Tell The Truth

"Tell the truth" is an effort to create a viral movement on the web.

The initial slogan of this movement is "Give us youth: Tell the truth!" which was my first tweet on Twitter, yesterday. Hashtag: #GUYTTT. I'm the "TTT guy."

I thought of the basic phrase "tell the truth" during the beginnings of the Occupy demonstrations when everybody what trying to figure out what Occupy wanted.

I figured that, in a nutshell, that's what they wanted. Or in other terms, that is what would have to happen for them to get the outcome they desired; people would have to start telling the truth.

I got the idea for the slogan from a discussion I had on a forum which I won't go into.

The cool thing was that not only did the message somewhat make sense, but it was also a couplet (a two-line rhyme).

So then I thought of the idea of asking other people speaking other languages to make up couplets in their own language that expressed a similar sentiment. I next included the idea of asking for different couplets in English that express a similar sentiment.

What GUYTTT means

I thought I better provide a write-up about this expression in case anyone had questions about it.

This is meant, basically, to be a communication from the people of the world to the power-brokers of the planet. It could be interpreted as a request, a demand, an assertion of what is, or of what could be.

Anyone who is alive knows the power of telling the truth. This demand is not meant to apply simply to "world leaders" or those who stand in the shadows behind them. It is also meant to apply to each other, and even to those "beyond."

When a being is honest, that being tells the truth, and you get...

I chose "youth" because it rhymes with "truth."

Youth connotes a happy, carefree, unrestrained, perhaps innocent, approach to life. So this is a way of saying "happiness" "freedom" "openness" "transparency" "clarity" "understanding" even "love."

It also connotes the younger years of life; childhood. So, for someone older (like myself) it also means "future." When I die, I want to be able to come back and be a child, without the fears of adulthood already peering in the window.

The game

The game is to see how many tweets with the #GUYTTT hashtag can be generated from now to the end of the year.

This could escalate into TTT flash mobs and other such events.

Will this idea spark change or be a dud? We shall see.

(June 2018 note: It has gone nowhere so far!)

Layers of Deception

“Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.”
The Wizard of Oz, 1939, MGM

Maintaining a secret requires deception.

I hope that proposition is self-obvious.

The question of why secrets are thought to be required is a little harder to get to. The truth about this, if there is any, is part of the secret!

One aspect of the problem involves leading someone to believe that if they do certain things (that most beings are fond of doing) that they will be kicked out of the game. There are not many punishments in the universe worse than being banned from a game. The same entity that convinced us of this terrible consequence for “sinning” then sets things up to encourage us to do just that. Now we must keep these actions secret, or risk being banished, or so we think. Sin, then, is a social control mechanism that can be enforced in deceptive ways that in turn lead to the desire to be deceptive.

Underlying this control mechanism lie misunderstandings that ultimately seem to be based on self-deception. Thus, the possibility arises that a being can keep something secret from itself. This is a real trick! However, therapies based on self-inspection would not work at all if self-deception were not a key factor in the development of a sense of loss of self-control.

But let's not go there yet. Let us return to the theme of attention, as introduced by the first quote.

Attention

“The magician and the politician have much in common: they both have to draw our attention away from what they are really doing.”
Ben Okri (Nigerian poet and novelist.)

Ability to direct attention is key to controlling an interaction with another individual.

If the flow is one of help, the effort will be in the direction of making a being aware of deceptions that exist around him or in his own universe. This should lead to the resolution of false problems and the confrontation of real problems.

If the flow is one of harm (or manipulation) then the effort will be in the direction of making a being less aware of external deceptions by inventing false problems and focusing his attention on them.

Ben Okri assumes that the art of politics, like the art of magic, is fundamentally based on deception.

But that is not necessarily the case. There could be a considerable range in skill among politicians and among magicians. At the top of the scale might exist real power and real magic. At the bottom of the scale would be false power and false magic. The lower a politician, or magician, is on this scale, the more he must resort to deception. Thus Mr. Okri's generality becomes a more useful gradient of ability versus deception.

To reiterate: Real ability requires little or no deception. Deception becomes a real problem in the absence of real ability. Thus, the need to be deceptive can be reduced by increasing real ability. Of course, deception is also an ability, and can be practiced and “perfected” by those who see no hope in ever gaining any real ability to actually do their assigned task.

Artful deception involves the ability to direct attention away from the truth (or what really is) towards a falsehood (or what really isn't). This is not an article on how to be deceptive, so I will not elaborate on this point.

The point is:

1) The ability to misdirect attention is not the problem.

2) The inability to do what one is supposed to be doing is the problem.

Failures in ability, and the deceptions that result from them can exist at any level of human activity. This often leads to the experience of “solving a problem” just to find oneself immersed in a bigger problem. In a universe where inability has become the rule rather than the exception, the layers of deception can pile up very thickly indeed.

