Ingo Swann (02Nov98)
Anyone having an interest in learning about the superpowers beyond a superficial level has to realize, at some point, and in some bigger-picture sense, that unusual kinds of knowledge packages are involved.
In this regard, it is possible to say that those packages are "unusual" because they either can’t be fitted into, or have been refused admittance into, those knowledge packages that have achieved status within societal mainstream power structures.
At first sight, the above might simply be thought of as a fluctuating social issue which doesn’t particularly have meaning to the thinking mechanisms of the individual.
But via teaching, experience, and educational methods, almost all individuals (1) adapt their thinking mechanisms to the knowledge packages that have achieved status, and (2) disadapt from those knowledge packages that have been refused admittance.
Thus arises the interesting situation regarding how individual thinking mechanisms can become compatible with the unusual knowledge packages required for cognitive superpower activating.
There are two major source difficulties in this regard.
FIRST, it is an established fact that after a certain young age all humans interpret all in-coming information and knowledge via THEIR versions of reality, and which versions have mostly been socially installed via various kinds of educational programming.
In this sense, the thinking mechanisms, or mind maps, of individuals more or less emulate the larger societal mind map of knowledge-reality, including the accepted and rejected knowledge patterns within that larger mind map.
Very powerful mental information processing grids then form up, and which, for the most part, function automatically in a number of subconscious levels—and thus out of sight of the individual’s conscious intellectual faculties.
Thereafter, the individual might become intellectually disposed to consider unusual knowledge. But mere intellectual interest in something might not lock it into the largely subconscious grids, and which "do their own thing." (NOTE: Some of the dynamics of mental information processing grids can be found elsewhere in this Website in the essay of the same title.)
SECOND, it is understood by many that societal power structures remain secure as long as the knowledge-reality packages upon which the structures are founded remain more of less intact.
Thus, most social power structures not only evolve their particular knowledge-reality packages, but also evolve ways, methods, and means of maintaining them as intact as possible. (NOTE: Some of those ways and means are discussed in the series of essays treating the topics of smaller and bigger pictures.)
Early sociologists established that conformity of the individual to societal knowledge-reality packages is THE key element regarding the conflict between the individual and society. That this IS actually the case can’t really be argued, and so further dissection of it would seem unnecessary.
But various hidden elements incorporated within the conformity need further elaboration—in that conformity is usually studied only as a behavioral problem requiring some kind of societal policing. In that sense, the individual conflict is with the societal policing.
However, and in a bigger-picture sense, behind the situation as described above, hovers the matter of human experiencing.
This aspect takes on luminosity in that it is logical to assume that if individuals did not experience this or that which brings them into conflict with society, then it is quite possible that no conflict would arise.
There are only two meanings in this regard:
- Conformity to societal knowledge-reality packages requires that individuals EXPERIENCE nothing that brings the knowledge-reality packages into question.
- The societal limiting of experiencing can only take place and be maintained by decreasing the awareness margins of individuals, since awareness margins have a great deal to do with experiencing.
The superpowers by definition involve matters regarding the state and conditions of awareness margins and experiencing not only within a given societal whole, but within each individual incorporated into it.
In this sense, then, we can begin to glimpse the awesome difficulties involved if individuals have become conditioned to the societal whole, and if the conditioning has achieved the state of subconscious automatic functioning in the individual’s mental information processing grids.
If this is the case, then mere intellectual study of the superpowers may not be very productive—because the study alone probably will not shift awareness margins very much, with the result that experiencing will either not take place, or will not be perceived.
Indeed, during the last thirty years, many have complained to this writer that they have read everything about psychic powers, but did not become psychic, at least in any awesome, functioning way.
In any event, if awareness margins and enhanced experiencing thresholds take on more vivid meaning with regard to the superpowers, then it is very worthwhile making an attempt to examine societal crunching and trashing of them.
This requires an attempt to erect or outline a bigger picture of what is involved—in that smaller pictures will not loosen up bigger pictures, but bigger pictures can and often do loosen up smaller ones.
