Shall I explore some more biology or go back into cognition? Cognition.

You are right. The world around you doesn’t dictate what you think. You are in total control. It doesn’t have to dictate what you think, any idea will do. For the purpose of blue magick the exact content doesn’t matter. The world around you controls how you think, and therefore it does control what you believe no matter what ideas you entertain to tell yourself otherwise. This sounds crazy, no?

A little bit.

Example. The popularly held beliefs in your community. Whenever someone expresses an inflammatory belief around you, it causes stress. You instinctively want to return to rest, so your brain wants to find some way it can accept that information which it does not distinguish from accepting the person present. Agreement means you can feel safe.

I instinctively want to argue, but I’ve learned to repress that urge. You instinctively want to argue because your sense of how you think feels threatened.

So as wild and controversial as things are in society today, this means most people adopt a generalized apathy. Not consciously, conscious choice doesn’t matter. To feel safe, your brain and body have convinced you that your reaction doesn’t matter. It reminds you each time you are challenged that the idea doesn’t matter. This is why they say familiarity breeds contempt, and we experience the most contempt for our own ideas. The artist is always their own worst critic. The list of observations is rather long. Are they invalid or just a cultural fad?

You believe that things are as they are and there is nothing you can do about it as much as you entertain high minded ideas and fantasize about world change. But why do you believe as you do? Why didn’t you choose?

If you really believe a thing you will act on it. Implicate memory and belief are the drives behind spontaneous behaviour. They are what emerges when you suffer a loss of impulse control. They have even discovered this to be true while people are intoxicated. If they took you while drunk and put you under a FMRI, what they see is a pattern not of changed brain behaviour, but of restricted behaviour, a form of cognitive myopathy. In vino veritas is a true principle to the degree that it reveals what you honestly believe.

People become more themselves while drunk, not less themselves. This idea that you are not responsible for your actions if you are drunk is complete nonsense. I have seen a great deal of cruelty and sadism in those moments, and it is true. Just as the idea that you can’t help what you feel is nonsense, what the truth is, is that we are not shown how to do anything but function as mental automatons. We are largely not self aware. This is why it’s such a popular notion in neuroscience and psychology, but is behaviour literal truth? Are you nothing more than what you do?

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~