About this blog

This blog is not about opinions or highfalutin theories about reality, the world, or whatever. The internet is already collapsing under the weight of all those opinions as it is, and besides: opinions are worthless as long as you have no idea how well substantiated and reasoned they are.

We like the form of the Chautauqua a lot better: here’s some stories about what we’ve experienced and learned, maybe illustrated with some drawings or music. We might dwell a little longer on some that are especially captivating, and about those we might write down some related musings.

We put it up here hoping that it is of some use to you. If so, that’s great (because then we didn’t do it for nothing); if not, that’s fine, nothing gained, nothing lost. After all, though everything we write here reflects our experience as faithful as we can achieve, we won’t claim that any of this is factually true in the sense that it could be objectively verified or falsified.

In fact, it’s best if you consider it all imagined – please keep that in mind if you feel an urge coming up to disprove whatever you read. There are more than enough quack science and conspiracy websites out there making factual claims that badly need to be disproven, so go on and make yourself useful there! 🙂

Of course we wouldn’t take the effort of writing all this down and creating a website to put it on if it was just for giggles. On the contrary: we think this sort of stuff is extremely relevant – not necessarily whatever we have written here, but things of this nature. This sounds paradoxical because it is paradoxical, at least from a regular common sense point of view.

However, it does make complete sense from another point of view. The problem is that this “certain point of view” is definitely not regular common sense: it’s “nonsense”, in the literal meaning of the word.

That probably doesn’t help a lot unless you feel that only common sense is worth your attention, in which case you probably don’t want to waste your time here.

But otherwise, nonsense in the sense of “not common sense” can still be many different things. It can be crazy, or absolutely meaningless, or impossible to grasp. On the other hand: it might also be very useful, liberating, or a doorway to a completely new way of looking at things. 

How can you tell? Common sense (reasoning) won’t save you here.

We think there’s only one way to find out: try it out and see what happens (it’s too bad that it isn’t as simple as trying out another brand of shampoo). A good analogy is non-euclidian space: if you fiddle with Euclid’s fifth postulate (which was definitely a nonsensical thing to do at one point), you get something that actually works better than the original thing. But it isn’t easy, and meddling with that stuff is not entirely without risk either, especially for people who are prone to have psychotic episodes.

Long story short: we think that this particular kind of nonsense reveals a fault, or a blind spot, in the modern way of thinking. This is nothing new: it’s been pointed out many times before by people like Carl Jung, Robert Pirsig, Owen Barfield, and, indeed, J.R.R. Tolkien (though you have to look deeper than watching Peter Jackson’s movies to find it), to name a few. It’s a pity that so few people actually read those books, and even fewer who read them in such a way that the message comes across – not because you need to be a genius for that, but because it’s so fundamentally strange that we blip over it. It’s a culture-wide, collective mental blind spot.

The trick is to get to that other point of view. How do you do that?

Monks in the Zen Buddhist tradition put quite a bit of effort to accomplish this change of perspective by studying koans: short riddles that can’t be solved with rational thought. The idea is that this should help the student to take a step sideways, outside their common sense.

So, you could become a Buddhist monk, but there are other ways. For some it’s relatively easy, but for others it might be so hard that they never get it; though the fact that you’re even reading this might be somewhat encouraging.

We figured that the best thing to do is “don’t tell, show!”

So that’s why we made this website. Maybe the path that we found by accident (or grace) can be taken by some of you, and maybe it inspires others to find their own way.