Such a bigger picture of course has historical perspectives, but in this essay we need only to confine our observations to the modernist epoch.
Within the many wonderful and terrible features of the Modern Age there has drifted a number of topics that have some kind of great importance, but whose particulars were denied admittance into the status parameters of modernist knowledge-reality overviews.
Beginning in about 1845, those overviews attained great power and importance. The overviews thus served as the basis for mainstream concepts of knowledge and reality.
The concepts, in turn, served intellectually as background information packages that determined the differences between proper and improper modernist thinking.
It is difficult to describe or grok what those denied topics consist of because the many real glories and successes of the Modern Age were of such luminosity as to blot out the nature and essence of what was being denied admittance.
It is thus difficult as a starting point to generalize what the denied topics consisted of.
In the contexts of the essays in this Website, though, it is possible to say that the "psychic powers" of the biomind faculties were denied as having any status parameters. Since this WAS the modernist case, we could make an effort to extend the present discussions only in that regard.
But if the discussions are extended only in that regard, one will soon encounter a tendency to drift downward, so to speak, into a number of smaller pictures concretized only within local social realities—and which local realities segment and fracture our species as a whole into largely conflicting and antagonistic compartments.
For hypothetical discussion, therefore, one somehow has to achieve a broader, more inclusive picture of what is involved.
One way of attempting to grasp the dimensions of a more inclusive picture is simply to acknowledge an important factor regarding all social collectives.
All social collectives establish many kinds of parameters with regard to what their members are allowed to EXPERIENCE—while most of them also emphasize what is NOT to be experienced, at least in any open way.
One of the results of this is that whatever is considered as permissible experiencing receives some kind of STATUS parameters, while status parameters are denied regarding what is not supposed to be experienced.
Now, the only area of human activity that deals openly and specifically with preventing or containing EXPERIENCING is the area of TABOOs. By studying the history and contexts of taboos, it is easy enough to establish that something reasonably akin to the above paragraph IS the case.
If one examines taboo history, it is easily revealed that the role and function of taboo is to stifle, and thus socially contain, certain kinds of experiencing that otherwise might flourish.
One of the centralizing concepts of all of the essays in this Website hypothesizes that our species is an intelligence-system species, and that this downloads into each and all specimens.
In this sense, it would be quite clear that an intelligence-system NEEDS wide awareness and experiencing margins in order to function as an intelligence system.
If this would be the case, then any narrowing, stifling, or cutting back of experiencing would in some sense be detrimental to the more complete functioning of any intelligence-system.
The term TABOO has gradually fallen out of fashionable usage during the twentieth century—especially after certain early sociologists began indicating, rather amusingly, that the modern sciences and psychologies harbored and supported various taboos within their own professional systems.
But the definitions of TABOO are vibrantly interesting, and especially if they are integrated into the contexts of knowledge, status, and reality.
In nomenclature origin, the term TABOO comes into English at about 1777 from the Tongan language of Polynesia, Melanesia and New Zealand—and meant "set apart or charged with a dangerous or supernatural power and forbidden to profane use or contact."
In the sense that it is used in the above definition, "contact" must be taken as meaning experiencing—in that one cannot usually have "contact" with something that is non-experienced.
By 1832, TABOO had been given two further elaborations as:
- "To give a sacred or privileged character to something, which restricts its use to certain persons, or debars it from ordinary use or treatment, with stress on the privilege and the exclusion; to forbid, prohibit TO the underprivileged, to particular persons, or for general use."
- "To forbid or debar by personal or social influence the use, practice, or mention of, or contact or intercourse with; to put (a person, thing, name, or subject) under a social ban; to ostracize, to boycott."
(NOTE: Although the term TABOO has largely become inactive in contemporary usage, the concept of "politically incorrect" carries on as a rough approximation of it.)
The idea of forbidding certain kinds of qualities of EXPERIENCING is admittedly not stated in the above formal definitions of TABOO. But it is possible to argue a reason for this—that the term EXPERIENCING itself fell quite neatly into a general taboo category.
After all, the term EXPERIENCE is taken from the Latin EXPERIENTA which meant "to try to, to attempt to."
