jordan pulse -

So that none of you are caught off guard by what follows, we should first settle a point of usage: we are using the term "illusion" here in its commonly understood sense, purely to make the point of these words easier to follow — even though our own position doesn't actually recognize "illusion" as a coherent concept, nor grant it any real standing in the way that term is conventionally used. Adopting the term for convenience, while flagging that we don't accept its underlying premise, seems a fitting way into a discussion of taboos that people have long made a habit of staying within the bounds of.
These taboos aren't confined to matters of religion; they extend to everything a person can imagine while dealing daily with what they've been told to believe — indeed, these beliefs go so far as to dictate the very course of a person's life, once fixed in a mind that has fallen under the grip of an "it's-settled-or-forbidden" mechanism, one that holds no real proof of its own validity beyond an accumulated fear of ever contradicting it. We addressed, in a previous piece, the origins of the idea that the earth is round; we won't repeat that example here, but we cite it as one instance of this fear of ever challenging such an idea.
What's new in what we're saying here is this: that fear of challenging the idea was itself built on a fear-based premise to begin with — the very one we discussed when we spoke of the sanctity granted to cinematic production, or the "sacred spectacle," surrounding an idea put in place "to dominate and subjugate," not "to be of use." This accumulated fear, reinforced by the passage of time, has become — beyond simple apprehension over the consequences of straying from its preferred path — an inevitable route that every seeker of knowledge, at every level and with every aim, ends up walking.
What distinguishes the picture we're describing is the set of constraints imposed by what amounts to "intimidation and dread of confrontation," to the point that these constraints have come to form entire "scientific" schools and departments — where, by their own teaching, nothing that contradicts them can be called knowledge at all. Here again we return to our core argument: that the conventional standard for what counts as "science" versus what doesn't is itself contradictory.
Take an illustrative example: the idea of humanity landing on the surface of the moon — much of whose detail we don't accept — which was built on theories about the shape of the earth, the moon, the sun and so on, and the movement of each. Notice that, on top of all this, we're told they all move and rotate and produce a whole range of phenomena and more — while we don't accept such "facts," whose origin, as we've said, was nothing more than a fearful reaction against contradicting religious authorities and having the public turn against them.
We'll limit ourselves, in exposing the simplicity of certain ideas about space, to occupying people with a single question: can anyone actually reach a vantage point from which to see — and photograph for us — the true shape and motion of the planets, so that we might then work with those images and whatever can be concluded from them?
Certainly not. But the burden facing anyone who challenges ideas imposed by institutions working in such a field, and by the people behind them, is far beyond what ordinary people can bear — people who find, in simply accepting what they're told, a safe passage toward pursuing their own interests, regardless of the matter itself. Anyone who wants to challenge that would, for instance, have to build a massive institution and use equipment exceeding the budgets of entire nations, and would have to submit to the power of national laws — all of which makes tampering with such matters practically impossible. This same picture can be extended to everything else, and — most importantly — extended to the past, especially the distant past.
There's an example that resonates more directly with people's daily lives: take the field of dream interpretation. We find that some interpret certain "sleep messages" that reach people in their dreams as mere jumbled dreams — treating "jumbled dreams" (I don't know what purpose that label even serves) as worthless — whereas we don't see any of these sleep messages as without value. Whoever failed to interpret a given dream, under the authority of some religion or another — regardless of place or occasion — decided that their own ignorance, which kept them from truly seeing what observers could see, should be cloaked behind a curtain of their own invention, just as others invented the idea of a round earth, a moon landing, and so on.
This is, for instance, a picture of someone with no real knowledge who nonetheless claims to have reached even an advanced level in it. What such people miss is that dream interpretation is a field of a special nature that no one possesses except by their own innate disposition — meaning it isn't a science that can be studied or taught, nor does it have rules anyone can rely on. It's a gift or a trait belonging solely to the one who has it, and everything ever proposed as its "rules" was never more than a means of climbing toward some interest or another.
As people huddle together around their own sense of safety, believing such falsehoods, they build within themselves a fortress of "illusions" they can no longer bring themselves to contradict — and even when they sometimes try to shake off that grip, calculations of gain, or of minimizing loss, end up dominating their equation instead.
This compound picture — of "climbing self-interest atop climbing illusions" — doesn't usually come to an end quickly, given the very mechanism of how it's built, one that cuts off every attempt to halt its growth. Which means a towering height will loom over the thinking of enormous groups of people — while those people overlook the fact that this height rests on nothing more than "the head of a pin," or, put more plainly, on the back of a whale or a turtle. The moment that whale so much as stirs — the very whale that grants the structure its span of height and its era of dominance — everything built atop it collapses in an instant.
Yet the idea of "the pin" remains the true master of this scene of upheavals. The whale won't move of its own accord; its own weight may well be what burdens that movement, or some force may end up controlling it — but "the pin" represents a strike landing in an "unexpected net" from an "unexpected striker," guaranteed by that striker and, in turn, guaranteed by time itself, given time's inherent refusal to grant anything eternal dominance.
The whale's flinch — a thing everyone overlooks except the one who causes it — may exceed description as a miracle, an era, a catastrophe, a savior, an awaited one, and so on. But it is a law that never fails to arrive, one that arranges, upon its arrival, every detail of the "height" that was built — a height whose parts had grown so tightly bound to one another that they lost all "flexibility of movement" within the machinery of the universe's order, placing them beyond the reach of its own logic of punishment, and so they fall under the weight of that punishment once the time comes for rights to be restored. From a scene like this, believers in the idea of a "just world" might see their own theory from an entirely different angle.
We won't close without one last example, from within the very heart of the world of scholarship itself: scientific research that meets the conditions for publication in academic journals is considered properly grounded, for instance, if it cites the latest specialized research on its subject — meaning that, by its very nature, research is required to rest on what has already been said on the matter, or else be dismissed as "mere talk," according to convention. In other words, research under this definition amounts to nothing more than repeating what has already been said, regardless of whether what was said is even true or where it originated.
This arrangement allows everyone to call themselves a researcher and be granted the title of "scholar" — something nature itself does not sanction. A true scholar is one who creates what did not previously exist; whoever merely describes something by cataloguing its properties is something else entirely. That's why anything presented as new, without grounding in "mainstream" research, ends up filed under one of two labels: either dismissed as madness or fantasy, or dismissed as nonsense. This entire establishment — present across every field of science and its research, and its institutions and bodies — is precisely what does this: it lets everyone in, so that everyone ends up lost.
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