Gullible? Me?
The two people who drop in on this blog every once in a while might have noticed that recently (March 2011) the subtitle changed from: “Keep an open mind but not so open that your brain falls out” to “exploring Deep Reality”. WTF?
When I started Mr. Gullible in 2008 I was on the height of skeptical rationality. I was (and still am) a regular listener to such podcasts as “The Skeptics’ Guide To the Universe“, “Skepticality” etc. In addition I thought about going to college to study Astronomy. This blog was supposed to be an outlet for my own skeptical musings. Every time somebody mentioned UFOs, out-of-body experience or god I would cringe. Dawkins’ “The God Delusion” was on the top of my to-read stack.
But something funny started to happen. Almost with horror I noticed that I was still interested in the fringes of reality. It also dawned on me that many of the things that motivate me as a musician, the process of composing, the semi-controlled randomness of improvisation, are actually quite irrational – and to top it off, that irrationality was one of the main attractions for me. Now, equipped with a big portion of skepticism towards paranormal claims, my own strange experiences, politics, skeptics and reality itself I started appreciating the weirdness all over again.
While I absolutely agree with the statement that woo-woo beliefs and practices hurt and sometimes kill people (“whatstheharm.net“) I also tend to think that ‘strange’ experiences, claims and ideas are real and therefore a part in the continuum of our reality. If I believe in aliens visiting Earth in flying saucers there may well be no material substance to the aliens or the saucers but my believe is still real.
And this is where Deep Reality comes in. If reality is the continuum which represents the material (in whatever form, function or shape) – the hardware – then Deep Reality would be our (and all of life’s) experience of that continuum – the (gasp!) software. This will undoubtedly make the woo-woo alarm go off in many skeptics. It smells of para-something, mind over matter, etc. And yet, our reality is not nicely divided into the scientifically provable, the rational, testable vs. the loony, unprovable claims and personal experiences. It seems to be a continuum where all too often the newest theoretical physics sound like science fiction.
This is why Deep Reality really interests me. Like in music, where a C major chord by itself is as innocent as an F# major scale played by itself, yet when you play them against each other a whole other reality emerges.