In English as late as the 1970’s, the Webster’s definitions are given as:
- "The usually conscious perception or apprehension of reality or of an external, bodily, or psychic event."
- "A direct participation in events."
- "Something personally encountered, undergone, or lived through."
- With regard to the above definitions, and in order to somewhat link into the concept of human intelligence-systems, one might as well add: "Something or anything sensed, and which results in awareness, perception, and apprehension of reality."
These definitions considered, the only possible FUNCTIONAL use of taboos is to exclude, stifle, forbid, and deny TO INDIVIDUAL HUMAN INTELLIGENCE-SYSTEMS specific kinds of experiencing access with regard to conscious awareness, perception "or apprehension of reality."
An added nuance to this would consist of NOT trying to, or NOT attempting to access those kinds of experiencing.
There are, of course, many methods socially employed to set up and enforce taboos, even if under other names. But one of the better overall ways to manage the enforcement is simply to withhold and/or delete societal status to whatever is involved.
One possible reason this method is so effective is that even if our species is a superlative intelligence-system, by wide and direct observation it is possible to see that our species also takes the matter of status with some quite serious seriousness. This aspect seem inherent in our species, since it very easily downloads and becomes quite active throughout all cultures and societal setups (even very small ones).
Indeed, it is at least somewhat possible to hypothesize that AFTER the matters of food and shelter comes the matter of STATUS, and this even BEFORE the topics of sex and money, and most certainly BEFORE the topics of KNOWLEDGE and REALITY.
It is also possible to toy with the hypothetical idea that our species is more sensitive and perceptive of its STATUS issues than it is of its intelligence-system faculties.
The topic of taboos is, of course, a nervous one. Indeed, one gets nervous even by writing the above commentary. But one of the major points of the foregoing discussion is to point up that all societal systems are based upon some kind of knowledge and some kind, or version, of reality.
But if all societal systems also contain taboos, then the taboos are embedded within the knowledge and the versions of reality—the sum of which embedding works to cut back or forbid certain kinds of experiencing awareness.
In such a case, individuals inhabiting this or that societal system are then quite likely to construct mind maps that conform not only to the knowledge-reality basis, but to the taboos patterns embedded within it. Generally speaking, this would mean that all individual mind maps would contain a category or an area titled "taboos."
Individuals absorb taboos without altogether consciously realizing it, of course, and most are anyway taught in many overt and subtle ways that it IS proper to do so. And anything considered to be proper is thus endowed with some kind of status.
Thereafter, as long as whatever they do experience is in keeping with their societal system plus its taboos, all can more or less be expected to go well—both at the individual level and for the societal setup itself.
If the central goal of taboo-constructing is to contain human experiencing only in accord with approved and condoned awareness margins, then it would follow that only those kinds of knowledge- reality packages likewise in accord can be permitted and given the status of knowledge and reality.
Considering that our species is capable of quite extraordinary sensing and awarenesses (and of experiencing appropriate to the awarenesses), the management of all this can become quite hellish.
But, to those who comprehend it, the taboo-making process has a series of in-built, fail-safe factors that work quite well to reduce the hellishness.
After all, TABOO means that whatever is designated as such is not to be discussed, communicated about, or even thought about AT ALL. Thus, even if an individual experiences something that is taboo, lips are supposed to remain sealed with regard to it.
When this fail-safe mechanism doesn’t work all that well, then more active measures can be taken. But discussion of such measures would be more at home in the section of this Website that attempts to examine the nature and functions of pismires.
Denying status to whatever is considered taboo is also quite workable, at least with regard to those who seek some kind of status within any kind of statusized system. Such individuals, of course, would not wish to involve themselves with something that has the aura of being de-statusized to begin with.
Some writers who have dared to identify and examine taboos have considered that when a taboo within a societal system begins to be broken or unwound, then cracks begin to appear in the egg-shell of the societal system itself. In that this is probably the case, then taboo maintenance takes on great and serious importance.
In any event, to a very large degree societal systems are supported as much by their de-statusized taboos as by their statusized knowledge-reality packages.
