The Dhamma is not just one way of thinking amongst others

 

There are several new references to, and quotations from, Bradley. I had already referred to him in Anicca [a] without having read him, and merely on the strength of what others have said about him.

But now I am actually in the course of reading his Principles of Logic, and I find that the reference was fully justified. It is satisfactory (and satisfying) to find someone else who has had the same thoughts (within limits, naturally) as oneself, particularly after the singularly depress-ing experience of reading some of the more recent English philoso-phers (Bertrand Russell & Co.). Bradley’s idealism won’t do, of course; but it is incomparably better than the current realism.

I am always pleased when I find a connexion between the Suttas and outside philosophies: it is not, to be sure, that the former can be reduced to the latter—the Dhamma is not just one way of thinking amongst others—, but rather that the Buddha has seen all that these philosophers have seen, and he has also seen what they could not see; and to discover this is extraordinarily exhilarating. Nobody can say to the Buddha, ‘There is this or that that you have not taken into account’: it is all taken into account, and still more. The Suttas give not the slightest pretext for the famous Sacrifice of the Intellect— Ignatius Loyola and Bodhidharma are strange bedfellows, indeed.

Certainly there is more to the Dhamma than intellect (and this is sometimes hard for Europeans to understand), but there is nothing to justify the wilful abandonment of the Principle of Identity.

People, mostly, seem to be finding it difficult to make very much of the Notes (I, too, find it difficult sometimes, so I cannot say that I am astonished). The university professors who have had copies are silent except one from America who (very politely) attributes their unintelligibility to his ignorance of Pali, but whether this excuses me or him is not quite clear. Few bhikkhus have had copies, but one has remarked that ‘they contain a lot of mistakes’—which, from the traditional point of view, is quite true. This would probably be the opinion of the great majority, who, however, would perhaps add that, in a foreigner, it is excusable.

Laymen here are sometimes interested, and at all events not hostile (except for one, who has been provoked to a fit of indiscriminate xenophobic fury, embracing Dahlke and the Ven. Nyānatiloka Mahāthera as well as myself—also strange bedfellows!).

Expressions of approval have come from Germany and ‘Les Amis du Bouddhisme’ of Paris, I am pleased to learn, are enthusiastic. About thirty copies went to England, but (apart from a bare acknowledgement from Nottingham, and a brief note from a personal acquaintance) yours has been the only comment we have received. Of course, it is not easy to know to whom to send, and the choice of addresses is largely a matter of chance.
**
The Principle (or Law) of Identity is usually stated as ‘A is A’, which can be understood as ‘Everything is what it is’. Bradley (PL, Ch. V, p.141) remarks that, in this form, it is a tautology and says nothing at all.

It does not even assert identity. For identity without difference is nothing at all. It takes two to make the same, and the least we can have is some change of event in a self-same thing, or the return to that thing from some suggested difference. For, otherwise, to say “it is the same as itself” would be quite unmeaning.

Stebbing (MIL, p. 470) says:

The traditional interpretation of the law is metaphysical. If “A” be regarded as symbolizing a subject of attributes, then the formula may be interpreted as expressing the permanence of substance, or the persisting of something through change.

The second paragraph of Attā says, in effect, that the Principle of Identity—taken, that is, with Bradley’s qualification that there must be ‘some change of event’ to make it meaningful—is no less valid in the Dhamma than it is everywhere else. Acceptance of this Principle (as you will see also from the Stebbing quotation and from my further treatment in Anicca, Paticcasamuppāda [c], & Fundamental Structure) means rejection of the popular notion that ‘impermanence’ in the Dhamma means ‘universal flux’. With the rejection of this notion we come to see that the question of anattā can deal, not with the self-identity of things, but only with ‘self’ as the subject (‘I’, ‘myself’ etc.).

But if one starts off sacrificing the intellect by assuming that the anattā teaching is denial of the Principle of Identity, then at once there is chaos.

In referring to Loyola and Bodhidharma in my last letter, I had in mind two ‘wilful abandonments of the Principle of Identity’.
(i) Loyola: ‘In order never to go astray, we must always be ready to believe that what I, personally, see as white is black, if the hierarchical Church defines it so.’ (ii) Bodhidharma (or, rather, a modern disciple of his, in an article—‘Mysticism & Zen’, I think—in The Middle Way1): ‘The basic principle of Zen is “A is not A”.’ (Note, in parenthesis, that once people start denying the Principle of Identity the question may arise whether the bare statement ‘A is A’ is quite as meaningless as Bradley supposes. A lot has been made in modern French writing, philosophical as well as literary, of Audiberti’s imaginative phrase la noirceur secrète du lait;● and this suggests that it may not be altogether meaningless to assert the contrary, ‘white is white’. This might perhaps seem trivial, except that a great deal of modern thinking—including mathematics—is based on a deliberate rejection of one or another of the Laws of Thought, of which Identity is the first. This may be all very well in poetry or physics, but it won’t do in philosophy—I mean as a fundamental principle. Every ambiguity, for a philosopher, should be a sign that he has further to go.)

