of the most screwed-up countries on the planet (Colombia). This is a place where one can *study* the cost and the ramifications of stupid choices, bad attitudes, stubborn, closed-minded attitudes, violent activities, lack of civic-mindedness. In all the areas, finance, sexuality, public administration, personal conduct, and in so many different areas, one can see so very clearly the result of bad thinking and bad acting.

Some percentage of the people here---in the Machiavellian sense daybrown refers to with his citations of Gibbons who speaks of what is lost when 'the people' become corrupt---are criminal, and there is little 'order of law'. The fabric of good government has been ripped. General lawlessness is almost unreally rampant. You've got guerrillas in the contryside who have hardly the slightest connection to leftist or revolutionary or reformist doctrines, and they basically run a racket, like mobsters, extorting money from farmers and growers, demanding 'vacuna' ('vaccine') or protection money from businessmen in the city, who have no other choice but to pay the money for fear that they murder a child to make their point.

They came up with the 'auto-defensas' and the 'para-militares' (self-defense forces) to combat the guerrillas, and it started out okay, but what it did was to create competing mafias, who struggle for the same territory, or who take to coca processing in the hills. But it is just another version of the same thing: criminalism.

General corruption seeps down into general culture, and in so many wasy you see evidence of the same bad choices, and the hard-headed mental disease that leads to pain. And yet the pained do not seem to see what is producing their pain, and so they flail about trying to locate the source---and isn't that a passion play of the unwise? Isn't that insanity? I feel sometimes like Lucretius:

"Tis sweet, when, down the mighty main, the winds
Roll up its waste of waters, from the land
To watch another's labouring anguish far,
Not that we joyously delight that man
Should thus be smitten, but because 'tis sweet
To mark what evils we ourselves be spared;
'Tis sweet, again, to view the mighty strife
Of armies embattled yonder o'er the plains,
Ourselves no sharers in the peril; but naught
There is more goodly than to hold the high
Serene plateaus, well fortressed by the wise,
Whence thou may'st look below on other men
And see them ev'rywhere wand'ring, all dispersed
In their lone seeking for the road of life;
Rivals in genius, or emulous in rank,
Pressing through days and nights with hugest toil
For summits of power and mastery of the world.
O wretched minds of men! O blinded hearts!
In how great perils, in what darks of life
Are spent the human years, however brief!-
O not to see that nature for herself
Barks after nothing, save that pain keep off,
Disjoined from the body, and that mind enjoy
Delightsome feeling, far from care and fear!"

The ramifications of general social corruption are ubiquitous, and the mental disease that produces it is simply out of control. It is like living in the body of madness, and yet (of course) there are redeeming features. There are some decent people (the Colombians say 'los buenos somos mas': the good outnumber the bad), and what is interesting, to me, is that this backdrop, in this very strange middle part of the play, with its dark and tragic tones, where the face of death laughs outrightly, where Russian roulette-like misfortune stalks the land, is yet a perfect place to give energy to the force of intelligence within ourselves. You see all the consequences of hard headed and extreme stupidity, but a sort of stupidity that is willed, conscious---none of the innocence of typical ignorance, which might be forgiven---this is misdeeding ignorance, a sort of satanic ignorance if you will permit the term.

In this context, I know it sounds weird, you get to see exactly what is the underbelly of human life in this strange plane of existence, this earth-plane, and everything stands out more, as if in relief. It is a tragic play, and it was designed by an artist with a tremendous sense of chiaroscuro, simply tremendous, and it seems to me that in the face of it, one should really have no choice but to try to go to the root, to try to *see clearly* through dark waters, to recognize the attraction for easy and apparent solutions and pleasures, and yet in almost a Biblical sense, as in Job, to see the necessity, for the sake of your own soul, to stay on a correct course, not to be corrupted, not to sink in the mire.

I do agree, and eloquently put. There must be squalor for there to be seen, by contrast, beauty. There must be senselessness for there to stand in sharp relief sense.

But I see it as being more than that. I guess I sometimes marvel at the level of attraction that seems to be in force, bringing evil in to attempt to actively destroy good -- if we can reduce it to such terms.

I remember once years ago at a Native American sweatlodge group, we made special improvements to the site in order to bring in more energy of a beneficial nature there. And it worked amazingly, but as soon as we left that day, some people came in there -- we had never been bothered before -- and trashed the place and drew swastikas and wrote things with spray paint. It was an incredible illustration of what I am talking about, that is, not only contrast but this seeming magnetizing of the destructive opposite.

That is what I see at this Forum.