THE DEVIL IN THE DETAILS - MYTHOLOGY, NEUROLOGY, PHARMACOLOGY, PSYCHOLOGY, AND... VAXINES

How reading scientific literature finally made me realize why mythologies always warned us from "the devil".

Originally published on the 20th of August 2021, to celebrate having 10,000 followers on Twitter…

SAFETY IS A PERCEPTION. THE BIGGER THE DISTANCE BETWEEN YOUR PERCEPTION AND REALITY, THE WEAKER YOU ARE.

Welcome to what will be a LONG thread.

TRUE STORY:
Few years ago a friend informed me she is going to dinner, after dawn, in a very doggy neighborhood in London.

I've offered my friend to escort her, we arrived safely, but on the way back to the tube station I was attacked by 3 men. When the fight ended and they escaped, I was bleeding everywhere, my suit was torn to pieces, my arm fractured. Later, at home, I also noticed I got stabbed.

I headed back to the house where I dropped off my friend, and they called the police. When the police arrived, the owner of the house, who was in shock told them he cannot believe it could happen on his safe street.

The two police officers looked at him, amazed, and told him about the number of violent crimes incidents that were reported in his Neighborhood on the last month.

The guy looked at them, shocked, and his response was "wow, it is so true that ignorance is a bliss!".

We all tell ourselves stories and lies because it allows us to survive in an alienating world where we are learn from a very young age that being honest is a bad idea. We notice how adults lie to themselves and to others, and we use that strategy.

And then we suffer.

Before we delve into facts, a quote from someone who admired the devil. In the personal acknowledgments of his book "Rules for Radicals: A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals", Saul Alinsky thanked "the very first radical ...that...won his own kingdom — Lucifer."

The Hebrew word for the Satan is "שָׂטָן", a verb that translates as "to act as an obstacle" for those following a righteous path. This force first appears in the story of serpent who tempted Eve in the garden of Ehden to eat the fruit from the tree of knowledge.

Since power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, and since knowledge gives you power, temptation for power and/or knowledge will corrupt, temptation for absolute power and/or knowledge corrupts absolutely.

Which brings us to Disney and Mickey Mouse.

In Disney's "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" animation from "Fantasia" Mickey Mouse (the apprentice), decides to use his master's magical powers when he was away. First it works, then trouble comes, and when Mickey try to fix it it gets worse, until his master saves him.

The sub-context of this masterpiece was: be careful playing god, because you are not. You don't know the truth, it will cause trouble, and trying to fix it will bring hell.

It was a warning not to be corrupted by our ego's desire for knowledge and power.

Iain McGilchrist wrote about brain lateralization in his book "The Master and His Emissary". Our left hemisphere cannot see reality and cannot integrate new information, while the right sees reality and empower the left to perform tasks, and then get highjacked by it.

It is known that some patients with stoke on their right hemisphere who has paralysis in their left arm cannot grasp it is paralyzed, will tell the doctor that they can move it, and if the doctor will pick their hand and show it, they will claim it is not their hand.

The left hemisphere sees a non-animated world, a snapshot composed of objects, an abstract. The right hemisphere "sees" flow, interconnectedness, oneness, or as McGilchrist likes to call it, a Gestalt.

I now understand that "the devil is in the details" also means that when the only thing you can see are the details you forget the full picture, and you think that the world is full of "things".

McGilchrist's new book, "The Matter With Things" will cover it in great detail.

Holy scriptures such as the bible allows those who read them from a place of devotion and surrender to experience them as their own autobiographies.

The stories about heroes, kings, mythical creatures, angels, and God connect to the forces within our subconscious.

Of course the work of Carl Jung has mapped these forces extensively. Here is @jordanbpeterson expressing his admiration to Jung and his work on the archetypes of the collective unconscious.

Let's fast forward to the now.
We live in the age of science, the product of the enlightenment movement, where reason, pursuit of happiness, and evidence of the senses are supposed to lead us into a better world. It was a counter movement to the corruption & control of the church

However, as the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, as a result of the enlightenment movement focusing only on reason and facts, "God is dead", which meant that there is no longer a righteous path, other than what our mind tells us is.

Our culture worships Apollo (rationality, order, clarity, perfection) and suppresses Dionysos, the god of intuition, "oneness or wholeness, physical pleasure and pain, and the nature beyond human control, as she really is."

The result of the enlightenment movement was a suppression of the right hemisphere, and as McGilchrist pointed out in a reply essay to @sapinker, this atheistic suppression led to the worst atrocities in human history.

channelmcgilchrist.com/reply-to-steve…

Reply to Steven Pinker - Channel McGilchristScience and the humanities: Iain McGilchrist’s reply to Steven Pinker My reply to Stephen Pinker’s essay (a version of this essay was published in the LA Review of Bookson 25 September 2013): ‘Steven …https://channelmcgilchrist.com/reply-to-steven-pinker/

We live in an era of scientism, we are being told to "follow the science", ignoring the fact that looking at the world via the prism of objects that can be manipulated to reach a desired result is the brainchild of our left hemisphere, which cannot see reality, nor the truth.

BACK TO THE STORY I STARTED WITH:

When the people who attacked me in London ran away, I looked at them, and I knew: you cannot do to others what you don't first do to yourself.

At the heart of all atrocities lies a separation from divine truth by following "our truth".

When scientists, who are trapped in their left hemisphere, decide to play with genes as if they are gods, the end result will be that like Lucifer, we will get our own kingdom, but, like Lucifer, it was hell.

YOU KNOW THIS IS TRUE.

Ehden