Talking outside the echo chamber
Jeroen
Luminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlands Veteran
Recently I have been finding that discussions with old-timer sannyasins who still believe that Bhagwan was enlightened and could do no wrong take a turn towards “do you still use the name Bhagwan gave you” or “do you still feel gratitude towards Bhagwan”. To answer these questions honestly then creates a certain conflict in worldviews, but I think it’s fair to give an indication of where my truth lies. If on the other hand I am not asked, then I tend not to open this discussion.
It’s kind of a parallel to discussing Buddhism with people of other faiths. Any discussion of faith between friends tends to turn around tolerance and mutual respect, if you go down the route of trying to convince the other that your faith is better you may well end up with a serious disagreement. So how you approach this requires some sensitivity.
But it’s with people who you used to have much in common with that difficulties tend to surface the quickest, because you were once closely aligned. It reminds me of this joke by Emo Phillips…
Once I saw this guy on a bridge about to jump. I said, "Don't do it!" He said, "Nobody loves me." I said, "God loves you. Do you believe in God?"
He said, "Yes." I said, "Are you a Christian or a Jew?" He said, "A Christian." I said, "Me, too! Protestant or Catholic?" He said, "Protestant." I said, "Me, too! What franchise?" He said, "Baptist." I said, "Me, too! Northern Baptist or Southern Baptist?" He said, "Northern Baptist." I said, "Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist or Northern Liberal Baptist?"
He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist." I said, "Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region, or Northern Conservative Baptist Eastern Region?" He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region." I said, "Me, too!"
”Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1879, or Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912?" He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912." I said, "Die, heretic!" And I pushed him over.
The thing is, with other followers of Osho you tend to have a lot in common — many shared experiences and a shared set of beliefs. But as a renegade you have said, certain things have caused you to break with that belief. That inevitably leads to a difficult discussion, do your listeners believe you were right, or do they believe you were wrong? It has a certain stake attached to it.
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It is difficult to have productive, civil conversations outside of one's affinity group. My working theory is that its gotten more difficult since the rise of the internet. Society used to have more of a shared social space. On the one hand it is nice to more easily find like minded people, especially when you're in the minority or isolated. On the other hand it means we can spend our whole lives around like minded people and our cross affinity social skills atrophy. I'll post this again as a sort of ideal for having those sorts of conversations.
A podcast on the old Soviet dissidents like Alexander Solzhenitsyn and in particular Vaclav Havel came up in my feed today. They are extreme examples, but it can be scary and takes some courage to stay true to yourself when in the company of "bridge pushers" or people who sound like bridge pushers and could potentially cause you pain, social or more serious.
I probably have a bit of an outlier personality, since I was young I would often say the true thing rather than the social thing. If you do get pushed, know that others have been pushed too and you won't be alone in your new reality. Know also that its quite possible to find yourself in the echo chamber of those who have been pushed off the bridge.
I think that’s true. In England at the time of my university days, which would be the start of the 1990’s, so before the internet, you had the “big four” broadsheet newspapers, The Times, The Telegraph, The Guardian and I think it was The Independent, and public discourse would be based around what was in those papers. The Letters and Opinions pieces were broadly read.
Of course one didn’t read the tabloids, those were for the hoi polloi, don’t you agree.
Certainly in the internet age it is easier to find likeminded folks. But even if you have been pushed, you can keep up a public discourse. Take Graham Hancock, he is what you call an alternative archaeologist, who believes in civilisation 10.000 years ago, which a lot of standard archaeologists have difficulty with. Yet Graham’s ideas have proved persuasive and popular with the public. He carries on the public discourse in podcasts, interviews and television programmes.
I'll try to avoid derailing the thread and keep it on topic regarding Graham. To the extent that he is treated like a heretic, I'm not on board with that attitude. To the extent that he is disagreed with and the flaws in his claims are pointed out, I think that is the essence of the scientific process.
Like I said it is possible to find yourself in a new echo chamber of those who have been pushed off the bridge.
The clip grabbed my interest, so I listened to the whole interview. Really good stuff on prehistoric Americas.