● Audiberti: the secret blackness of milk. [Jacques Audiberti— 1899-1965—was a French poet, playwright, and novelist noted for his extravagance of language.]
**
This ‘sacrifice of the intellect’, which Saint Ignatius Loyola says is ‘so pleasing unto God’, is required also, incidentally, of the quantum physicist: he has to subscribe to the proposition that there are numbers that are not quantities. It is not, however, required of the follower of the Buddha, whose saddhā—trust or confidence—is something like that of the patient in his doctor. The patient accepts on trust that the doctor knows more about his complaint than he himself does, and he submits himself to the doctor’s treat-ment. So far, indeed, from saying to his disciples ‘You must accept on trust from me that black is white’, the Buddha actually says, in effect, ‘What you must accept on trust from me is that you yourselves are unwittingly assuming that black is white, and that this is the reason for your suffering’.
**
black is white: Cf. Bhayabherava Sutta <M. 4: i,21>: ‘There are, divine, some recluses and divines who perceive day when it is night and who perceive night when it is day. Those recluses and divines dwell confused, I say. I, divine, perceive night just as night; I perceive day just as day….’
**
The notion of two successive ‘moments’, A and B, as akālika or non-temporal is a confusion. Either A and B are simultaneous (as e.g. viññàõa and nāmarūpa), in which case they are indeed akālika; or B follows A and they are successive (as e.g. the in-&-out-breaths), in which case they are kālika. Even if there is no interval of time between the ending of A and the beginning of B, it remains true that B comes after A, and time is still involved. The source of the confusion is in the contradictory idea of a moment as the smallest possible interval of time—i.e. as absolute shortness of time—, and therefore as no time. Two successive moments are, thus, also no time: 0 + 0 = 0. This is nothing but a mystification: it is like the notion of ‘absolute smallness of size’ in quantum theory (Dirac, op. cit., pp. 3-4), introduced to compensate for other philosophically unjustifiable assump-tions made elsewhere. (Quantum theory, of course, being an elaborate and ingenious rule of thumb, does not require philosophical justification; but ipso facto it provides no foundation for philosophy .) To the idea of a ‘moment’ as the shortest empirically observable interval of time there is no objection; but this merely marks the threshold below which changes are too small and rapid to be clearly apprehended as discontinuous and are grasped irrationally and ambiguously as a flux. What it does not mark is the boundary between kālika and akālika. See Paticcasamuppàda [c]. A different approach to this whole question is outlined in Fundamental Structure.
Nanavira Thera
***
Electrons, protons, neutrons are all conjecture, they are invented in the human mind and given as technical explanations for the elemental phenomena of fire, air, earth and water.

Quantum particles are mathematical in nature, they do not exist outside of the imaginal realm of concepts and ideals, they are not part of creation, they are not things in nature, they are hypothetical, unobservable and cannot be isolated or used to build anything.

To clarify, earthen materials do break down into grains of varying shapes and sizes which can be viewed under a microscope (like salt cubes and sand), and there are repeating geometric harmonic structures in crystals which give them their colour and form, interacting with specific wavelengths of light, but the fact is that the power contained in the substance is diminished at smaller and smaller scales. When it comes to matter, less is actually less.

Atomists however will contend that somehow the power gets greater as we venture into the tiniest of tiny realms, beyond the micro and nano and into the pico-, femto- and atto-meter scale of reality, way down there is an untapped source of world-destroying power locked up in the centre of the most infinitesimal corpuscular units.

Under the guise of an enlightened new perspective, atomism has subverted scientific thought over the last few centuries, normalising the belief that ‘everything is made from atoms’, and by the 19th century it incorporated with Darwinism into the belief that ‘everything is made by atoms’. In this worldview, the Atom has replaced the Adam as the origin of man, and has replaced God as the creator of all things. As such it became the focal point of all physical, metaphysical and political power in the 20th century, it changed how we view the universe and even how we view our selves. In this brave new world of the Atomic Age, we're all just a bunch of atoms bumbling around in space.

Nobody has ever really seen an atom though, as they’re way way beyond the range of senses, and there is this deep philosophical problem about the impossibility of effective  observation at the quantum level (‘the observation paradox’), but nevertheless we’re told that atoms hold massive amounts of ‘nuclear energy’ concentrated in their centre, as well as the ability to self-organise into molecules and complex lifeforms, giving rise to all known life, the human race and the entire universe as we know it without any need of an intelligent creator. The atomists have endowed the atom with the attributes of the divine, like a pagan idol, a humanist icon, an abstract mental concept to replace God, allowing the believer to discard any fears about judgement or morality.

A Fool’s Wisdom
Science Conspiracies & The Secret Art of Alchemy
Steven A. Young

Flat Earth or conspiracy theories as a spiritual exercise

A Lesson in Humility

Alchemists stress the importance of humility, because a humble mind is always ready to receive higher truth. If we cling pridefully to false knowledge then truth will flee from us, we must always be ready and willing to have our worldview transformed into something greater and more illumined. We must be able to discern between the true light and the false light, to follow the golden thread.

Back in 2002, my PhD supervisor, a senior professor, told me a story which always stuck with me. There was an international nuclear physics conference back in the 1980s, where all the world’s top researchers gathered annually to share their work. One of the guests of honour was an old professor who had spent his entire career developing an exciting new theory of the structure of the atomic nucleus.
Everyone admired him and was familiar with his work, he was a legend in the international theoretical nuclear physics scene.

During the conference, a young post-doc, fresh out of his PhD and still wet behind the ears, got up on stage to deliver his presentation. In it, he systematically debunked and disproved the professors theory, using sound scientific methodology and reasoning, demonstrating that it could never happen as it was physically and logically impossible.
He showed this beyond any doubt, revealing that the professor had spent his whole life promoting a theory which was inherently flawed and just plain wrong. The professor stood up from his seat, walked down the isle, got up onto the stage and reached out and shook the post-doc’s hand, saying “Thank you, now I know the truth’.

This story is a lesson in humility, and a reminder to all intellectuals that truth should always be the goal, we must be prepared to let go of our beliefs and admit fault the moment we become aware of it, even if we have spent our whole life working on it, its the honourable way.

It can be difficult. embarrassing, humiliating even, as our ego gets attached to the wrong ideas, we may even be successful and financially dependent on perpetuating them. Nobody likes to publicly admit they were wrong, it is vulnerable, a form of surrender, a humbling. Humility is the opposite of pride, its what makes an apology a real apology.
If this professor were full of pride, he would kick and scream and launch ad-hominem attacks, demanding that the post-doc be cast out from the conference and stripped of his honours for daring to question authority.

