I think I just realized why I get into trouble with so many people----somehow I never realized what now seems obvious----reality testing is politically incorrect!  Whether you are a religious fundamentalist or a New Age fundamentalist, on the right or on the left, if it feels emotionally satisfying, then it’s true.
      What really drives me crazy about this though is that people on the left and New Agers, who would be the first to criticize Christian fundamentalists for rigid, non rational beliefs, often have no self criticism about their own non rational beliefs.  For example, twice this week people have forwarded me the following announcement:
A cosmic trigger event is occurring
> on the 17th of October 2006
> ==========================
>
> This is the beginning, one of many trigger events to come between now and  2013. An ultraviolet (UV) pulse beam radiating from higher dimensions in universe-2 will cross paths with the Earth on this day. Earth will remain approximately within this UV beam for 17 hours of your time.
>
> This beam resonates with the heart chakra, it is radiant fluorescent in
> nature, blue/magenta in color. Although it resonates in this frequency
> band it is above the color frequency spectrum of your universe-1 which you,  Earth articulate in. However due to the nature of your soul and soul groups operating from Universe-2 frequency bands it will have an effect.
>
> The effect is every thought and emotion will be amplified intensely one million-fold. Yes, we will repeat, all will be amplified one millions
> time and more.
>
> Every thought, every emotion, every intent, every will, no matter if
> it is good, bad, ill, positive, negative, will be amplified one million
> times in strength.
>
> What does this mean?
>
> Since all matter manifest is due to your thoughts, i.e. what you
> focus on,  this beam will accelerate these thoughts and solidify them at an accelerated rate making them manifest a million times faster than they normally would.
>
> For those that do not comprehend. Your thoughts, what you focus on
> create your reality. This UV beam thus can be a dangerous tool. For if you are focused on thoughts which are negative to your liking they will manifest into your reality almost instantly. Then again this UV beam can be a gift  if  you choose it to be.
>
> Mission-1017 requires approximately one million people to focus on
> positive, benign, good willed thoughts for themselves and the Earth and Humanity on this day. Your thoughts can be of any nature of your choosing, but remember whatever you focus on will be made manifest in a relatively faster than anticipated time frame. To some the occurrences may almost be bordering on  the miracle.
>
> All we ask is positive thoughts of love, prosperity, healing, wealth,
> kindness, gratitude be focused on.
>
> This UV beam comes into full affect for 17 hrs on the 17th of October
> 2006.
> No matter what time zone you are in the hours are approximately 10:17
> am on the 17th of October to 1:17 am on the 18th October. The peak time  will be 17:10 (5:10 pm) on the 17th October. You do not need to be in a meditative state through out this time, though would be beneficial. The main key time no matter what time zone you are in will be the peak time of 17:10 (5:10 pm)
>
> Perhaps at this time if you can find a peaceful spot or location to
> focus.
> The optimum is out in the vicinity of grounded nature, likened to
> that of a large tree or next to the ocean waves. Focus on whatever it is you desire. What is required for the benefit of all Earth and Humanity is positive thoughts of loving nature.
>
> We call this UV beam trigger event, "818" gateway. Please forward this
 message to as many people as you know who will use this cosmic trigger event to focus positive, good willed thoughts. We require approximately 1- million people across globe to actively participate in this event. Please use whatever communication mediums you have at your disposal. Reach out to as many people as possible. We require 1-million plus people at the least to trigger a shift for humanity from separation and fragmentation to one of unification and oneness. This is your opportunity to take back what is rightfully yours i.e. Peace and Prosperity for all Earth and Mankind.
>
> This is a gift, a life line from your universe so to speak, an answer to
> your prayers. What you do with it and whether or not you choose to
> participate is your choice.
>
> Mission1017
>
> Raphiem/Blue

      
       The last person to send me this bit of channeled nonsense was an older, well-educated woman.  When I made the mistake of trying to reason with her I got back a snotty dismissal:  “OK, stay there.”   In other words, if I am such a regressive, patriarchal, unconscious person that I don’t take ultra-violet pulse beams from Universe 2 for granted, based on an email, then I’m just too clueless to even converse with. Unlike the “photon belt” we used to hear about, which attempted at least a patina of pseudo science to justify itself, here we have something so aggressively nonsensical that it would make a Medieval Theologian blush to mumble it in Latin to an empty church.

