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Carlen Altman's avatar

TrUsT ThE PlaN!!!!

I agree with this and have been completely tuned out of the circus, only learning to listen entirely to my intuition which is something I think can be very hard with all the noise/frequencies.

Somehow this entire experience is making me grow stronger but it really is a level of trauma based mind control and co-intel that I didn’t think I would ever experience in this lifetime. Thank you for being one of the only sane ones.

You vibrate at the frequency of truth which is how I found your work in a sea of noise , so thank you.

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Helen's avatar

But then again you only think that because Joshua's thoughts resonate with yours, right? Hall of mirrors, as he says!

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Carlen Altman's avatar

@helen haha good point! 😂 🪞 the only thing is that I do genuinely want the truth more than comfort, and I am always open to being humbled or having my world be shattered - whether it’s about climate change, the moon landing, The Beatles, or the nature of reality itself - what I appreciate is especially about Josh’s writing is that he backs up what he shared with fact and sources , not scary music or sensationalism. But of, course facts can be manipulated on all sides and that’s why I try to listen inward and focus on doing what I can to avoid fear, synthetic biological and synthetic living and beliefs on all levels, regardless if the WhiTe HaTs are in control 🙏💕 🪞

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erin's avatar

We are living in an epistemic war.

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Anti-Hip's avatar

It's certainly an epistemic crisis. Did something similar happen during the early years of the printing press?

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erin's avatar

Exactly... "Truth" fractured when the Church could no longer control it. Burning people at the stake did not curb the damned heretics... they began to print their stuff and spread it all around in hundreds and maybe thousands of copies. Now we have millions and gazillions of copies... and anyone can write, not only the few.

I think the censors do have one point. (And only one.) And that is... how do we arrive at convergence of views in this new landscape? There are times when such covergence is badly needed... I am puzzling over this. The first old solution was a crackdown... the second old solution, hatched in the Enlightenment, was scientific/rational expertise.

Both are dead. What now?

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WWIBT's avatar

"how do we arrive at convergence of views in this new landscape?"

Excellent point. For a long time I've had a crude idea that a way to "quiescence" to knowledge in the internet age would be to find ways to do something like this: (1) ground subject matter to addressable space (analogous to the Dewey decimal system, but much better thought out), (2) in some method of "organized chaos", allow that space to be populated with innumerable baseline assertions (definitions of, e.g., "the sun", of "democracy", of "life", of mathematics, etc. etc. ad infinitum), and then let that be populated with infinite recursive commentary, (3) use AI(?) to somehow fold it in logically (???) to polished consensus that would be easily navigable, but still eternally tentative with all the underpinning assertions accessible. Don't know if this is in some way possible, but what I agree what we have now is simply unnavigable siloed chaos.

The reason for all this is that, IMHO, there is literally nothing that humans believe about that world that is unimpeachably *known*. (The only way to know something fully, after all, is to be one with it; everything else is distortion. The word "know" might best be abandoned. Otherwise, it reduces to revealed religion. Therefore, free speech has been / is forever permitted. It gave us modern science, adversarial justice, and modern republics, among many other useful things, after all.)

Wikipedia as we all know took a good stab at this for public consumption using the traditional encyclopedia format, but it was internet's v1.0, and as we know it was eventually gamed into corruption, and it has not (to my knowledge) been processed outside manual editing.

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erin's avatar

The other thing is, with AI, it's garbage in, garbage out.

Or more accurately, lies in, lies out.

Can trust be built in somehow?

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erin's avatar

I am trying to think it through. Yes, and also...

Somehow, there needs to be less enmity...

In Moravia, in the 16th century, the solution was... you followed the beliefs of your local nobleman. If he was Catholic, you were catholic. If he was Utraquist, that's what you were. And the widely persecuted Hutterites found a home there as well. For about a 100 years, this worked. And I think it worked because 1) you could move to a nearby nobleman's holdings, if you really could not abide your local situation, and 2) people of differing views were relatively close neighbors, and could to some extent mingle and find out that the other side was not really devils incarnate.

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Martin's avatar

The only thing I can be totally certain of is that I don’t really know.