Pride puts ego above truth, humility puts truth above ego. At its most extreme, pride can completely block people from the truth that is right in front of their noses, it’s a form of spiritual blindness and a back-door for demonic influences to enter the mind and take over. Alchemical texts and religious scriptures are replete with warnings about the consequences of pride.

Whereas, humility is said to be a precursor for receiving higher knowledge and for effective healing and prayer, it’s a key component of spiritual development. We must be able to humble ourselves before the eternal truth of the universe, or we are destined to live out our lives in darkness, believing in fables and pseudo-science.

**

I first heard of ‘flat earth’ around 1999, playing the Stephen Jackson Illuminati card game with some friends at university. The cards each represent human groups with different special interests, and on the card for ‘Flat Earthers’ it says “People laugh, but flat earthers know something”.
Of course, my student friends and I all laughed at the idea of people who believe the earth is flat, how could they be so stuck in the past? I kinda dismissed it as a weird joke, and after that I didn’t think about it again for many years.
During 2015-2016 it popped up a number of times online, and eventually by recommendation from a friend, so I decided to see what it actually is these people believe.
I expected it to be some weird cultish thing like scientology, but what I found was just solid, verifiable scientific research that calls into question many of the theories we are taught about our world. For the most part there was no nonsense at all, just straight-shooting facts and hard questions that are thought provoking and irrefutable. As someone coming from a scientific background, I was well impressed by how meticulous and well-reasoned the flat earth research was, it was a breath of fresh air to see the scientific method being used so effectively. I couldn’t understand why I hadn’t learned any of this in university, it’s really fundamental stuff. It took a few months of watching presentations and doing experiments and having many heated conversations with people, but eventually I came to a place of 100% knowing that our world is not a planet spinning through space. I may not know 100% what it is, but I know 100% what it is not, and it’s not a spinning ball. The Illuminati cards were right, flat earthers do know something.

The process of conversion is a one-way street, nobody ever goes back to believing in the ball, there are no ‘ex-flat-earthers’ as far as I know, because there is actually no reason to believe you are spinning once you know that you are not. But how does one get to a place of knowing such a thing?

Well, start by asking yourself, how do you know that you're on a spinning ball flying through space? You have to set about trying to prove the globe, something that seems like it should be quite an easy task (especially for a boffin such as myself) but it turns out is actually quite impossible.

Many will tell you the same story, becoming a ‘flat earther’ is the result of having tried to prove the globe and failed. The irony is flat earthers are treated as the most stupid people in society, a proper fool in the negative sense, a symbol of ignorance, madness and wrong-think, a group of people not even worth listening to. The globe is so entrenched in the collective consciousness that it is generally deemed to be an unquestionable fact of reality.

To do the work it requires a position of neutrality, no attachment to any particular outcome, just simply to look at all the evidence for and against the spinning ball earth.
In doing this we have to be comfortable being ‘the fool’, people will call you a fool for even looking into it, so we must be open minded, curious, humble, and ready to have our worldview challenged.

Going in with a hard head and a zealous attachment to the globe will get you nowhere. Eventually, once the various proofs are understood, and the beliefs and assumptions of the globe model have been overcome from every conceivable angle, it all just clicks into place.

I remember vividly the day I realised I wasn’t spinning through space, it was the most profound awakening of my
life, a true enlightenment experience, a new dawn, finally getting ‘out of the mind’ and ‘coming to the senses’. The globe earth is often called the mother of all conspiracies, and for good reason, it’s a conspiracy about the nature of our mother, Earth! And when you internalise this it is like a master key that makes all other conspiracies very transparent and easy to spot.

The topic has been presented and debated very thoroughly for a long time now, there are literally hundreds of verifiable scientific experiments to consider’ and some amazing resources and dedicated people’ devoted to giving you all the best information on every question you might have.

In general it is a topic best discussed by video presentation, since the globe is largely an image promulgated through the medium of video. However, if you really wish to try and prove the existence of the globe for yourself, let me save you some time, there are only two tests that really matter:

1) proof of spinning,
2) proof of curved horizon.

Here’s the catch: you can’t use images from NASA as your ‘proof’ because NASA has been shown to be a fraudulent organisation that lies to the world and fabricates fake imagery, many times over. Plus, it’s unscientific and logical fallacy to ‘appeal to authority’, you have to prove it using the scientific method, techniques that can be repeated by independent people. All NASA imagery is unverifiable and unfalsifiable, so it’s useless as evidence for anything (the ‘space program’ will be covered in the next chapter).

When I set about trying to prove this back in 2016, I thought it would be child’s play, with my trusty PhD and advanced mathematical skills, and since I was flying ‘around the globe’ in planes all the time, I could undoubtedly prove it, easily! But the more I looked and the harder I tried, I just couldn’t, I searched for globe evidence every single day for many years, it was an obsession, I kept thinking maybe there was something I overlooked, some test that proves it, I soured many relationships due to broaching the subject, and I followed the debate online closely, but I have never found a single reason to believe in the globe in all the years since. The case for the globe gets weaker with each passing year, while ‘flat earthers’ grow in number constantly.

What’s clear is that academics don’t engage with it on a sincere level, they either completely ignore it, or use ad-hominem attacks to slander and belittle the researchers, as if the whole topic is beneath them, an insult to their intellect, a conversation not worth having. This is intellectual bypassing, they just block you and smear you and carry on as normal.
From 2015 through to 2018, a golden era for the free flow of information online, almost every single day I found more reasons to doubt the globe model of earth, and almost every time I tried to talk to someone about it, I was shutdown, dismissed as a fool.