What I often like to do with things like this is to listen to one point of view and then get another differing one. Seeing where they converge and disagree, I think, really sheds a lot of light on the subject. So I then listened to the one with Graham Hancock.
My cousin believes this clown archaeologist, considers him a friend.
But then she believes in crop circles from aliens.
This is David Icke type science evidence. Facts mixed with an interpretation that seems plausible (to some).
Too harsh or just reality in a non-echoing hologram of our own creation?
I like Graham Hancock… he has a lot of respect for evidence and facts, although he doesn’t follow the establishment line of thinking about the past. I also think he is right, in that there was a lot more to early human culture than simple hunter-gatherer tribes.
This IS the establishment line. The thing that isn't the establishment line is that the early human culture we know about was seeded from a single advanced society that was wiped out without a trace and spread throughout the globe.
There's no such thing as an "Alternative Archaeologist". He doesn't have the academic standing to be called an archaeologist. At best, he is an amateur historian pedaling pseudoscience.
That's because there's no real, solid, peer-reviewed evidence to prove what he says. He just says it and some people believe it. Like someone saying he'll lower the price of eggs and end the war in Ukraine in one day.
With uneducated and monumenta lly stupid people, yes, much like people who voted for Donald Trump.
I worked in the field of archaeology for years, during and after college. I was shoulder-to-shoulder with REAL archaeologists. Hancock does not qualify.
Listening to both Ed Barnhart and Graham Hancock. I think what is appealing about Hancock is that he talks about the cool, exciting stuff like ancient astronomy and the more mysterious stuff. Barnhart was really interesting too, but he stuck more to migration patterns and the social and political dynamics of the early Americas.
This is well-spotted @person, it’s one of the things both I and my father like about Hancock, that he looks at all these things that haven’t been explained about ancient structures and artifacts. We don’t know how all of them were made, there are signs there of an older science which may have had nothing to do with the kind of science we know today.
The thing is, a lot of archaeology is educated guesswork based on the small evidence that is there. We try to construct pictures of the ancient world. Hancock is willing to go across the boundaries of fields into areas like the origins of terra preta, the Amazonian dark earths, or local legends on Malta about giants who build stone temples in a single night, to form a more complex picture of the past than just bone fragments and pottery shards. It’s interesting, is all I am saying.
What are these "signs"?
For example, in Macchu Picchu there are granite stone blocks of many tons and irregular shapes so precisely shaped and fitted to each other that you can’t slide a piece of paper between them. Granite is really hard stone, difficult to work even with the tools we have today.
In the Museum of Cairo there is an oddly shaped artefact named the Sabu Disk, which is 5000 years old and made by an unknown technique. It too is made of stone, but it looks like a machine part.
There are other examples…
That seems to assume that Incas were incapable of working with stone, as accurately as we see. It's quite obvious that they did, as there is no other plausible explanation. There are plenty of other example of the ancients' skill in working with stone. Ancient Egyptians, made huge granite obelisks to precise dimensions, using stone, copper and bronze tools. You can see the signs in the quarries they used near Aswan. Not only that, but they figured out how to get those obelisks down to the river, into a boat of sufficient displacement, and then travel downstream to what is now Luxor.
Granite isn't all that difficult to work with. Egyptians were able to carve Granite very precisely, as evidenced by their obelisks and statues. It's not as easy to work as limestone, but well within their collective skill set.
I've always thought that if advanced science was used, why didn't it include iron tools instead of the softer alloys they did use. Why no wheels, including pulleys, as well as block and tackle. Then there's their inability to render hands and feet on statues that were otherwise anatomically correct.
I've seen it first-hand. It doesn't look like a machine part. It's made from schist, which has a similar mohs hardness as Marble. It could be easily worked with stone tools. What it was used for, I neither know nor care. If it was from a machine, it must not have been a very good one, as there is only one in existence and there are no records of its use.
What you site are not signs of advanced science. They're merely examples of culture we cannot explain at present.
Ed Barnhart speculated that the Macchu Picchu stones were shaped by acid. There are natural materials in the area that they would have used for other things that could be combined to make an acid powerful enough to weaken the stone and make them press together.