There are thus important interacting links regarding knowledge, reality, and status VERSUS human experiencing thresholds.
And this rather automatically leads into considerations about what knowledge and reality do and do not consist of within any given societal system.
Whatever is involved, though, is important with regard to the superpowers of the human biomind, and to any possible activation of them at individual and group levels. To try to point up what is involved in this regards requires a somewhat roundabout approach.
First, during the modernist period the implications of psychical research and parapsychology have been vividly taboo within all of the modern mainstream professions—including, for example, those of science, philosophy, history, archaeology, sociology and psychology.
The taboo embargo has been vigorously extended to include the terminology of Psi research—and so such experiencing descriptors as psychic, telepathy, clairvoyance, etc. are forbidden within those mainstream professions.
This clearly means that none of the forbidden terms (much less their implications) make even a brief appearance in the thousands of mainstream professional papers and reports produced annually.
Indeed, most professionals will not dare to discuss what is involved even in a negative way, since doing so moves them dangerously close to the taboos themselves.
Technically speaking in the societal sense, the inclusive sum of all published papers (and books based on them) is taken as de facto knowledge which is given the status AS knowledge—and which knowledge thereafter serves as THE reality basis regarding, as it were, knowledgeable awareness parameters.
If it is useful, at least in a hypothetical sense, to conceptualize all forms of Psi as particular forms of species-wide experiencing, then the taboo embargo works to prevent and deprive knowledge regarding those particular forms of species-wide experiencing.
It is clearly the case that those particular forms of experiencing obviously involve particular forms of awareness and perceptions.
And so the more clear-cut issue behind the taboo involves societal attempts to cut-back and forbid knowledge regarding those particular forms of awareness, perceptions, and information sensors not only to psychics, but to workers within the mainstream professional fields.
The most obvious implication here is that each individual human specimen as an intelligence-system is to have certain of its inherent information sensors and perceptions demobilized and shut down.
And about the only efficient way to achieve this is by some kind of deliberate societal oversight activity geared to reduce awareness margins in some kind of wholesale way, and which is effective with regard to the societal commune entire. THIS kind of societal oversight clearly qualifies as a kind of mind control (of which there of course exist a number of types.)
The use of the word "deliberate" in the above paragraph might at first seem rather extreme and off the wall. But it is entirely justified IF the tripartite major definitions of TABOO are recalled:
- Set apart as charged with dangerous power, and forbidden to profane [common, ordinary] use or contact
- To restrict use to certain persons, or debar it from ordinary use or treatment, with stress on the privilege
- To forbid, prohibit to the underprivileged
In the sense of the above three definitions, they CANNOT be deployed unless what is to be made taboo is certainly and clearly KNOWN TO EXIST (at least, and most probably, by the so-called "privileged.")
Indeed, it seems quite difficult to see how something that is not known to exist can be incorporated into a taboo—or into any kind of knowledge-reality packages, either.
This is to say, then, that the modernist mainstream taboo regarding Psi awareness margins came into existence because the awareness margins appropriate to Psi were known to exist—with knowledgeable CERTAINTY.
Otherwise, there would have been no need for the tripartite taboo in the first place. [NOTE: If the above would be the case, them among WHOM, where, and when the knowledgeable certainty existed is of some interest. There may be some surprising answers in this regard.]
The foregoing discussions about societal knowledge-reality packages placing forbidden limits on awareness margins, perceptions, and wider experiencing thresholds now needs to be contrasted, or compared, to the following having to do with possible activation of the superpower faculties.
This activation is, of course, taboo within the powerful mainstream sense of it—while the taboo is assisted by appropriate deprivations of knowledge-reality overall.
In the sense of all the foregoing discussions, then, the species-wide superpower faculties have no status among modernist knowledge-reality packages regarding what humans consist of.
The non-status exists because it is taboo determined—and this precisely in the face of knowledge-certainty that the superpower faculties DO exist.
And so this taboo-non-status element must be omitted, removed, or somehow gotten around, in order to provide a picture of the human that excludes the faculties.