I eventually opted to keep it out of social conversation as it’s far too much of a thankless labour trying to re-educate people in cosmology during the short windows of time we have together, especially when most don’t even want to learn. All the alchemy texts I was reading warned against trying to share higher knowledge with people who are not ready or willing for it, plus I felt like there was no reason why anyone would believe me, in the eyes of the world I was a professional fool, not a serious scientist.

Nevertheless, I knew in my heart of hearts that the globe is a lie, I could find no real evidence for the existence of this giant spinning ball we call “planet earth”, and all the theories it was based upon were crumbling under scrutiny, it became clear as day that the whole thing is very a clever fabrication.

Steven A. Young
Science Conspiracies & The Secret Art of Alchemy

***
Photograph of Chicago taken by Joshua Nowicki, as he stood at Grand Mere Park, Michigan, 57 miles away.
If the earth were a globe Chicago would be below the horizon. The only way that Chicago could be seen from the western shore of Michigan is if the world is flat. Below is a map showing the 57 mile distance across lake Michigan from Grand Mere Park, Michigan to Chicago, Illinois.

Let us calculate the position of Chicago in relation to Grand Mere Park, assuming that the earth were a globe. Grand Mere Park is 600 feet above sea level. Lake Michigan is 577 feet above sea level. Therefore, Grand Mere Park is 23 feet above Lake Michigan (600 − 577 = 23). Let’s assume that the photographer was at the highest point in Grand Mere Park. We will add six feet for the height of the photographer. We come up with an estimate that the camera was, at most, 29 feet above the level of the water on Lake Michigan (23 + 6 = 29). We will subtract seven miles from the distance of 57 miles to account for the 29 foot elevation of the camera above Lake Michigan (29 foot drop to horizon = approximately 6.6 miles, which is rounded up to 7 miles) (29 feet = 6.62  × 8 inches).

Calculating the curvature of the earth using the 50 mile distance, we find that the street level of Chicago should be 1,644 feet below the horizon. The tallest building in the picture is the Sears Tower (it has been recently renamed the Willis Tower). The Sears Tower was, from 1974 to 1998, the tallest building in the world. It stands 1,450 feet above the street. However, the antennae on top of the tower brings the total height to 1,729 feet above the street level. In coming up with the 1,644 feet drop below the horizon, it must be understood that it was necessary to subtract 23 feet from the total drop of 1,667 feet (502 × 8 inches = 1,667 feet) to account for the fact that the Sears Tower is 23 feet above the level of Lake Michigan. The Sears Tower is 595 feet above sea level. Lake Michigan is 577 feet above sea level. That puts the Sears Tower 23 feet above Lake Michigan. Therefore, the base of the Sears Tower would be 1,644 feet below the horizon (1,667 − 23 = 1644). That means that if the earth were a globe, none of the buildings, including the Sears Tower, would be visible. They would all be below the horizon. The top of the Sears Tower would be 194 feet below the horizon (1,644 − 1,450 = 194). The only thing that would be visible in the entire Chicago skyline would be the uppermost 85 feet of the antennae on the top of the Sears Tower.
In fact, however, the entire Sears Tower and all of the other buildings along the shore in Chicago can be seen in the Nowicki photograph. (...)

Joshua Nowicki’s photograph created such a sensation that it was necessary for the media powers to explain how Chicago could be seen from the Michigan shore, 57 miles away, which is an impossibility if the earth were a globe. Tom Coomes, a weatherman for ABC News argued that it was impossible to actually see Chicago from 57 miles away. Coomes stated that “Chicago is beyond the horizon; you should not be able to see it.”47 However, it can be seen; it is clearly revealed in Joshua Nowicki’s photograph. How does Coomes explain this apparent impossibility? Coomes explained away Nowicki’s photograph by averring that the Chicago skyline wasn’t really there at all.48 He claimed that Nowicki’s picture was depicting what is called a “superior mirage.” Coomes showed an amazing display of self control, as he kept a straight face throughout his ridiculous explanation.

The problem with Coomes’ explanation is that a superior mirage is a mirage of an object that is usually inverted above the actual object. Sjaak Slanina explains that “[a] superior mirage occurs when an image of an object appears above the actual object.”49 The drawing below is from the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) and illustrates the inversion of a superior mirage. (...)

Mountains of Proof

Jon McIntyre was troubled by the evidence of the flat earth and simply could not bring himself to accept that such a massive conspiracy to hide the very nature of the earth could exist. He came up with an ingenious way to determine, once and for all, whether the earth was a sphere or flat. He concluded that if the earth were flat then two equally high mountains separated by many miles would appear to the observer to be the same height if the observer was stationed at a vantage point that was equal in height to the peak of the two mountain tops.

All he needed to do was to move perpendicular to the alignment of the mountains, thus creating a parallax between the mountains, and he could then see both mountains side-by-side. If, however, the earth were a globe, then the more distant mountain top would drop below the height of the nearer mountain top by the distance in miles squared multiplied by eight inches (miles2 × 8 inches = distance of drop on the supposed spherical earth).

McIntyre searched and found three mountains that met his criteria. The three mountains were found in the Black Mountain Range in North Carolina. He positioned himself with his camera at an elevation of 5,385 feet on the ridge of Tennent Mountain. He then trained his camera at Fryingpan Mountain, six (6) miles in the distance from his position on the ridge at Tennent Mountain. The peak of Fryingpan Mountain has an elevation of approximately 5,380 feet above sea level. Thirty four (34) miles beyond Fryingpan Mountain was Graybeard Mountain, with an elevation of approximately 5,395 feet.

McIntyre’s position was to the side of Fryingpan Mountain, which created a parallax between it and Graybeard Mountain. This allowed him to view both the mountains juxtaposed to one another, although they were separated by 34 miles. He discovered that in fact the mountain tops were almost the same height, just as indicated by their official reported elevations.

If the earth were a globe, then the curvature of the earth would cause Graybeard Mountain to drop 770 feet and be out of the sight of the observer. But that is not what we see.