      Notice that the announcement contains the classic pillar of New Age fundamentalism: “Your thoughts, what you focus on create your reality.”  We hear this constantly, ad nauseum:  “You create your own reality.”  There is, of course, some partial validity to that principle, but it is not the absolute validity adamantly insisted upon by New Age fundamentalism.  Let’s reality test it for just a moment.  If we create your own reality than how come some sufficiently positive thinking New Ager hasn’t created an earth they can share with the rest of us that has no environmental pollution?  Did all the children and babies that drowned in the Tsunami create their own reality?  Most of the time we create our own inner reality and that is often, but not always, a major influence on our outer reality, but no, this principle does not hold up to even the most obvious reality testing, and yet it is recited with the irrational conviction of any religious fundamentalism. 
     Besides, if we create our own reality, then why the hell do we need Ultraviolet Pulse Beams from Universe 2?  Maybe we need to scale down this fundamentalism a little bit to some more realistic corollaries like:   “You create your own emails.” or “You create your own nonsense which you can put in your own emails.”

      Similarly, many of my friends on the left feel so self righteous and sure of their convictions that fact is no longer a necessary ingredient when criticizing the right. Shortly after 9-11, in an article called Left off Balance (http://www.zaporacle.com/textpattern/article/108/left-off-balance) I noted the following in a discussion of shadow projection amongst people on the left:
     Here's a classic example that happened just yesterday. I get on email and find messages from two different people, a dire chain email petition that tells me that "they" (there's always a mysterious dark they) are trying to sneak through an amendment to the constitution trying to outlaw gay marriages. I scroll down and see some very intelligent people I know have added their names and addresses to this document. After a stunned moment I realize this is utter nonsense, it is impossible to "sneak in" an amendment to the constitution that requires huge Congressional majorities and is going to be a huge drawn out high profile, high publicity process. The Constitution has not been amended in decades. (I'm no expert, I slept through Civics class in high school too, but isn't this general knowledge?) People I knew were forwarding this bogus bit of propaganda, adding their names to it, because their shadow projection makes them gullible and able to be blind sided by darkness. Because they so easily project the shadow onto a "they" which they believe runs every governmental and media decision, they could be made fools of, manipulated by someone who very likely wants their names and addresses for a shadowy purpose of some sort. It never occurred to them that shadow might instead manifest from one of what seemed like their number and blind side them. They were giving away, voluntarily, their info, their privacy, because their shadow projection blinded them to the multivalent aspect of darkness----it shows up everywhere. Most people are murdered not by the government, not by terrorists, but people they are close to, and even more often by themselves, particularly via bad health habits. They were hit by their own shadow that blind sided them because they don't see how quick they are to attack "they" with no evidence, no reasonableness, no scaled view, to jump to a false conclusion and go into flight or fight mode just like a bad cop.
       Next example of failure to discern shades of grey. Constant statements I'm hearing that are version of, "They have complete control of the media, it's all just wartime propaganda, it's all lies." An example of this POV was a very amusing recent Tom Tomorrow cartoon. In the cartoon two news anchor people are going to give a report on "Why they hate us." The camera turns to a female TV person and she says, "They hate us because we're free." The male anchorperson gets on and sniggers that they probably deserve a Pulitzer for that. So I laugh at this cartoon, go with its POV, because I hate plastic new anchor types and love biting sarcasm. But then I look up and see this week's Newsweek (can't get more mainstream media than Newsweek) and see the cover says "Why They Hate Us" I have it in front of me right now. Inside I don't find, "They hate us because we're free." I find a twenty page article which begins with the sentence, "To dismiss the terrorists as insane is to delude ourselves." Four sentences later they dismiss the statement, "We stand for freedom and they hate it." Then follows a nuanced, probing look into cultural, religious, geopolitical variables that have brought their hatred about. The West is not portrayed wearing a white hat. They also state, "The daily exposure to Israel's iron-fisted rule over the occupied territories has turned this into the great cause of the Arab--and indeed the broader Islamic---world." Elsewhere, they look at American policy in the region as "...cynically geared to America's oil interests, supporting thugs and tyrants without hesitation." And Newsweek doesn't just say that is their POV, for they also add, "There is substance to some of these charges..."
