Friday, June 11, 2021

Why try to tell unpopular truths? (video)

EricDubay.com, LEVEL (documentary); Editors, Wisdom Quarterly COMMENTARY

The earth may be flat, but it is not flat!
How dare Eric Dubay and these "nuts" question the shape of our planet. There are photos NASA claims are from space (which differ from those taken by private citizens avoiding the use of fisheye lenses that distort things). We know the shape! It's not debatable! This topic is banned! Censorship is good. Save the children from unpopular assertions and speculations. They'll call you a "theorist"!

Don't try to warn me. You're going to ruin my comfortable existence. Leave me to my labor!
In the Allegory of the Cave, no one would listen that all of this was an illusion of shadows.
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Plato: Socrates! Atlantis!
In Plato's Allegory of the Cave, we learn something about trying to make unpopular truths and theories known. A frequent truthteller may be bloodied but is likely to be unbowed.

Tough truths are better than easy illusions.
Why? Because the evidence says something unpopular is true, one will not be dissuaded no matter how much friends and family scoff, ridicule, oppose, and ignore one -- to say nothing of the opinion of strangers.

This is how it is with truth that runs in the face of the current "consensus reality."

Not all proofs for the truth are actual proofs. They have to be debated and tested to convincingly become that.

Thou shalt not question the flat earth
But there is no debating and therefore no testing (and therefore no arrival at truth) when we dismiss truthtellers out of hand, fail to consider, neglect to question assumptions.

It seems some people just want the veneer of respectability, the label "defenders of truth and reason" as university professors with tenure but no cahones to question anything important. Thou shalt not go against the powers that be (university gatekeepers) or industry (corporate entities).

The other night geophysicist Peter Langdon Ward (physically-impossible.com) was saying that global warming is real but that it is physically impossible that it is due to the things the gatekeepers and media says it's due to, like methane and other greenhouse gases.
Ward makes such a strong case that he can only be ignored and silenced. He soldiers on showing the objective evidence. Truth and evidence don't matter in the face of special interests like industry (private business interests) and the military complex.

Life outside the cave: in living color.
Something else is going on, but everyone remains asleep. Learn to question. We don't have to tell everyone we learn. But if we ourselves don't want the truth, however inconvenient, then what is the purpose of life? It's like Plato's teacher Socrates asserted: "The unexamined life is not worth living."

Life is here to know and see. What is the way to know and see? Calm and systematic practice for insight, in that order.

Doing good deeds make one calm? So good deeds are enough? Sure, if one defines "good deeds" as "anything and everything the Buddha ever taught."

My message: Question. Let go. Seek wisdom.
But that's not what people will do. They won't even learn or ever hear about what the Buddha taught. Instead, they'll get echoes of Jiddu Krishnamurti -- saying nothing because [ultimately] there is nothing, and nothing is the goal, nothing is wrong, just let that sh*t go, no matter that you can't.

To quote the great Ajahn Chah, "...practice letting go. You don't have to become a stream-winner or a once-returner. You don't have to make those suppositions. You don't have to be those things. If you are anything, it's a turmoil. If you are this or are that, you are a problem.

"So you don't have to be anything. There's nothing but letting go — letting go and then knowing in line with what things do. When you know in line with what things do in every way, there's no more doubt. And you aren't anything."

Better keep our heads down, do what we're told.
Even if he is right -- and no doubt, in context, it is advice coming from an enlightened place. The Buddha experienced the same thing: He was ridiculed, attacked, dismissed, scoffed that. But he had developed all that it takes to be a universal teacher beforehand. So his message survived, not without damage and forged imitations floating around in the name of Buddhism.

It took the supremely enlightened one, the Buddha, 45 years to establish the community of enlightened individuals independent of his great enlightenment -- those able to claim by their own direct experience that the Path was true. And that's given the fact that anyone could prove it to themselves by practice.

What I make known is for the liberation of beings!
How then do any of us have a chance looking at the actual evidence with a willingness to be proven wrong? Debate, debate, debate. The scientific method is based on doubting and debating, questioning and testing -- not relying on popular views that ignore inconvenient truths.

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