Such a configuration as depicted in McIntyre’s photograph would be impossible on a spherical earth. His picture is compelling evidence that the earth is flat.

It should be noted that McIntyre is not a believer in the flat earth. The most he can bring himself to say on the issue of whether the earth is flat is: “I don't know.” But he cannot otherwise explain the phenomenon of the mountain peaks being the same height in relation to one another as officially reported, although they are separated by 34 miles. He states that he can “find no way to interpret this data other than to say that it clearly supports the conclusion that the earth is flat.” Yet, he cannot bring himself to believe it. The implications for him are just too disturbing.

This shot I find to be completely bizarre. Do I believe that the earth flat? That’s a big leap to make. A really big leap to actually believe in a conspiracy theory of that size. It is craziness! But what am I supposed to do with this evidence? I don’t really know. Honestly, I don’t really know.

But I felt compelled to make this video. I felt compelled to collect irrefutable evidence one way or the other, so I could end the internal debate I was having about it and answer the questions I was having regarding flat earth, because I did find the debate interesting.87

It seems that McIntyre finds the evidence in his experiment that proves that the earth is flat to be compelling. He put a lot of work and study into conducting his experiment, but when the results pointed clearly and irrefutably toward a flat earth, McIntyre could not fully believe that the earth is flat. To do so would be to make “a really big leap to actually believe in a conspiracy theory of that size.” He has been thoroughly conditioned to ignore his senses and view the results of his test as “craziness” no matter how convincing is the evidence. McIntyre admits that, although the evidence in his experiment is compelling proof that the earth is flat, he cannot bring himself to accept it, because he cannot overcome his conditioning from “a lifetime of being told that I live on a globe flying through space.”

My love of truth and love of the pursuit of truth compelled me to conduct this experiment and produce this video. I find the evidence I collected to be very convincing. In fact I find no way to interpret this data other than to say that it clearly supports the conclusion that the earth is flat. Yet if you were to ask me if I believe the earth is flat my answer would be “I don't know” because at this point I truly do not know what I believe. I am fully aware of what this evidence is pointing to and yet my mind seems unable to firmly settle on the belief that the earth is flat. Maybe this is due to a lifetime of being told that I live on a globe flying through space.88

McIntyre’s video and photographic proof of a flat earth has been attacked by deceptive debunkers.

They use sophistry, obfuscation, and lies to confuse readers and conceal the truth of the flat earth. One example is the purported debunking website, Metabunk.com, which was so full of errors and misrepresentations that McIntyre called the deceptive posters: “liars.” The whole purpose of the heliocentric posters is to deceive the unwary and ignorant who the posting charlatans know will not truly dig into the details. It is an age-old strategy of befuddling people with misleading details so they will just throw up their hands in frustration and reject the otherwise convincing evidence that would upset the mythology of the status quo.

Below is a quote from McIntyre about the supposed debunking of his video on the forum at Metabunk.com. Keep in mind when reading McIntyre’s reaction to the deceptive posts that he, to this day, does not accept that the earth is flat. That means he agrees with the viewpoint of the debunkers that the earth is a sphere, but he nonetheless calls them liars. He calls them liars, because he knows his facts and understands how they are twisting the evidence to mislead others. McIntyre will not tolerate misrepresentations of the evidence. McIntyre strives to find and accurately report the truth and will not allow his work to be maligned by liars who have an agenda to deceive people into believing that the earth is a sphere; even though he, himself, believes the earth is a sphere. Indeed, he pulls no punches and describes the so-called debunkers as “liars.”89 McIntyre states:

Look, this is exactly what I'm not going to deal with. I spent many, many days hiking around those mountains trying to locate the perfect position to get the shot. The whole entire time I was intermittently seeing Fryingpan and Graybeard.

And I've been up there probably more than twenty times since and I still see them all of the time. I hike over Tennent regularly. Guess what? I see Fryingpan and Graybeard and they look exactly the same as in my shot because guess what??? They are the same mountains. How in the world do I go up there and spend all of this time up there and hike all of these mountains. I've been to the top of all of these peaks. I know these peaks. I see them all the time. And then somehow when I need to find a shot on my line of sight and at the right elevation I suddenly forget what they look like.

I quite seriously do not appreciate this. Not you bringing this to my attention but a liar lying and the trying to force me in some way to pay attention to these lies as though they are worthy of attention.

The assertions by that page you sent me are.... I don't know... absurd, outright lies, inanity. I verified those peaks. I live near those peaks. I hike those peaks. I was directly on that line which is obvious to anyone who can think because it looks exactly like the image on Peakfinder.

Furthermore, just take a look at the mountain range in the distance that includes Graybeard. LOOK AT IT. To the left of Bald Knob you sea steady incline all the way up to the hogback of Mount Mitchell.

It's obvious. Look at it. then look at Peakfinder and examine the way it looks. That ridge of mountains is unique and completely identifiable to anyone willing to think.
I hike up there all the time. I drive up the Blue Ridge Parkway all of the time. And I've hiked down the ridge to Graybeard from the road. When I'm driving up the Blueridge I have Mt. Mitchell on my left and I'm looking to the right and guess what I see... to the furthest left: Graybeard, slightly closer: Pinnacle, then even closer: Bald Knob. I've sat on top of those peaks. I know them. I've hiked that trail and been up there. I've used my topo maps for navigation. I've seen them from multiple angles and multiple mountain tops.

... I hate liars. I've seen those peaks from many angles and and made sure to be thorough and yet I have some guy making up lies about me and my test. Look, you are free to read that trash and believe it. You are being lied to. [If] you bring it to my video again, sincere or not, I [will] delete [your] comments and I [will] block you.

Why? Very simple. I will not allow lies and deception to be promoted along with my video on my channel. I won't have it. I'm done. Bring legitimate, honest debunking to my comments or don't bring anything. Stop being lazy.