     Does this article have a bias or two or three or more? Sure, how could it be otherwise, what human account of events doesn't? But it is full of relevant information, most of which is factually true, and I can benefit from this information which I can't if I believe George Bush that they're the evil doers and we're the good guys and don't bother to read the magazine, and I also lose the information if I am leftist and know for a fact that Newsweek is controlled by "they" and is full of lies. I am told from Sept. 11 on that "they" have the media in complete lock down mode. But mostly I hear this POV from callers calling into nationally broadcast NPR shows. NPR still gets some money, if not as much as they should, from the government. Well radio shows can use screeners, they can easily and invisibly control content by who they allow on. Caller after caller after caller had a radical leftist POV and were unilaterally criticizing the US, saying on national radio that they control the press, there is no freedom of press, it's just what the government and corporations want us to know. None of them seems struck by the irony that they are saying this on a national broadcast heard by millions. When I point this out to Leftist friends I hear, "You see, they're just allowing that so you'll think there's a free press!" This is the classic warped logic of paranoia and shadow projection. (end of passage from “Left off Balance”)
      Five years after 9-11 and a new fundamentalism seems to be growing on the left, “The 9-11 Truth Movement.”   I know this is going to piss off a lot of people, again I seem to have trouble getting it that reality testing is not PC.  That this has become a fundamentalism should be obvious from the deceptive name, “The 9-11 Truth Movement.”   I would have no problem with it if it were called “The 9-11 Conspiracy Movement,” because that’s honest, it consists of people who believe that 9-11 was a US government based conspiracy.  I have no problem with the C word, because there really are conspiracies.  But when it calls itself a “Truth” movement, it announces that it is a fundamentalism.  A real truth movement would mean an investigation that was open to learning things that contradicted what the investigators originally believed.  But here “truth” means what it does for any fundamentalist, we own the truth and our movement is devoted to proselytizing and converting the heathen who don’t know the truth. 
       To be fair, the 9-11 truth people do present evidence, lots of it, and much of it seems impressive.  I don’t rule it out as a possibility, and I can certainly believe that members of our government knew something was about to happen and chose to look the other way. There are certainly enough questions and anomalies to justify a massive, public, non partisan investigation. But what I don’t get from the 9-11 Truth people is the self critical reality testing where you challenge yourself with some pretty obvious questions from an opposing vantage.  For example, two pretty obvious questions occur to me, and whenever I ask a 9-11 Truth person I never get a response.  They say that three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead.  If 9-11 were stage managed by the U.S. in the way that most 9-11 Truth people claim, it would require a conspiracy with probably a thousand or more people in the know working together with military precision and no leaks.  But the Bush administration, like every administration, is riddled with embarrassing leaks all the time, like the intelligence assessment that was just leaked that said Iraq has increased our risk of terrorism.  Second, if these people are such efficient puppet masters, able to create such an elaborate event as 9-11, why didn’t they plant some WMD in Iraq?   That would have saved them the tremendous political capital they lost nationally and internationally when they couldn’t find any WMD.  Planting WMD in Iraq would be a total cake walk compared to pulling off 9-11. 
      Finally,  what 9-11 Truth people and New Agers have in common is no sense of the trickster aspect of the unconscious and synchronicity.  Wherever you cast your obsessive attention you are bound to find weird patternings that are hard to explain as coincidence and that will tempt you to explain in ways that confirm your obsession.   For example, it’s a bit of weird pattern that the terrorist attack in Spain apparently occurred 911 days after 9-11.  Does that mean it was an intentional conspiracy?   If you are a 9-11 Truth Movement True Believer then the answer is a resounding Yes! because all weird patterning and synchronicity is interpreted in that direction. But I’ve got some politically incorrect news for true believers everywhere:  Weird patterning and synchronicities are to be found everywhere you cast your obsessive attention!   

      Here’s an example of weird, synchronistic patterning----I just saw a magazine ad put out by a tire company.  The ad tells you how to know if you have enough tread left or need to replace your tires.  The test is you take a penny, put it between the treads and see if Lincoln’s head is covered.  It turns out that Lincoln’s head is exactly one sixteenth of an inch from the outer edge of the penny.  OK, but here’s the spooky part that probably proves that secret stone masons operating through the Federal Reserve control every aspect of this country: Lincoln just so happens to have been our sixteenth president!  Does this means that Illumanati, in bed with the tire industry, set all that up to promote tire sales?  I think it means that weird coincidental or synchronistic patterning occurs everywhere, and will light up wherever you cast your obsessive attention!  
     

     Most mass killings on this planet happen at the hands of various truth movements, people who already own the “truth” and demand other people get moving in lock step with them.  What would be helpful, but is apparently as wildly unpopular now as in the Middle Ages, would be a reality testing movement.  I have a feeling my In Box is about to fill up with evidence of just how unpopular and politically incorrect reality testing is on the left as on the right, in the New Age as well as among the old time Fundamentalists.