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Roundball Shaman's avatar

“We used to share the same lies. Now we each get our own. Soon, we may not even agree reality exists. Reality has been shattered into billions of pieces, each one perfectly tailored to fit someone's worldview.”

Most everything we believe is a lie. This is not because we are all stupid or have bad intent. It’s because Life as we experience it on this Earth is as the sages and mystics have told us forever: It Is A Dream... A dream that we dream while thinking we are Awake. And the only way out of the Dream is to realize that you are dreaming and that what you are dreaming is not real.

We can have our own thoughts about what Reality is. And for us – that IS reality whether it truly is or not. Our Quantum Universe is very accommodating – it will create and reflect back to us whatever we choose to think and believe about it.

Go ahead and try to convince someone that their ‘reality’ is not in fact, real. Try as many times as you like – and you will still get nowhere. The other person has convinced him or herself of what is real... and in doing so they have constructed a mental and spiritual prison that they live out their lives in. That is, until and unless they set about a life path of pursing what is known as, Awakening.

You would have better luck trying to convince a dog that it is actually a cat. Actually, you wouldn’t have much better luck with that either because a dog lives within a structured and limited consciousness of assuming itself as ‘Dog’-ness. So much for that.

What is this, Awakening? This is when you drop the nonsense of believing in what you think you see all around you and you accept the truth of what is (really) going on. And what is that? That we are living in a Quantum Universe composed of Energy and Consciousness and nothing else. Because Energy and Consciousness are all we need – and these are what each of us is.

Awakening means you learn and accept the truth that the ‘reality’ that we perceive as ‘real’ on this Earth is just a playground of forever dancing energies that swirl into shapes that our minds deem and perceive as ‘things’. But there are no such things as... Things. Atoms are virtually completely empty of substance and they are in fact energy packets... as also are our bodies that we deem to be real but are as empty as a thing can be. We are Energy Beings have a conscious spiritual experience.

We are given the innate freedom to create any ‘reality’ we wish if we choose to enslave ourselves into a dimension of fundamental falseness. We can conjure anything our creative minds care to... and then we can attach the power of our energy to our false World and live out our lives on that prison if we so wish.

And what do many of us choose to do these days? We don’t even bother to use our own minds to create the false World we deem as real and to live out our life within. We just take someone else’s World view ('Authorities!' and the like) and we adopt that garbage as their own. So not only do they not use their own creativity but they take the additionally lazy choice of just living within someone else’s twisted vision. Could one be any more lazy and irresponsible with their personal power than that?

So, there is the Reality of our Quantum Universe known as the Energy Matrix or Ground of Being which is Who and What we are in a free state at all times. And then there are the countless versions of false realities that humans have been conjuring – or simply accepting pre-existing versions of – for generations through Time.

The Mystics and Sages have long known this and provided our pathway to truth and freedom. And the Dark Siders in Life have also known about this and deliberately created World views and false versions of false realities to confuse, de-power, and alienate ourselves from our own self and from each other. For Their dark and damning benefit and purposes.

These are the ‘Players’. We live in the ‘Game’. We ARE the Game... if we are wise enough to discern and embrace that.

You are always your own Savior and you are also your own Enslaver. It’s all about what you perceive, understand, and choose to do with your personal piece of Divine Nature

and cosmic intelligence.

Live in the Dream... or live in the Real.

Choose wisely...

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Emmy's avatar

Wow...you really nailed it!! I was thinking of saying (in these comments) the same thing, only you have said it so much better than I could have. The important thing is to "live the life you love and love the life you live". Thanks so much for sharing these insights......

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Gwyneth's avatar

“I have never since entirely freed myself of the impression that this life is a segment of existence which is enacted in a three-dimensional boxlike universe especially set up for it.”

- C. G. Jung

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The Hidden Life Is Best's avatar

Same as it ever was. Just more of it. Nothing new under the sun. Just more of it. Twas ever thus.

Stay away from the panic button. 😃

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Alice Hesselrode's avatar

good article. The exit is marked "certainty."

That's how you know it's a trap..

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Jane's avatar

Wonderful article! I've been feeling it more and more. We are moving into virtual smart communities: electronic agreement zones that surveil us, consume our time/ energy, and secure our social movements. How can we not love it? Information, palatable-to-fascinating, constantly on tap; and people who agree with us... who we will only ever know virtually. But I am not sure this is relationship, or good for us. My current inclination is to be out in nature or engaged 3D as much as possible. Consciously leaning in to the itchiness, clunkiness and untidiness of 3D.

