Shit or Shinola?
Part One
By Simon G. Powell
Author’s Note – these days, if pushed, I confess to believing solely in the present moment. Everything else is speculation. Thus, with regard to the ‘bigger picture’, I can’t be 100% sure about what is really true or what is really false. I suppose many things are possible, no matter how peculiar. In any case, I must have written the following piece according to how I was feeling at the time.Which was obviously sceptical and cynical.
I am at the end of me tether. The approach to D-Day 2012 is causing emergent new age nuttiness and is fast vanquishing all traces of reason and critical thinking in many people. Every time I see evidence of this, every time I see people waxing lyrical about ‘energy’ or ‘increasing vibration’ or ‘inter dimensional beings’ or ‘healing vortices’ or ‘galactic portals’ and the like, it brings to mind that amusing scene in the movie The Jerk where Steve Martin is learning about the difference between shit and Shinola, between woolly nonsense and valuable substance.
What, exactly, does increased vibration mean? As far as I know, when something gets hot its molecules are vibrating more rapidly. Is that what new agers mean when they talk about an increase in vibrational frequency? How about frequency of consciousness? Cognition and conception that vibrates more rapidly than more sluggish forms of thought? Well, what does that really mean? It is such an ethereal contention as to be meaningless. Yet the words ‘energy’ and ‘vibration’ are consistently bandied about like they had agreed upon definitions, akin to talking about watts or calories.
Before I continue, I realise that this rant may land me in trouble. People may deplore me for saying these things, like I am a heretic or a grim spoilsport – but someone has got to put their hand up and pose some critical questions. Or are we not to ask critical questions? Should we just accept any fanciful ‘far out’ notion or what? For instance, when, on Facebook, I see people raving about crop circles and the sublime new age messages allegedly conveyed in them – as made and delivered by interdimensional beings or whatever – I am repeatedly astonished at the enthusiasm to embrace such ideas. So let me pose some key questions. Even if you are an ardent fan of crop circles and are even now starting to detect in me some negative vibe or something, you will hopefully agree that the following questions are at least interesting and worthy of consideration.
To start off then, let me ask why no-one seems to see crop circles being formed? (well, I did see a clip on Youtube that purports to show a crop circle being mysteriously made – but the video was such rubbish ultra-low definition as to make if perfect evidence for believers but flimsy evidence for sceptics). Shirley these crop circles would have more of an impact if we could see them forming before our eyes as if by magic? Wouldn’t that create more of an impression than the patterns alone? Countless video cameras would be able to record, in high definition, the crop circles forming in broad daylight and the news media would have a field day (no pun intended). Moreover, just because we don’t see the makers of crop circles does not mean they are alien or crafted in a paranormal fashion. I mean, no-one has seen Banksy yet his talented artwork is not attributed to some mysterious supernatural force is it?
And why don’t these wise extraterrestrial beings (or numinous interdimensional forces or whatever) make their artistic patterns on the front lawn of the White House or on the roof of the Houses of Parliament? Even better, why not make a massive design across the face of the moon for everyone to see? Too difficult? OK, what about etching a ‘sacred geometrical’ pattern onto the surface of the Statue of Liberty or the Taj Mahal? And in broad daylight too just in case we were not amazed enough by the patterns alone. Tell you what, why not dispense with using remote wheat fields or other surfaces and, instead, make something mystical appear right in the middle of Prime Minister’s Question Time in the House of Commons? Like a ball of radiant white light that dances around the prime minister and the leader of the opposition. That would have a staggeringly greater impact than a pattern in a field in some remote part of the English countryside. Then again, maybe it is best that these cosmic communications occur in remote areas just for the chosen few who have open minds and whose inner vibrations are attuned…
I am reminded here of documentaries about explorers visiting a remote jungle tribe who have never before encountered Westerners. The explorers do not leave mysterious diagrams on trees do they? Instead they invariably leave useful technology like machine crafted knives along with tobacco and necklaces and such. If the explorers left strange designs on a tree instead, they would be little more than surreal pranksters right? Then again, maybe crop circles are akin to alien gifts? Attractive artwork to let us know that the aliens are friendly? As alluring as this may sound, it raises more questions than it does answers. If a benign ET intelligence is watching us and interested in our welfare, then some advanced technology like plans on how to generate ultra cheap energy would serve us better than pretty patterns on the ground.
In any case, another thing to ask is how come they are crop circles? Why the obsession with circular lines and curved motifs? Because a circle indicates oneness? Or is it simply that circles are easier to mark out with a piece of rope and a stake than other shapes? Moreover, you know all those delicious fractal designs that appear in crop circles? How much more powerful such images would have been if they had appeared, say, in the 1950’s before the Mandelbrot Set was ever portrayed on a computer screen? And why aren’t there more crop circles in China? Or Pakistan?
