Why I Have Nothing Left to Say

I don't have anything to add to what I have already said. Anything else I write is just curating and clarifying. But also, I have learned that people don't understand most of what I say, no matter how hard I try to come down to their level. Here I've listed some of the mental habits I have come to think may be responsible for them not getting me.

1. Intellectual laziness -- most people find thinking hard to be painful and imagining things enjoyable. So they make things up or believe in made-up things without checking, and often without even knowing how to check.
2. Not being taught about the subject of epistemology, or even worse taught an absurd post-modern relativism.

3. An almost inexplicable love of magic and woo-woo concepts. Why magic is so appealing to people is not clear to me. 

4. Thinking in non sequiturs, i.e. leaping to conclusions that don't logically follow from the previous statement.

5. A complete lack of understanding what "evidence" means. So nearly anything can be evidence of some cherished belief. This is how conspiracy theories form.

6. Bias. People not only have biases, but seem to have a kind of mind-blindness about their biases. A bias is often simply a favorite belief.

7. A desire to conform to a group. This desire is captured in words like hip, groovy, with it, and cool. Rather than think for themselves, most people prefer to choose from a kind of buffet of "rebellious" cliches that have group support. So even when people rebel against one group, they leap into another.

8. People like to believe they hold rare, secret, esoteric beliefs. This makes them feel important, but also gullible to any nonsense with the word “secret” attached to it. This was pointed out to me by a retired editor of Shambhala Books.

I have never seen any remedy for these thinking limitations. It doesn’t seem like any amount of education in logic, epistemology, or evidentiary standards in law or forensic science can help. Such people seem to be born this way, and seem incapable of change. Even famous professors of logic and mathematics I have spoken with display these cognitive weaknesses.

Those rare souls who actually notice and work to overcome these mistakes in thinking also seem to have simply been born that way. They were born with a desire to discover the truth, even when that meant letting go of some habitual bias, even happily relinquishing them as chains that had repressed them.

For this reason I feel no motivation to write anymore. People will just attack what I write. To accept what I write sets a person apart from their social group and has no woo-woo appeal, and so does not satisfy people’s real wants.

I have come to think that the Avatars know all this about human nature, and know that it is simply a natural consequence of where they are in the reincarnation process — and trying to help them too fast will only confuse them. So, knowing it is natural and basically incurable, they do work-arounds. A work-around is a plan or method to circumvent a problem without eliminating it. Some of these work-arounds include:

• Speaking in a way that appears to conform to people’s biases -- while including in what one says some small insight that will help them but that they can handle. They know they can't digest more than that. The small insight is said in a way the person will like. Another way to say this is that a master comes down to the level of the person he’s speaking to in order to help him.
• Making light fun of “philosophers” and people steeped in “reason,” which makes simple people relax and feel hopeful and eager to hear what the master has to say. The master then often says things like “understanding has no meaning,” and recommends to the simple person easier Bhakti practices. Or he might even say, “Don’t worry about how you love me, just love me.”
• They will include in their discussions with simple people enough magic and woo-woo to satisfy their natural craving for these ‘amazing’ things, knowing it is false but that it lures people in. This is also why Jesus performed miracles. If he did not do so, simple people would not have listened to his words at all.
• Take some nonsense people already believe in that moves them and reframe it in a way that conforms just a little closer to the truth. This way the master does not upset a person's whole worldview, but still moves the aspirant just a little close to the real path.
• Saying that some mystics or philosophers always mean X by Y, knowing this small white lie will help them accept what he tells them. 
• Giving people a new myth that will help them. The use of myths as a teaching tool is very ancient. People get pulled in by the story and the truth being conveyed is slipped in in a way they don’t notice.

The masters can engage in these playful games to help people, without having to worry about more advanced souls present, for advanced souls will know what they are doing and look past it.  

I also think that masters discourage people from trying to use "reason" and "logic" because they don't know how these methods work or how to use them, and trying will just get them confused. 

I noticed this lack of capacity to use reason and logic effectively even in my professors of philosophy. Presumably knowing better, they freely engaged in known fallacies to support their own unsupportable views. Here are some examples:

• Presumption-based thinking. They just assume things, usually also assumed by a larger group they identify with. They preface such views as being part of what we "all just know." This shows an almost complete lack of critical thinking.
• Assuming that they (and not others) have some rare magical gift called common sense or horse sense - meaning they're right and others are wrong. It doesn’t seem to occur to them that others have this same view of themselves, but completely different opinions. 
• Bandwagon thinking. Professors of philosophy notoriously adopt those views that they believe will better their career. Usually this means identifying with some popular “school” of philosophy as the safest track to tenure.
• Overt use of the straw-man, ad hominem, and reductio ad absurdum fallacies to critique a belief they don’t share. A reductio ad absurdum argument attempts to establish a claim by showing that the opposite view leads to some absurdity. For instance, it is common for professors to say George Berkeley’s immaterialism leads to solipsism, while only a person who never read Berkeley carefully could think so. The real world is in God’s mind, not in the individual’s.
• My professors also suffered from a baseless conviction that magical unseen theoretical entities had to exist, relying solely on imagination, bias, appeal to the mob, and a phony appeal to common sense. 

In all, my professors showed an incredible lack of ability to dive deep and think profoundly.

People are basically children, and I wrote my earliest papers on the naive assumption they were adults. I have never met an adult.

Like children, they delight in dwelling on pleasing imaginary fantasies. Some they make up. But mostly they believe in ones they are told.

The only test they use (subconsciously) to determine what to believe is whether imagining it delights them or not. This is what I mean by bias and desire. They believe X when they believe there is something to gain by believing it.

In truth, these people aren't worth talking to. For they only want to hear their fantasies repeated back to them in an endless and fruitless loop.