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Mark Brody's avatar

Interesting and at times fascinating but always thought provoking. Josh has a way of insinuating his mind into the deeper issues that lie buried behind the frenetic surface controversies we read about on a daily basis. Socrates became famous (and later dead) for demonstrating the folly of all belief systems. So we must climb out of the "nothing is knowable" pit and stratify our understanding based on probabilities. As with kinds of most human understanding, I think the blind man and the elephant analogy is helpful -- many perspectives have at least some validity, some more than others, and a synthesis of the perspectives may get us closer to sketching out the elephant than any one or two alone.

Nonetheless, I found some of Josh's examples highly implausible, and probably just downright wrong. I think it's important to try to identify what's wrong as much as what is right. I don't believe the fracturing of perspective is orchestrated with precision -- rather, I think it is likely the by-product of a variety of convergent forces, including the active broadcasting of propaganda, the censorship or ridicule of true information, the general deterioration of critical thinking in our educational system, and the moralization of belief -- if you believe "X" you are a reprehensible person. Each of these trends is initiated with some political goal in mind, but, like converging low pressure systems, the net result will be predictable in only one sense -- that it will be chaotic.

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Joshua Stylman's avatar

Hey Mark, thank you for taking the time to comment. I'm thrilled my rants are getting people to engage in such a thoughtful dialogue.

I especially appreciate your articulation of the “convergent forces” theory. It maps well to what I’ve described elsewhere as what some friends and I call "the accidentalist mindset" - the idea that fragmentation of perception emerged organically from a mix of unrelated trends: polarization, educational decay, tribalism, and so on.

My issue with that interpretation is that requires us to ignore decades of documented coordination through programs like MKULTRA, Operation Mockingbird, and institutions like Bilderberg, Tavistock - each of which explicitly explored and weaponized information control, perception management, and mass psychology. I explore this more here (and other places on this Substack): https://stylman.substack.com/p/that-cant-be-true

Your framework implies that the same powerful actors who gained influence through careful planning and top-down control somehow stopped coordinating once they reached cultural and technological dominance. That we accidentally ended up in an atomized, surveilled, algorithmically conditioned society - and that this state just so happens to disproportionately benefit those very same actors. Maybe I'm wrong but that seems far less plausible to me than intentional design.

And just to clarify: the “implausible” scenarios I described weren’t hypotheticals. They’re real perspectives I’ve encountered in actual conversations with friends over the past few years - typically delivered with absolute conviction. That you find them obviously wrong (and frankly, I do too in many cases), yet others believe them wholeheartedly, is precisely the point I was trying to make. This is what manufactured perception fragmentation looks like.

Sometimes the most sophisticated manipulation is convincing intelligent people that systemic outcomes are spontaneous. When the effects are this predictable - and this advantageous to entrenched power - calling them “accidental” starts to feel like its own kind of magical thinking.

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Helen's avatar

It felt like a personality type test, which is your whole point, isn't it. It's quite a scary feeling when you realise your own sanity is only such in your own eyes. Everybody is sane in their own eyes. We're going to need to drop our attachment to all our stories to exit the hall of mirrors altogether...

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Joshua Stylman's avatar

I think it’s less about a personality test and more an examination of our biases - often shaped by our media diet and social circles. I do agree with the rest of your comment.

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Helen's avatar

Yes, I think I'm saying the same thing. The Enneagram, for example, looks at personality as the result of the layers of identity we have adopted in response to all those slings and arrows - which will be at least in part what creates our biases and where we look for feelings of security.

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Craig's avatar

It's hard to eliminate one's biases completely, but when you're in the habit of stepping back from what you think you know, it's not so bad.

Some people are far more used to this perspective than others. I'll say this: money changes things, and people defend their salaries to a fault.

Plus, good thinkers can entertain competing ideas in their own heads. I'm just saying, some of us are less intellectually screwed than others.

Mr. Stylman has a gift for articulating this stuff, to be sure.