We've had plenty of examples of archeological things over the years that people had no idea how they were done only to have figured it out later. Its a sort of "Atlantis of the gaps" problem.
If someone added historical stories of fairies, vampires and giants to the story of history they could make it more complex and interesting, but that wouldn't make it true. I think its a question of how we know what we know. Speculation is good, many currently accepted Theories about the world were considered crack pot at one point. But for every plate techtonics and germ theory there are many more hollow and flat earths, planet Vulcans, or wilder ideas.
Maybe not every idea Hancock comes up with will be true, but most of them are reasonably sensible. There are things like mounds of Earth in a city like pattern in the US, it’s a question of just a few solid pieces of evidence being enough. You call it “Atlantis of the gaps” but that’s not wholly accurate, there is evidence in these gaps, otherwise Hancock would be entirely unbelievable. Anyway feel free to believe or not, you are welcome.
Its his main idea that I think I'm focused on and pointing out flaws.
This is where I think he has it backwards. He's starting with a belief and working to find evidence of it by cherry picking, fuzzily interpreting (like the Sabu Disk), and ignoring contradicting evidence.
I get a bit bothered about this topic, because its about more than people's personal beliefs. Its about what we consider science and how we go about knowing what we know. If Ancient Apocalypse, or Ancient Aliens, or Curse of Oak Island get mainstreamed as "scientific" then I consider it a loss for science literacy, which impacts more important things like climate or vaccine science.
Like, which ones?
I suppose you're talking about Cahokia. There are more than a "few" solid pieces of evidence supporting, current thinking about it. There's a warehouse full of evidence in Milwaukee, from Melvin Fowler's excavations. I worked with several archaeologists who worked and studied under Fowler, and I met the man myself - he gave me a tour of that warehouse while I was visiting to check out possibilities for post-grad studies. But anyway, I digress ....
He is entirely unbelievable. He'll take something that's somewhat obscure to the public. He'll present a conclusion about it, then set up an argument to support it, which is ass-backwards science. People buy it, in large part because they don't know any better and have a high level of gullibility. He also shades modern history and archaeology, in order to erode confidence in them, and reinforce his own ideas. He's a kind of latter-day Erich von Däniken.
I think common sense is more important than scientific literacy. Hancock might just be right about some things, there is enough supporting evidence that it might be so. In the end it is not worth getting hot under the collar about.
Mentioning Ancient Apocalypse in the same breath as the other two is doing it a bit of a disservice. I’m not really interested in arguing about it, so I’ll just let you carry on.
I don’t see that that’s necessarily true. Why build a whole pyramid? Why not build a ramp with a steep drop at the end? That also gets you to a high place, with a lot less stone and a lot less effort. Why not build a platform? I think that text just speaks to cynicism and an unwillingness to consider an obvious change in worldview.
What basis is there to say all of these were seeded by an undiscovered advanced civilization other than "its possible"? The point of the above picture is that people see that and think they're so similar there must be a connection. Well, there is a connection, its a really good way to create a tall structure that won't fall down and stand the test of time, its possible there were other ancient tall structures that fell down over the centuries. If you propose another connection you should have some actual evidence of that connection. If you want to change people's worldview it should take more than, you can't rule it out completely. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and as the above points out there is a perfectly ordinary explanation for pyramids across the world.
As climate science deniers have shown us, there are often multiple explanations to fit the facts. I think to expect ancient civilisations to have such a long view that they would build structures just because they would last thousands of years is unreasonable, it makes no sense. That’s why I am more inclined to accept the explanation of a sea-travelling ancient culture.
They didn't do it to last that long, they survived til now because of how they're built. It feels like you're intentionally misunderstanding or misleading (just because, unreasonable, makes no sense). Yes, there are often multiple explanations, I suppose where I'm coming from is that the ordinary explanation is better than the extraordinary until the extraordinary has a decent amount of concrete evidence supporting it. I don't think it's a matter of you have your beliefs and I have mine, c'est la vie.