Exactly once in my life so far, I have met someone who seemed to be certifiably bonkers, and talked to him about his beliefs, and then actually witnessed him changing his mind.
(The fellow in question thought, among other things, that Chinese tanks were massing on the Mexican border, a charmingly antiquated piece of nuttery which really doesn't hold up well at all these days. When he thought about it a bit, apparently for the first time in his life, he agreed that this really couldn't be right. And the conversation actually got better from there!)
I had nothing better to do while we were waiting for the bus that day, but I still wish I hadn't bothered to talk to that man. Because that tiny success ignited within me a spark of hope that other people who seem on the surface to be completely batty can, in fact, be talked to in a rational way, and perhaps thereby pulled a little closer to consensus reality, nearness to which is strongly correlated with life-enhancing experiences like not waking up naked in an alley, or not shooting John Lennon.
In every single subsequent conversation with those of a psychoceramic persuasion I have, however, been utterly unsuccessful in changing anybody's mind about anything at all. Yet on I strive, driven by my one, increasingly distant, success, to the great frustration of both myself and my mentally unusual correspondents.
But at least now I can get a blog post out of it.
It's been a while since I heard from the good folk at Life Technology; the last time was almost a year ago, here. I must insist that any of you who haven't checked out the Life Technology site go and do so right now, because the assortment of products available there really is very hard to match anywhere (though they have, regrettably, retired the Flash banner thing that made a trippy New Age gong sound whenever you loaded a page. I miss that).
Life Technology is like Brooklyn Superhero Supply, except Life Technology aren't just trying to encourage imagination.
Mr, or possibly Ms, AURUM SOLIS™ (I think the capitals and trademark symbol are important) decided to favour me with another communiqué on the first of April. Were the message from anybody else, that'd mean it'd be a joke. But not so with AURUM™, who continued our correspondence over the next few days.
The correspondence follows. I bet it'll attract some really spiffy Google ads.
DANIEL THIS IS WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT WHITE POWDER GOLD THERE IS AN ORCHESTRATED CAMPAIGN BY THE POWERS THAT BE TO FRIGHTEN PEOPLE AWAY FROM THIS PRODUCT SCARE STORIES INVOLVE REPTILIAN ALIENS AND ARE OBVIOUSLY FALSE SO DONT LET SUCH NONSENSE PUT YOU OFF FROM FINDING OUT THE PLAIN TRUTH ABOUT THIS VERY IMPORTANT SUBJECT REMEMBER BRISTOL MYERS SQUIBB RESEARCH PROVED THAT WHITE POWDER GOLD DOES EVERYTHING THAT THE PHILOSOPHERS STONE IS ALLEGED TO HAVE DONE IE REPAIR DNA AND INCREASE LONGEVITY WE WOULD BE HAPPY TO SEND YOU A 1GRAM SAMPLE FREE OF CHARGE IF YOU ARE INTERESTED IN TRYING THIS THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION DANIEL
AURUM SOLIS™
[And then AURUM™ quoted the content of this blog post. Do feel free to read as much of it as you can handle.]
I remind you that the thing the Philosopher's Stone was most often alleged to do was transmute base metals into gold.
Does white powder gold do that?
The Philosopher's Stone was also, by pseudo-logical extension, commonly alleged to be able to make you immortal. You would not age, and would not sicken for any reason, which implied that you would also be immune not only to ordinary physical diseases, but also to poison and physical attack.
Does white powder gold do that?
Your idea about the magic substance "correcting" anything in one's body that is "incorrect" is entirely in line with what the old-time alchemists said about the Philosopher's Stone. It was their belief that gold was the most perfect of metals (I imagine because they didn't know about the platinum group; platinum was at the time regarded as an unwanted, unmeltable contaminant sometimes found in silver). If they'd known about DNA they'd no doubt say that the mystic Stone would "perfect" that as well.
The tricky bit is defining what "perfect" means. Many diseases, like for instance autoimmune disorders, are the result of normal bodily processes working too well. Every second alternative medicine is supposed to "boost" the immune system; if they actually do that, they should all come with warnings about how they may cause rheumatoid arthritis as a side-effect.
What, in fact, does white powder gold do? Where's this Bristol-Myers Squibb research you allude to - or, indeed, any research that doesn't just ramble on, as you always do, about mystic vibrations and extradimensional harmonic ascension?
If white powder gold has no effects that people who don't believe in it can detect, then it is no more interesting than any of the hundreds of similar potions and religions.
I do enjoy these occasional e-mails from you, though.
