What’s the big idea?
I operate a small bakery specializing in easy-to-digest half-baked ideas. The Oatcake Stack celebrates 10 years of baking and what I’ve learned along the way.
By the numbers, Genuine Nova Scotia Oatcakes is approaching half-a-million oatcakes baked, or about 50,000 a year. That’s about 200 batches a year. Each batch is recorded along with what was listened to while it was made on oatcakes.ca. This has also generated a work-in-progress genuine bibliography of influences on the oatcake.
Reality check: from a Mcluhanesque or big picture point of view, nothing like this was ever possible before. We have an accelerating accumulation of all the intelligence and insight of humanity at our finger tips. One might imagine that this would produce some pretty smart cookies over time…
By all means comment if you feel inspired. It seems to me over the past decade the cognitive landscape has transformed quite a bit. Knowledge, not so long ago came in predetermined bundles. At this time of writing, it seems nuggets of truth emerge from research troves. The more one digs the more facets are revealed. The more one discovers, the more preconceptions are shed.
Folks comment on posts and refine perspectives. Propaganda from obviously false narratives is rejected. Deeper more accurate stories form and proceed with ever sharper detail. Heroic citizen journalists unencumbered by corporate livelihood ties contribute with inspiring bravery and ethical passion. The “heart of the matter” takes on ever greater clarity albeit with an accompanying sense of wonder-terror.
So what’s really going on here? Well we might visualize Substack (or the Internet generally) like a rather large sponge soaking up everyones’ mental events.
There’s a big push to monetize (one’s mental events). Now that’s a thought in itself!
Have you noticed the way we’re all connected? An influencer on the far side of the sponge comes out of nowhere and one can trace the tsunami as the influence lights up neurones clear across the Substack sponge — not so much “out there” — as inside and between our very own synaptic junctions.
The big idea that floats at the top of a decade of downloading is that thoughts have agency. Thoughts are beings.
This could be the best way to start the Oatcake Stack.
What exactly is that “inner voice?” Look around — everything — the whole of the culture sphere is a result of and powered by “thoughts.” Even this!
Some references:
Harold W. Percival introduced me to the notion that thoughts are beings. I wondered why more people don’t talk about this…
“A human is a laboratory in which nature does the chemical part and thinking carries on the alchemical work.”
“Human thoughts when issued are beings, not merely things. They are points having a potential system which gives them certain inherent qualities and power. They are centers of force and take on matter of the four worlds. They have no form that can be seen clairvoyantly.”
“Thoughts have great potential power and the ability to last for ages, because thoughts are born in the light world under the Light of an Intelligence. Because of the power in thoughts the whole material world with all its acts, objects and events exists and is maintained and changed.” — Harold W. Percival
THINKING AND DESTINY CHAPTER VII MENTAL DESTINY
“Thoughts are like gold fish in a bowl; the real Self is like the water. The real Self is the space between the thoughts, or more exactly, the field of silent awareness underneath all thoughts.”
— David R. Hawkins, Letting Go: The Pathway of Surrender
“We are thoughtforms. We are energy. We are consciousness embodied.”
— Alicen Grey
Epilogue
We can’t see ‘em. We really have no idea where thoughts come from or where they go. They are nevertheless the soup we’re swimming in. And we do tend to take certain thoughts rather seriously. But why?