Anyhow I digress. The main thing that sparked me to put finger to keyboard was because of a recent Facebook incident where I started questioning this bloke who was claiming that photographs from Mars showed all sorts of giant Martian mining vehicles and such. He was alluding, among other things, that there was an underground advanced civilisation on Mars. The parts of the NASA photographs of the Martian surface where this bloke was pointing out Martian vehicles were simply rocks. It was plain as plain can be. Yet he was putting arrows on the pictures and highlighting ‘mining vehicles’, ‘giant extractors’, ‘mining complexes’, ‘robots’, ‘towers’, and the like.
On first hearing these claims, one may become intrigued. The situation is not unlike Uri Geller’s claims that he can bend the Eiffel Tower. Extraordinary claims grab our attention. Yet, as Carl Sagan pointed out, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Anyhow, here is the link to the nutty Mars site: http://marsrevealed.com/
As I alluded, a cursory examination of these ‘objects’ reveals nothing more than overzealous pattern recognition (well, that is actually a generous conclusion). If you look for long enough at blurry images, or clouds, or curtains, you can find faces and other patterns. Same as if you listen to audio static or grainy night time pictures of graveyards – if you look or listen hard enough your mind can hear words or see faces. Especially if that is what you are yearning to find. But the Mars Revealed guy is not even good at this kind of unwarranted wishful thinking pattern recognition! In fact, a brief examination of his website suggests that he simply got a load of NASA imagery of the Martian surface and then spent but seconds in Photoshop adding arrows pointing to whatever came into his fertile mind. His work, if it can be called work, is so cheap and tawdry as to be a (bad) joke. Yet he is selling DVDs and maps and such. Indeed, some of his Mars Revealed posters are on sale for a whopping 500 bucks!
Anyhow, he was on Facebook and certain of his friends seemed to be well into his ‘work’. So I started questioning him. Good questions like why the Martian atmosphere appears to be at equilibrium if there is plenty of life and metabolic activity underground. I was very polite and maintained a calm composure. My real interest was whether he consciously knew he was bullshitting punters or whether he really believed his fantastical hype. If it was the former, it would be horrid. It would make him a scam artist preying on people’s gullibility. And this is exactly what I dislike so intently about much of the new age movement – it is riddled with greedy conniving scam artists. The idea that there are people out there who are deliberately deceiving people just to make money is deplorable. It’s bad enough that we get this kind of deception in the vending of various consumer products and from politicians, let alone from new age/conspiracy circles.
You could argue that if people are that gullible as to believe in immense Martian robots and subterranean Martian civilisations who break to the surface in order to mine (!) then these fools deserve to be cheated out of their hard earned dosh. Be that as it may, if people are scamming other people then, like snake oil salesmen, they need to be exposed.
After a few days of hard questioning and healthy scepticism, the guy appeared to close down his Facebook page. I then watched a video of him on the above site. Suited, he appeared totally sane and sounded totally sane. Which convinced me that he was indeed a Uri Geller style sensationalist who knows full well that he is selling nonsense and is simply cashing in on people’s seemingly insatiable desire to connect with some kind of advanced non-human intelligence. Actually, I suspect that it is precisely this yearning to contact an advanced intelligence of some kind that is driving the new age movement (and maybe even religious movements).
Of course, there is really nothing wrong with the feeling that we live in some kind of ‘deliberate’ Universe, or that a Universe able to encourage evolutionary processes to the point of consciousness has some kind of important meaning to it. Indeed, that the laws and forces of Nature can craft the genetic code (a code!) and that millions of proteins can fold into exquisite self-sustaining (and even conscious!) organisms highlights the fact that Nature may be way more than simply life-friendly – it may even be a kind of distributed self-organising intelligence (see what I wrote here: https://realitysandwich.com/psilocybin_natural_intelligence). But to pursue crop circles or faces on Mars is, I contend, a path riddled with false prophets and connived profits.
Psilocybin, on the other hand, is Shinola. It is, and has, real substance and is infinitely better at granting insights into a grand coherent aspect of Nature otherwise occluded to us. Indeed, entheogens like psilocybin and ayahuasca have incontrovertible spiritual power and blow fluffy new age malarkey clean out of the water. In my opinion that is. Just raising some questions is all. Peace out.
Simon G. Powell is scriptwriter for Earth 2.0. His firstbook (chiefly about psilocybin) is due to be published by Inner Traditions in July 2011.