Go to Peakfinder. Take a look at how that mountain range looks and then watch my video. It is obviously the same mountain range. I should not have to spend my time explaining something to you that is so completely obvious. Instead of checking with me to see if some debunker has made a point just go spend an hour and look for yourself. It is easy. And you will see they are lying.90

McIntyre’s tirade against the liars on Metabunk would also apply to Jesse Kozlowski, who portrays himself as an expert in land surveying. Kozlowski states that he has been land surveying for many decades. Jesse Kozlowski has posted videos and other information on the internet that he alleges proves that McIntyre was wrong and that the earth is a globe. Kozlowski was first introduced to this author by Dr. Jim Fetzer. Dr. Fetzer is professor emeritus of the philosophy of science at the University of Minnesota Duluth, who believes the earth is a spinning sphere. Dr. Fetzer engaged in an email discussion with True Ott, Alex Studer, and this author about flat earth. Dr. Fetzer explained his view of the flat earth thusly:
As a professional philosopher, I offered courses in epistemology and the philosophy of science as well as in logic and critical thinking. My first book, SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE (1981), focuses on the nature of scientific knowledge. The belief in a flat Earth is a manifest absurdity in contradiction to thousands of years of scientific research.91

Dr. Fetzer followed up that email by calling upon Jesse Kozlowski as one of his experts to address the evidence with which Ott, Studer, and this author had presented Fetzer that proved the earth was flat. Dr. Fetzer introduced him as “the brilliant Jesse Kozlowski.”92 So, here we have an eminent professor in turn bringing forth his “brilliant” expert to once-and-for-all put to rest the flat earth nonsense. Let us examine the effort closely, because the refutation of their evidence does nothing but prove the earth is flat. (...)

The Greatest Lie on Earth
Proof That Our World Is Not a Moving Globe
Edward Hendrie

[One bhikkhu introduced me to the idea, which previously was ignored by me. Indeed, things aren't as simple as I thought, good exercise in thinking against acquired set of assumptions]. But one should remember the Sutta:

“Now recluses and brahmins of the third kind reckoned thus: ‘Those recluses and brahmins of the first kind, by acting as they did without precaution, failed to get free from Māra’s power and control. Those recluses and brahmins of the second kind, by reckoning how the recluses and brahmins of the first kind had failed, and then planning and acting as they did with the precaution of going to live in the forest wilds, also failed to get free from Māra’s power and control. Suppose we make our dwelling place within range of that bait that Māra has laid down and those material things of the world. Then, having done so, we shall eat food not unwarily and without going right in amongst the bait that Māra has laid down and the material things of the world. By doing so we shall not become intoxicated; when we are not intoxicated, we shall not fall into negligence; when we are not negligent, Māra shall not do with us as he likes on account of that bait and those material things of the world.’ And they did so.

“But then they came to hold views such as ‘the world is eternal’ and ‘the world is not eternal’ and ‘the world is finite’ and ‘the world is infinite’ and ‘the soul and the body are the same’ and ‘the soul is one thing and the body another’ and ‘after death a Tathāgata exists’ and ‘after death a Tathāgata does not exist’ and ‘after death a Tathāgata both exists and does not exist’ and ‘after death a Tathāgata neither exists nor does not exist’294 [158] That is how those recluses and brahmins of the third kind failed to get free from Māra’s power and control. Those recluses and brahmins, I say, are just like the deer of the third herd. MN 25

Hawking Isn't Talking

Isn’t it weird that E=mc² is the most widely recognised physics equation in the world? And yet it is literally of no use to anybody. This is the power of physics propaganda. Most people can’t convert miles to kilometres, but they sure know all about E=mc²!

Everyone knows about Albert Einstein, he’s the greatest genius who ever lived, right? Followed by Stephen Hawking, of course! You can’t argue with that, they are the two most brilliant minds in the entire history of the human intellect ever, their contributions are greater and more significant than all the other achievements of all lesser mortals combined! They are truly GODS AMONG MEN!!

Seriously though, you have to wonder why these two odd fellows are given such pride of place in the pantheon of academic idols. I used to admire them myself, but as I’ve alluded to previously, I was a naive young fool, an idealist.
The fact is, when you no longer worship atoms and gravity as your personal lord and saviour, and you’re no longer awe-struck by academic laurels, waffly explanations or synthesised speech, you start to see more clearly what is right in front of your face.

In the cold light of day, it is plain to see that neither Einstein nor Hawking achieved anything meaningful by tinkering with their tensors, it was all pure vanity, indulgent mathematical conjecture, mental gymnastics and CGI razzamatazz. Relativity is not reality, and absolute truth exists absolutely. Gravity and/or ‘bendy-space-time’ are not found in nature, they are mathematical models with no useful application in the real world, and this is what Stephen Hawking devoted himself to.

In 1963 at the age of 21 he was diagnosed with terminal ALS and given only 24 months to live, yet somehow he managed to press on for 55 more years. People with ALS (a.k.a Lou Gehrigs or Motor Neuron’s disease) only live 3-5 years max, he outlived them all by more than 10x. That is quite an achievement, something was surely working for him, he looked healthier and more plump in 2016 than he did in the 1970s, and he somehow developed golden blonde hair and grew a new set of teeth in his old age (despite being unable to eat solids since the 70s).

Now before I get accused of distasteful humour or ‘ableism’, it’s important to understand the reason for my sarcasm. It has come to light in recent years that the Stephen Hawking ‘phenomenon’ is actually something quite sinister and disturbing, so I’m using bits of humour to relieve the tension, otherwise it would be too depressing.

I am not the first to say it, and I won’t be the last, there have been several presentations about it online (banned from youtube of course, but search Bitchute or Odyssey), and even some coverage in the mainstream media‘. Most recently (2024) there were some bizarre revelations regarding his appearance on Epstein Island, so there’s a LOT of things about Hawking that just don’t add up.

