Normie Heads Exploding

A Double Whammy

In the age of Hyperobjects we might find ourselves waking up inside our very own perceptual emotional thought bubble, inside a simulated reality.

The former we tend to take for granted, or take to our therapist. The fact that we’re constantly creating the simulation is a somewhat novel, deeper layer.

A recurring theme on this stack is the notion that our thoughts have agency. Our thoughts are beings and can take on a life of their own. This is a central message in Percival’s Thinking and Destiny.

The Tibetan Buddhist view which I’ve been slowly coming to comprehend, I’m sure would concur. Wrapping ourselves in thoughts, either self-realized insights, what we’ve been taught or force-fed, can at best provide a temporary comfort. What if we’re missing something really important?

We have endless ways to freak ourselves out. Boomers on death’s door step and those younger still trying to piece together their psychedelic or plant medicine experiences are deep down screaming for sacred ontology/cosmology.

Yes, the batter does matter!

The double whammy comes when we really understand what we’re up against here. As the brilliant substacker Leonard Murphy writes of his personal experience in Red Pilling, Grief, and the Freedom of Un‑Knowing:

Eventually, acceptance arrived, not as resignation, but as clarity. The world is what it is, not what I had been told it was. The narratives I had trusted were incomplete at best and weaponized at worst. The question shifted from “can we get back to normal” to “how do I live honestly in a world where normal was a carefully curated illusion.”

The implication? This might not be your run-of-the-mill dark night of the soul…

As Darcy Dudeck puts it in Healing Was the Red Pill, A reflection on healing, awakening, and being ripped out of the illusion I was taught to live in:

For a lot of us, awakening starts with confusion, disillusionment, and discomfort. It shakes you to the core of who you thought you were and what you thought was real. It can feel destabilizing, lonely, and deeply unsettling.

An underlying mission of the oatcake stack (likely all stacks actually) is to correct, change the frequency of the narrative, adjust the frequency of the algorithm running our collective consciousness altogether.

I imagine that one day finishing school for our children would include 1. sophisticated polishing meditation instructions, 2. a thinking curriculum (for example de Bono) and 3. a sacred teaching emphasizing respect for the power of our thoughts. As the great James McCrae puts it: “thoughts are prayers.”

There’s a cute meme out there that suggests “thoughts emit photons.” No doubt they do. The next great thing might be designer telepathic light shows. You heard it here first.

With the Jeffery revelations the pillars of society are toppling. And yet one gets the impression there’s an overwhelmingly large portion of humanity still sipping the coolaid fluoridated water so to speak, basically accepting the reality that’s being fed to all of us and conjuring up highly intelligent analyses based on data provided by the illusion.

We want things to be okay. We tend to prefer the illusion. It’s too fucking painful to let it go, so we become preoccupied with adjusting it politically to suit our fancy. It’s a great time to expose the mafia destroying Canada. Linch mobs on X, if their imperatives are operative, will make us so much better off, and so on and so forth. We actually imagine we get to chose our fav tyrant.

What’s missing here? If we introspect, we begin to realize that we live in and are constantly party to a culture of self-indulgence. How else could we end up where we are? Interesting hyperobject: a culture of self-indulgence. Be it pedophilia, a belief system, an ideology — or indulge me for a sec — our personal thought bubble, all somewhat equally completely self-indulgent.

I’m fond of the great Substack proposition:
Monetize your prayers, it’s your only option.
Happy to discuss.

“The masses have never thirsted after the truth. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.”
– Gustave Le Bon

This is the initial essay of the Fire Horse Year on the Oatcake Stack and comes exactly one year after posting the meme-setting Hyper-zeitgeist: Hyperobjects, Hypernormalization, Hypernovelty. Homage and credit due to the wisdom holders of all times and traditions, and to all my relations.