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Joshua Stylman's avatar

Thanks Craig. I don't know if it's a gift, but I think I just may be a mellower version of this guy...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RujOFCHsxo

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Craig's avatar

Indeed. I didn't know where that saying came from.

The recent RFK betrayal on the shot authorization... We don't have a word for that kind of blackpill. I literally don't know how to exist in this world anymore.

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ERIKA LOPEZ's avatar

"The recent RFK betrayal on the shot authorization... We don't have a word for that kind of blackpill. I literally don't know how to exist in this world anymore."

YES! YES! YES!

thank you. i literally don't know how to exist in this world anymore... pure poetry thank you for distilling my current existential screams into one line.

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Craig's avatar

My pleasure.

I'd hasten to add, the usual methods of escapism are no escape either!

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Andy's avatar
Jun 6Edited

There is a way through this very calculated divide and conquer strategy the “elites” confuse us with in their drive for power and control.

We are being manipulated by high stakes game-players who are more clever and cruel than they are smart. Sadly, due to mass-media (which they own) induced fear many of us can’t use our brains to see through the trickeries behind the wars, terror attacks, and diseases that are thrown at us. When Covid was blasted over the airwaves I was disappointed (but not necessarily surprised) to find that many people could not distinguish between absolute and relative rates of infection, the difference between so-called “infection” and an actual case, and understand the implications - and the bought and paid for media certainly wasn’t going to help us. The PCR test, of dubious pertinence and value to gauge infections (see inventor Kary Mullis) to begin with, was cranked up to cycles of ludicrous magnitude, and the CDC (or WHO - I can’t remember which offhand) issued (too late and not publicized) a retraction re the value of its use. When people, even if very highly credentialed, speak with balanced perspective of facts and sensible interpretations, they are ruthlessly ridiculed, censored, and threatened with loss of their credentials and livelihood.

However, if we maintain a healthy skepticism and apply the scientific method, and hone our basic scientific and mathematical skills so we can at least understand what the “experts” are telling us (and not telling us) we can very much see through the lies. Of course this also requires an open mind and resisting peer pressure to conform to any false official narrative. It also takes a bit of work, but it’s certainly worth it. The Cabal (and there really is one) behind much of this madness relies on our fear, gullibility, and herd like tendencies to enlist our energies in our own enslavement.

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Quay1's avatar

You are living in the Matrix. Literally. Check OUT. It won’t kill you in reality. You are STATE CITIZENS. NOT US CITIZENS. THIS IS IT. ALL. NOTHING ELSE. YOU ARE FREE LIVING MEN AND WOMEN. ACT LIKE IT OR DIE NOT KNOWING WHO AND WHAT YOU ARE. Leave the Federal Government. Enough is enough. Eddie Craig Tao of law can be found on YouTube. James C Lovett also. Find them. Find YOU.

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Max Todd's avatar

I just now subscribed to Joshua's Substack for a year; I've been meaning to do it for a while and since JS has totally overwhelmed me with his brilliant wordsmithing and excellent content, I had no other choice but to help him. Maybe more people will see his work and as a result support him too.

"What Do I Know, What Do I Think I Know, And Why Do I Think I Know It"

is an essay written by Bob Fenstermaker. It paints the concept of personal perception in a powerful yet playful way. Here's a link to Bob's essay: http://www.easyroute.net/what/

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Rob (c137)'s avatar

Every time they try to divert people's perception, it opens them up to thinking about the topic.

They're fighting a losing battle and if they really wanted to keep control, they should give people more and cut the fat economic parasites out of the economy and health care.

Regarding the feud between Musk and Trump, consider this dynamic.

I think the gen X predator class is preparing to sell out the boomers who messed stuff up. They hope to gain the credibility of us. But if they continue the same crap, it's not going to work.

So the question is, will they give reforms and cut the fat budgets out or do they expect that with a mere act they can continue with the same shit?

Remember, Reagan Clinton Obama and Trump are false reformers but at the time it worked tricking people like my dad etc. But his generation is going away and this trick won't work for us!

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LW's avatar

Is the point it keeps us divided? Not just conservative vs lib, but shattered into MANY pieces. Divided we fall.

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Joshua Stylman's avatar

Certainly seems like that's one of the goals...

https://stylman.substack.com/p/divided-we-fall

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