The answer to problems of deception, then, is ability.

The problem of expanding awareness

"To use a comparison, we could say that creating a new theory is not like destroying an old barn and erecting a skyscraper in its place. It is rather like climbing a mountain, gaining new and wider views, discovering unexpected connections between our starting-point and its rich environment. But the point from which we started out still exists and can be seen, although it appears smaller and forms a tiny part of our broad view gained by the mastery of the obstacles on our adventurous way up."
Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld
The Evolution of Physics. 1938, p159.

This article was originally an introduction to all the different sources of data I had explored concerning possible histories of this planet and other more distant ones. It has been re-written to focus more on the question of: Is it worth it to collect tons of data from a variety of sources on this subject, sift through it all and look for patterns, similarities, differences? What would be the purpose of such an activity?

With the desire to handle a situation comes the desire to achieve a higher-level understanding or awareness of it. And as Einstein wrote in his textbook, this involves "climbing a mountain" to get a better view. But in the case of a subject as broad as the history of life, or of human life, what is the situation that needs to be handled? And are we in a position at this time to attempt to handle it?

All thinking men and women agree that there is a situation to be handled, or perhaps several situations. We have the decay occurring in the biosphere due to pollution and other human activities. We have the various moral crises involved with war, the growth of industry, and our focus on materialism in general. Education seems an ever greater challenge because of the level of expertise required to master our newer technologies. And so on.

If there is any common theme to all these situations, perhaps it could be called human ability. We seem to be reaching the limits of our ability to cope with our own expanding activities and desires.

The traditional approaches all assume that human ability has certain limits that cannot be exceeded except by the creation of ever more powerful physical technologies. My studies have taught me that this assumption is basically incorrect; that in fact an increase in human ability is the only viable way to improve our condition. Why, then, spend endless hours trying to sift through facts when we can increase human ability to handle situations instead?

If you are not, then, simply interested in an academic exercise (and I have been, many times!) and would prefer to do something that gets results, then why not look for a subject to study that gets results?

Others who have offered us "help"

ETs communicating to us through a telepathic (or similar) contact. The most obvious problem with these contacts is that we can't verify who is really making the contact. They seem special because they are telepathic. But even if they are ETs, what they offer seems wishy-washy or simply not useful. There is often an expressed undertone that we should rely on their advice because they are our superiors.

ETs communicating through direct contact. This phenomenon was made famous by Billy Meier. However, if the people flying the craft look human, how can we be sure if they are really ETs? And beyond that, they don't seem to be offering us much more than what has been communicated using telepathy or channels. Some people with websites about such things have had both types of contact.

Evidence-based Researchers. There are a variety of humans who claim to have obtained data about ETs, related matters, and of course all the usual subjects you might think of, through more normal modes of research. They are often not sympathetic to the "ET" messages coming from the two sources above. Most of these folks are all caught up in how amazing their data is. Whistle blowers, mostly from the military, have also provided data to us, either directly or through researchers. While this data is often sensational, it is otherwise largely unhelpful, and tends to only point fingers.

Action or study?

Some of us study data just to have something to do. Others, more purposeful, study so they can act. Your best bet, if you want to take action in the direction of handling the various situations on Earth, is the latter approach.

Introduction to My Universe

My universe was outgrowing the space I had created for it at Wordpress in 2009.

Bill my PHP instructor wanted us to use a blog to keep him posted on our progress with our projects. Well, I had never had a blog before, so I wasn't just going to start a blog to keep my PHP instructor informed about my progress on my project! I tried to make it bigger than that; and it is.

But that blog is about technology. And this blog is about the results of technologies. On this blog I am not going to go deeply into the nuts and bolts of how to do things, either physically or spiritually.

I expect this blog to stay on a very concept level, and concentrate on integrating data from a variety of different sources. However, the use of some data and some sources seems only to muddy the waters. I don't intend to be confusing on this blog, only informative and perhaps opinionated. So I may revisit these posts from time to time and modify them as seems appropriate.

In some ways, this space functions as a storage area for my thoughts and ideas expressed (mostly) in the written language of English. I wish I had a better way to communicate with more people that might be interested in being in communication. But this is more than I could have dreamed of when I was young and kept my writings in a loose leaf notebook that no one else could really ever look through.

I haven't explored the Blogger application very much yet. But I anticipate turning comments off in the beginning. I have not had great experience with the comment paradigm at other sites I have been involved with. If I can, I would like to leave one page for comments. We'll see how that goes. It took a couple years before I became aware that anyone was even reading my Wordpress blog. Outflow is more important than inflow. And communication can be achieved in a variety of ways.