The point of the foregoing is that it can easily be shown that the "knowledge" based picture of the human that excludes the faculties consists of three factors that need to be understood and acknowledged as existing that:
- The picture HAS been convincingly erected during the modernist period.
- The resulting picture enjoys enormous group- and mass-mind influence both at the objective knowledge and subjective (psychic?) awareness levels.
- Any expansion of awareness margins that might include contact with the dimensions of the superpower faculties probably will also include contact with (1) and (2) above.
One of the most probable meanings here is that any activation of the superpower faculties would NOT in the first instance merely consist of attempts to widen awareness margins per se.
Indeed, the first instance would rather constitute a defiance of the knowledge-reality package status that works to prohibit activation of the needed awareness margins for possible common use among the "underprivileged," or the not-privileged.
To move briskly onward now, if one excludes any awareness of the elements presented in this essay so far, then the expectations associated with learning and activation of the superpower faculties seems rather straightforward and simple.
In general, the expectations involve three considerations:
- Understanding the nature of the superpowers
- Whether they will be activated at the individual level for common usage by teaching-learning processes
- The degree they might become activated and utilized
This three-part expectation downloads from the teaching-learning concept that if the student (or individual) intellectually learns to understand something, then the student will become mentally enabled to interact with it in some functional way.
This expectation is well-founded with regard to many subjects and topics where intellectual learning is, in some major sense, all that is required.
For example, if one intellectually learns a great deal about biology, then one will become mentally enabled to function within biological knowledge contexts.
In this kind of case, it might be said that one’s awareness margins regarding biological matters were expanded and increased by the intellectual learning. This in turn results in higher stages of conscious mental functioning with regard to the biological matters.
This type of learning is based in the idea that if one intellectually learns a great deal about a given area of interest, then one’s abilities to FUNCTION with respect to it will automatically be enhanced and expanded. Depending on the individual involved, this is entirely possible—except in those cases where powerful societal taboos are encountered.
As discussed (and repeated) elsewhere in these essays concerning the superpowers, this type of intellectual learning has been tremendously successful in the cultural West—to the degree that many assume that it is applicable with regard to learning everything.
However, the best track record substantiating the effectiveness of this kind of learning pertains almost exclusively to outer physical factors, i.e., to dealing with concrete THINGS.
This kind of learning begins to "fail" to the degree one attempts to apply it to inner awareness states and consciousness, and which are fluid-like and hence seldom thinglike in nature.
Before concluding, it is worth establishing that learning about external things via intellectual in-taking of information was entirely compatible with the philosophy (and sciences) of materialism.
Philosophical materialism is defined as "a theory that physical matter is the only reality and that all being and processes and phenomena can be explained as manifestations or results."
After about 1846, this philosophy achieved mainstream dominance in the cultural West, and as such was extended to include modernist mainstream formats of the sciences, the various psychologies, as well as mainstream academia, students’ awareness margins, and the profession of text book compilers and publishers.
One of the factoids being pointed up here is that the approach to knowledge and reality via materialism didn’t really NEED any other format of learning except the one that focused exclusively on intellectual in-take of information regarding material things.
All other possible kinds of learning could therefore be marginalized, declared obsolete, and ultimately vanish from conscious knowledge of them. If those sanitizing options didn’t work too well, then the option of erecting taboos needed to be undertaken.
It is important to establish that the point of the above discussion is not to discredit the very valuable mode of learning via intellectual in-take—but simply to help establish that there are many aspects of knowledge and reality that, so to speak, do not respond to that in-take.
Thus, it is possible to hypothesize that:
- Those aspects require additional or other learning formats.
- Entry into those aspects might not benefit all that much from the intellectualizing teaching-learning formats characteristic of "realities" associated with mainstream materialism.
Various elements pointed up herein will be further elaborated in a subsequent essay entitled MIND MAPS vs THE SUPERPOWERS.
NOTE: For further information regarding EXCEPTIONAL HUMAN EXPERIENCING, see the contributed paper of the same title by Rhea White found elsewhere in this website.