Some remarks more on Ingo Swann

I'll round off my remarks on Ingo Swann from the previous post.

First, he died of a stroke, as he should have according to my torment that night Estonian time. His understanding of the physical workings of the brain is mostly beside the point, because all he ever dealt with is hunch training, which relies on learning how to distinguish good from bad hunches, which is no different from learning how to distinguish effective from ineffective transcendent acts, i.e. by working on your expectation.

I never had any meaningful visual hunches, and if you don't have hunches to begin with, it's difficult to train them, not that I can complain about my hunches or transcendence overall. Actually, his reality box skit here

I could have pulled off myself in a silly mood, but he's of course serious. I heard Ray Dalio say something similar the other day, the idiotic notion that we would understand more, if we wouldn't categorise things but look at all the data unfiltered. Understanding is abstraction. Neurons die in order to create order, like marble being chipped away to reveal a statue. Of course it leads to misidentifications as are common in old age, but it allows us amongst other things to read instead of having to painfully put one letter after the other like a first grader: youth has perception and instinct and age experience.

More specifically, what Swann calls reality box, I call conceptuality (Begrifflichkeit) and it is precisely what allows the training of hunches, and when you develop your conceptuality in one area, you specialise in that area and filter out other areas. That is the way of things. There is no choice between open- and closed-mindedness, lest you accept to marvel at everything.

Conceptuality is of course a part of comportment (Haltung) and our mood is a hunch that tells us whether we comport ourselves the right way, so our reality box is actually dictated to us transcendently, which Ingo Swann is obviously completely unaware of, but then again, if his comportment would have been dictated to him in a forceful way, he wouldn't have spent his life as a lab rat for the Stanford Research Institute. Actually, Schopenhauer already made the point that having the second face seems to be connected with a lack of will, and maybe there is something here that explains it, like being more interested in other peoples' activities than doing something yourself (Wouldn't you like to know the thoughts of the president? - Bush, at the time...)

Somebody who felt he has to comport himself in a certain way would likely believe in God, somebody who thinks that the very idea to comport yourself in any certain way is a nuissance probably doesn't.

Yet, even if your whole life is determined by your curiosity, you end up doing something and I believe that Ingo Swann had developed high hopes in the betterment of humanity through the training of hunches, which he had made his duty, and as long as his hopes were pure, God would have listened to his heart, even if his mind denied His existence.

Now, the conference took place in June 2002 and Minority Report premiered in September 2002, which is significant, because, if Ingo Swann's ideas about the workings of the brain were correct, it would be certain that people would be put into pots where they wouldn't be distracted by their surroundings and their unconscious brain signals would be recorded and then compared to world events until the relevant correlations were found and they could be used as seismographs to predict future earth quakes and really everything you cared to investigate, since the whole purpose of the hunch training would be to allow some of those signals to become conscious, and no matter how good the training, their full recording and correlating would always be vastly superior.

When he died in the last hours of January 2013, he probably withdrew from his duty, being a materialist, and his prayer died with it. Then, another course, not the betterment of humanity through trained hunches, but the technical use of human brains as sensors feeding a mathematical signal identifier became the expected future and that shifted the burden away from duties for the sake of our blessing to vows for the sake of our grace, which started the entire social uprooting, well, maybe only after Grothendieck also died in December 2014, which was announced to me in February 2015.

I had of course already taken my vow in 2004, and while it didn't exactly remain inconsequential, nothing changed socially until about 2015, when Trump and Brexit started to appear on the horizon. Nothing has been solved so far, but the historical imperative has changed and Ingo Swann provides a good example to study why, I guess Grothendieck's writings are still under wraps, of course they would provide quite a contrast to Swann's academic pretensions, but considering what I felt when he died, he must have likewise defended a course that was starting to be subsumed by evil.