The charge against him is that the man we see in the wheelchair is in fact not a scientific genius but merely a puppet, a stooge that gets wheeled out by the establishment to give intellectual credibility to political agendas. He is not the one programming the words on the computer, the voice is scripted by hidden hands, crafted behind the scenes then attributed to Hawking via the speaker on his wheelchair. We are expected to believe Hawking did all his greatest work by twitching the inside of his cheek in binary code to program a speech synthesiser with the words he wishes to say. Try to imagine that! Theoretical physics is hard enough when you have the ability to write and draw and communicate, how much more challenging must it be while in a state of total physical and verbal paralysis, limited to using 1s and 0s? The only conclusion, he must be a super-genius, right!?

Though severely disadvantaged, Stephen Hawking did have one big advantage over everybody else in the world; he can say anything, and nobody can challenge him. Nobody can argue with a mute in a wheelchair, it’s just not fair play, it would be cruel and ‘ableist’ to rebuke him, plus you'd be waiting forever on him to program responses with his cheek muscle.

But, can he even really do that? I used to wonder why we never saw him in live debate or conversation with people, but it makes sense now, all the words emanating from the computer voice are pre-programmed, he can’t come up with real-time responses on the fly, that would be crazy. At best he can select phrases from a preset list.

But does he even do that? How much input does he really have on the words that come out the machine? We have all witnessed him sat there with that gummy smile while the synthesised speech buzzes out science words, we may even have seen him twitching a joystick with his wrist a few times, but we've never seen him actually communicate.

Nevertheless, his extreme disability status gives him virtually unlimited credibility in academia and on the world stage. In the inverted realm of legacy media, it’s all about the victim, the more of a victim someone is, the more exalted they are. Stephen Hawking is the undisputed champion of the victim olympics.

We are told he was the greatest physicist in the world at just age 19, and experienced a lengthy decline in bodily functionality throughout the 60s and 70s and had to give up lecturing, but his mind remained sharp and his determination to uncover the secrets of black-holes was unwavering. However, something happened in 1985 that changed his life forever.

While at a conference in Geneva hosted by CERN, he fell ill with pneumonia and was rushed to hospital, put on a ventilator and given a tracheotomy which destroyed his throat rendering him unable to vocalise even the most basic groaning sounds (which he had been using to communicate through the 70s). Allegedly then he was shuffled off back to England to be managed by a team of professional carers.
A year later he emerged, reborn, like a phoenix from the flames, equipped with a highly advanced (for the time) custom voice computer and wheelchair, and in 1988 published his seminal work ‘A Brief History of Time’, the most successful and unmemorable pop-science book ever.

He then went on to be a celebrity science idol for the next 30 years, appearing in a myriad of TV shows, movies, adverts, pop songs and concerts, as well as touring universities lecturing, even going up in a “zero-g” vomit-comet aircraft in 2007 to experience weightlessness. For someone who can’t physically move or talk, he’s a serious ‘mover and shaker’, a super hero on wheels, he gets around!

He’s also a bit of a ladies man, and has been accused of fondling handlers and seducing nurses with his charming banter. His condition did not hold him back sexually, he got married and supposedly produced three children in the years after his crippling disability kicked in (try not to think about that too much), then in 1995 got divorced and hooked up with one of his carers, someone named Elaine Mason.

Now I don’t like to judge by appearances, but Elaine Mason is a very suspicious looking individual who comes with a very suspicious back story.

Elaine, as the story goes, was previously married to David Mason, the engineer who developed Hawking’s voice box. Think about that for a second; she divorced from a successful able-bodied engineer who can speak, and married a paralysed mute in a wheelchair who relies on her ex-husbands technology to talk! Before that she was just a humble nurse at an orphanage in Bangladesh, helping poor children out of the kindness of her heart.

After his divorce was completed in 1995, Stephen wasted no time getting right back in the game, Elaine had been one of his nurses/handlers for quite some time, so she was well familiar with his ... proclivities.

Though this was during the peak of his celebrity career, their relationship was reportedly strained, mired by rumours of abuse and cruelty, and only lasted until 2006, at which point “Elaine” dropped off the face of the earth, never to be seen again, probably back caring for the poor orphaned kids in Bangladesh.

Curiously, all the tabloids put out stories around the same time with headlines like “All you need to know about Elaine Mason”, where they lay out the whole list of sanitised, government-approved factoids. The spell being cast in those articles is clear; there is nothing more to know about her than what we tell you.

If I were a gambling man, I'd be willing to bet my bottom dollar that Elaine Mason is an undercover agent, a military man in a ginger wig, possibly even a ‘catch & release’ criminal; serial liars like this have a very distinctive face that becomes easy to spot as you get wiser, plus you have to be seriously lacking in morals or under huge amounts of blackmail pressure to pull off a stunt like that.

The more you look, the more it starts to seem like the people surrounding Hawking are impostors and agents, bad actors playing a role in some twisted secret narrative, using him like a prop or a ‘cash cow’, a way to advance their careers and fill their pockets.

His alleged sprogs, Timothy and Lucy Hawking, are also quite suspicious, they have done the rounds on all the UK breakfast shows, tabloids and magazines, retelling their fond childhood memories about how he was the greatest dad ever, and cashing in on all the book sales and royalties of course. It must be said, they bear no similarity to Stephen at all, he was not exactly a handsome man but he had very distinctive primate-like features which did not seem to pass on to his children (lucky for them).

