How Visionary is Too Visionary?

Mr Hancocks talk could have been a little less passionate and personal for a TED Talk ... more objective and informational taking into account an audience of broader {less like-minded} viewpoints.

Of course many of us of the same viewpoints could easily relate but for larger public forums maybe more dispassioned objectivity, allowing the audience to come to their own conclusions.

Mr Sheldrake was in fact much more concise and objective, and really should have been allowed to stand as presented.

Eveyone seems to have their own viewpoints as to what is "publically feesible" as far as how it reflects back on the presentation medium.  

Everyone including Reality Sandwich and Evolver should of course have a right to edit out what doesn't suit their particular vision.

Still there should be at least some forum for more open and sheerly "visionary for visionaries sake" discussions and presentation with everyone knowing that they are just for the ecstatic revelation of subjective creative inspiration itself and not meant as direct representations of the more static inertia of the more objective, "so-called" factual relativity.

 

A forum for each context ... for different categories of thought.   TED doesn't have to, or necessarily claim to be the exclusive forum for progressive thought.   

I am sure that there are many presenters who would enjoy both types of forums ... those of more formal bent, for educations sake ... and those of more casual sharing ... of a more personal exploritory type interaction with the audience.

Like the difference between submitting a formal article on Reality Sandwich, and sharing more intimately live at an Evolver spore get together, where one can "let their hair down" a little more.

One often hears things like "don't feed milk to a serpent" ... "don't cast pearls before swine" .. "don't preach to the faithless" etc .. as such can often backfire and cause undue envy and jealousy.

One should likely never reveal more confidential and personal revelation to an audience that is not on such an intimate level with the subject matter ... allowing them to gradually make their own way through the world of conscious, subjective experience.  

Most arguementation on even more progessive forums as this usually comes about when individuals want or expect their personal subjective revelation to trump anothers more objective viewpoint ... as sharing and learning are not necesarily direct parallels. 

So many instances of individuals thinking that their more intimate and confidential realizations will or even "must" be surely reaching another in it's appropriate context just by posting the associated words on a blank screen.

To go from objective acknowledgement to subjective revelation can be a stretch for all of us when dealing with new or foreign subject matter. 

Objective relativity does not require as much conscious participation as subjective conscious revelation does.   

Many people openly say how entheogens are not for everyone and yet there is Graham basically openly promoting such unabashedly in a public forum based mostly only on his personal testimony.

Which again at an Evolver spore, or at a MAP conference such could easily be seen as appropriate, where as on a TED presentation, maybe a little less subjective passionate revelation and a little more objective relativity of comparable facts etc ...   

Of course behind the scenes "think tank" social engineering with political agendas ... how at least some aspect of that influence seems to be everywhere ... well that is a whole 'nother discussion itself.  

If we are to gradually evolve as a whole we are going to have to learn to spoonfeed, a little at a time, the more intimate and confidential wisdom of revelation to the masses, rather than just expect them to dive deeply into what comes to some of us a little more easily.

There is already so much mindless fiction and fantasy going on in mainstream media ... surely a little "out there" philosophical and scientific imaginable possibilities should be made available for all to see "somewhere"... as long as they know of the context and category of the presentations being made.

Both Graham Hancock and Rupert Sheldrake are heretics at the leading edges of their fields.

 Today's heretics are often tomorrow's geniuses. The difficulty is with finding adequate support to keep on going when one is at the forefront of the evolution of human consciousness and/or understanding.

 I'm thankful both men continue to pursue their passions and offer their ideas into the collective. Just because Ted doesn't appreciate what they bring, doesn't mean it isn't appreciated! 

TED is just dumb. I have not watched these particular talks, but the idea that TED is banning things for being "unscientific" is quite something. I've watched a handful of TED talks and found most of them just about unbearable, mostly because there is an air of quasi-religious worship of "science" (often either weak, scientifically, or trivial and puffed up), technology (in which I include social and emotional "technologies"), and unbridled boosterism for oh golly just how smart and enlightened and world-problem-solving the speakers are. An awful lot of it is just flashy fluff, and even where there is substance there's something about the context that I find unbearable. So why worry about being rejected by idiots?