There is some video of Hawking “actually talking” prior to his accident, but I warn you, it is disturbing to watch, he is just groaning incomprehensibly, with nothing even close to words coming out of his mouth. Yet his trusty “interpreter” dutifully translates it all into perfect English “he says that no light can escape from the gravitational pull of a black hole” etc. It’s a very ballsy charade and I will admit, I fell for it, I was an ignorant fool for ever believing this man was a genius. When dealing with long-term media narratives like this, where information is based solely on testimonies of actors and compromised people, or something that was once uttered by a computerised voice machine, it can be hard to know what is true or genuine. However, when all the tabloids and breakfast shows are telling you the exact same list of ‘facts’, we know for sure it must be bought and paid for, a total fabrication.

Perhaps the most bizarre twist in the life of this “tortured genius” was his association with the Jeffery Epstein Mossad honey-trap operation, there are several pictures that have emerged with him on the island hanging out with some very unsavoury characters. It turns out Jeffrey Epstein was a big supporter of scientism, he branded himself as a ‘science philanthropist’, among other things. In 2012 he financed a conference in the US virgin islands’, with 21 of the worlds “top physicists”, including Hawking and his able-bodied Canadian counterpart Lawrence Krauss, and 3 Nobel laureates, with the purpose to “define gravity” (but wasn’t it defined 350 years ago?).

In January 2024 there was a large publication of files relating to the Epstein case, including transcripts of a conversation where it is claimed that one of Hawking’s proclivities involved ‘watching naked midgets try to solve complex equations on a blackboard too high up’. Of course this is pure gossip, information that could be easily fabricated, and actually totally ludicrous the more you think about it. There’s no way to know if he really said or consented to anything at all.

Understand that it can’t be determined whether Hawking was ever even sentient, whether he wrote any of the books or said any of the things attributed to him. There is no evidence that he was capable of communicating his ‘proclivities’ to anyone, in fact it is absurd to even think of a man in that position as having ‘proclivities’ and going to a sex island to partake in orgies etc, it’s pure mockery.

Quite possibly he has been inserted into the Epstein narrative to distract from the other living men and women who are implicated in it, or he was just brought out to the conference for ‘shits and giggles’. Epstein is said to have specially modified his personal submarine for Hawking’s arrival.

It’s entirely possible that the figure in the wheelchair was in some cases not even a living man, but due to the extremely limited degree of bodily movement on display, it could have been animatronics. It appears there were several different ‘models’ of Hawking used over the years, maybe 3-4 different versions of the body in the chair. People note the changing hair colour (from black to grey to golden blonde), weird teeth developments, ear size, nose shape, skin quality and so on.

The prevailing theory is that the ‘real’ Stephen Hawking died during the Geneva incident in 1985, and what emerged after that was some kind of Frankenstein’s monster, a state-controlled bionic boffin, the Robocop of Physics (curiously Robocop was released right around the same time).

A Brief History of Time was likely written by a team of ghost writers, it’s very waffly, and his computer speech would be programmed by whomever happens to be ‘using’ him at that time. This was evident in the later years as he began spouting globalist rhetoric and pushing political agendas, appearing in ever more bizarre places like Star Trek, Stargate, The Simpsons and Futurama. But his core message and philosophy was always essentially the same; there is no god, aliens are real, the planet is going to die from climate change and gravity will suck us all into a black hole.

We may never know exactly what happened with him, or who Elaine Mason really is, or whether Timothy and Lucy are really his children (his first wife Jane was admittedly having affairs), but we can be sure of two things; he made no fruitful contributions to science, and the official story of his life is a charade, a mockery.

It is a mockery of the idolatry of scientism, since the idolaters are essentially worshiping a ‘retard’ whom they believe is a genius, but he has no more capability than a vegetable. Its a mockery that shows how unscientific and gullible the majority of scientism believers are, and as someone who was very much involved in that world, I feel it deeply, it’s a cruel mockery but it perfectly illustrates the folly of idol worship.

I used to think Erwin Schrédinger was an idol, because of his legendary quantum wave equation and the infamous cat paradox, I even quoted him and used his image in presentations, then I found out he was a rampant pedophile! It would have been good to know that first, before quoting his work and associating myself with him, but the world is an inverted place, and it seems academia is generally unconcerned with morality these days.

It’s notable that the word ‘hawking’ means ‘selling in a public place by calling out to people’, as in merchants hawking their wares, or media hawking their narratives, or scientists hawking their theories.

If, as I suspect, this whole thing is a mockery, then the deceivers might have left a few little ‘easter eggs’ or clues for inquisitive truth seekers such as ourselves. Well, get this; it just so happens that Stephen Hawking died on March 14th 2018, also known as ‘Pi day’ (3.14), a poignant date for physics geeks, which also happens to be ...Einsteins birthday!

And if that weren’t unbelievable enough, we’re told that his friends at school used to call him by the nick name...Einstein’.

Of course, we’re expected to believe that this all happened by sheer coincidence on the edge of a giant spinning ball of atoms in an uncreated universe devoid of meaning and intelligent design!

To the discerning eye it is quite evident that the story of Stephen Hawking is a fabrication, and a profitable one too. There was never any real physics being done, nobody will ever use one of Hawking’s equations to solve any problems, it’s all complete gobbledegook designed to make gravity seem like this super complex thing that only the most tortured boffins can comprehend.

But actually it’s not so complicated, the plain truth is very simple to understand; gravity does not exist in nature, never has, never will, it has no place in true science and should be banished from our vocabulary altogether.

Hawking is to Einstein as Einstein is to Newton, they are the ‘gatekeepers of gravity’, nothing can be said about gravity without invoking them. They are gravity, and this is why they are held up above all other men of history, because without gravity, the Copernican model of the spinning globe earth and the Heliocentric solar system fall apart, along with the entire field of astrophysics and the whole state-sanctioned history of the universe; the big bang, the explanations of stars and galaxies, the planetary globe model, and even the theory of evolution - all of it collapses like a house of cards.

Steven A. Young
Science Conspiracies & The Secret Art of Alchemy