Why does it seem to be so hard for some people to make up their own minds about what they hear and see? Why are there always people screaming for a ruling body to set the standards for them? To me it's another example that most people never seem to outgrow the toddler consciousness...

I have been following the controversy around Graham Hancock and Rupert Sheldrake’s recent TedX talks, which got removed from the official TedX site, with the suggestion that what they present may be considered “pseudo-science.” I am a friend of Graham’s and believe he plays an important role in the ongoing consciousness movement. Recently, I have especially enjoyed hearing him speak out against the War on Drugs as a war on consciousness and human freedom. He boldly and courageously advocates that adults should have the freedom to determine their own state of consciousness – I agree with his position. Therefore, it is a bit unfortunate that I have to say I don’t entirely disagree with Ted in their decision on Graham’s talk. I think that Graham could have said everything that he wanted to say, and avoided this “censorship,” if he had considered his rhetorical approach with more care. Ted most definitely belongs to the “Church of Science”– but there is no reason that the ideas Graham presents can’t be allowed in, as long as he is careful to avoid overstepping logic and making category errors. He could have been more strategic, in other words. From reviewing Ted talks, he should have realized that discussions of the soul, or directly anthropomorphizing “Mother Ayahuasca,” might raise concern. He could have stated the same ideas but more objectively, quoting from Shannon’s book on the phenomenology of the ayahuasca experience, for instance. I think Graham has a slight tendency to be expressive and sensationalist – for instance, Fingerprints of the Gods seemed to predict a literal destruction event on December 21, 2012. Graham has never offered much in the way of clarification or reconsideration – and that book with its sensationalist theme was a bestseller around the world, making his name. Graham’s impassioned and emotional engagement with his subject is great in a way, yet at the same time if these ideas are going to reach beyond the choir, they need to be presented in a way that meshes with the worldview of the wider, secular audience. He makes me flinch a bit when he makes somewhat simplistic statements – such as “We hate visionary states in our society.” A more nuanced and effective way to say this would be to point toward the Inquisition and its targeting of ancient plant knowledge in the West, combined with the Colonialist assaults on indigenous and shamanic cultures – leading up to the legal repression and cultural demonization of psychedelic substances since the 1960s. Some visionary states are accepted - consider Christian Pentacostals - just not the kind that he believes we need. I have less understanding as to why Ted removed Rupert Sheldrake’s talk, which I found quite strong. Perhaps in this case there is a situation of an old paradigm, in the sense that Thomas Kuhn described, starting to run up against a new paradigm which it cannot yet understand or integrate. I thought that Sheldrake noted his “morphic resonance” idea was a theory, not something proven, and I don’t understand why you can’t speak about any theory, as I have seen many TED Talks on ideas that are not yet demonstrated. Sheldrake was definitely provocative in his opening statements, noting that the sciences today “are wholly owned subsidiaries of the materialist worldview.” (I found myself agreeing with this, but now writing it, I wonder about it: Even if thoughts or memories are not physically localized and not even stored in the brain, wouldn’t they still be “material” in some way? I am interested in the distinction between “substance” and “material” and perhaps it helps to conceive of immaterial things as having substance also? Is a pattern or a matrix substantial rather than material?). What is exciting is that the worldview of materialist science and the worldview that seeks to expand the boundaries of materialism to encompass the psychic, psycho-technical, and perhaps eventually the spiritual are now clearly on a collision course. Eventually we will need a conference or series of teaching and learning events that fully develop a new vocabulary and syntax for exploring the science of consciousness, and bridging the differences.

This column at Reality Sandwich was the first place where I read about this. Then, Red Ice Creations linked to this article.

I think you changed the TED talk's position on censoring these speakers by shining a spotlight on what happened.

We can't let people be censored. This was an affront to the dignity of Graham Hanckock and Rupert Sheldrake for them to be censored. I have had my misgivings with the TED talks for quite some time, but this really clinched it for me.

If you disagree with someone, you make your position known and perhaps debate them, but you do not attempt to silence them. TED tried to silence these thinkers and that was an injustice.