DEAR DANIEL DONT BE TAKEN IN BY THE SCEPTICS WE KNOW YOU ARE A GOOD MAN BUT SOMETIMES THE DARK SIDE HAS MISLED YOU ABOUT CERTAIN THINGS YOU ARE A SPIRITUAL BEING LOVED UNCONDITIONALLY BY THE CREATOR AND SINCE BIRTH MATTER IS ALL YOU HAVE KNOWN BUT THERE IS MORE THAN MERELY MATTER LAST NIGHT AFTER I CONSUMED THE WHITE STONE I COMMUNICATED WITH INTELLIGENT BEINGS FROM SHAMBALLA AND I WAS EDUCATED BY THEM IN THE SUBJECT OF THE KUNDALINI ENERGY AND BECOMING AN ASCENDED MASTER. PLEASE SEND YOUR ADDRESS FOR A COMPLIMENTARY FREE SAMPLE.
But how do you know I'm "a good man"? How, if what most humans call external reality is as ephemeral as a ghost, ready to blow away so that you can perceive greater realities when you take your magic potion, do you know that I'm even here at all?
Perhaps I'm a manifestation of the universe, here to enlighten you to yet another layer of reality. Perhaps this whole exchange is purely a figment of your imagination. Once you say that words like "is" and "exists" and "meaning" can have different... meanings... you lose all ability to say, or think, anything about anything.
You said that your product does what the Philosopher's Stone is said to have done. That, first and foremost, means it must turn base metals - classically lead - into gold. Now you say that instead it sends you on some sort of psychedelic spiritual journey. Well, OK, great, but nobody in antiquity said anything about the Philosopher's Stone doing that. It was meant to turn lead into gold, and it was meant to make people immortal. Those are the two big things that the Philosopher's Stone was meant to do.
You said, in as many words, that white powder gold does what the old alchemists said the Philosopher's Stone did. Now you say that it actually doesn't.
If I can expect consumption of this substance to make me as confused as you, I will stay very far away from it, thank you very much.
If your product instead reveals the truth of the universe or some such, then it is a different thing from the Philosopher's Stone. It is also indistinguishable from numerous psychedelic, hallucinogenic and dissociative drugs, none of which show any signs of actually giving their users superhuman powers, or allowing them to figure out things about the mundane world everybody else inhabits that they could not have figured out otherwise. On the contrary, habitual use of powerful consciousness-altering drugs tends to make people much less able to operate in the mundane world.
I do not, of course, actually believe that whatever experiences you have are actually happening to you because of the white powder gold concoction. I think it's likely to have no effect at all, and your own mental peculiarities are what're allowing you to talk to the extradimensional space gods or whatever.
Does everybody who takes white powder gold have the powerful experiences you mention? Or do you have to be a believer already? If you slip some into someone's drink without them knowing, will anything happen to them? Have you tried such a basic test to see whether you're making this all up (on purpose or otherwise)?
http://spiritofmaat.com/mar08/white_powder_gold.html
LINK WHICH PROVES DAVID HUDSON IS TELLING THE TRUTH ABOUT WHITE POWDER GOLD
This lengthy ramble is, when it tries to say definite things about chemistry and physics, nonsense. Apart from the frequent use of words which do not exist - many of which I suppose could be the fault of the transcriber - it alleges, if I'm reading it right, that gold likes to hang around in two-atom molecules, like hydrogen, and that the element drastically changes in state if you manage to separate those atoms, becoming your magic potion.
Gold does not in fact form diatomic molecules. At all. The only "metal" that does is hydrogen, which is only metallic in very extreme circumstances. All other metals form metallic bonds between atoms, which can involve any number of molecules; it is also quite easy to separate individual atoms from those bonds, by for instance dissolving a metallic salt in water (giving a solution of ions), or by "sputtering" a piece of the solid metal (giving honest-to-goodness separate atoms flying around separately).
Gold sputtering is used routinely in, for instance, the preparation of samples for viewing under an electron microscope. Individual gold atoms are knocked off a piece of gold, and condense in a super-thin layer on the subject, where they return to their normal polyatomic metallic bonding.
I don't expect you to pay any attention whatsoever to this, because I know that when you talk about "atoms" and "molecules" and just about every other noun used at http://spiritofmaat.com/mar08/white_powder_gold.html, you do not mean the same thing that everybody else means. But I wonder why it is that you think that anybody else would find this "evidence" convincing, since you and your friends do not use the same dictionary as the rest of us.
Does http://spiritofmaat.com/mar08/white_powder_gold.html also comprise your "Bristol-Myers Squibb evidence"? The only mention of the company there is that "over the last four or five years, there is tremendous research going on with precious elements and cancer treatment. The precious elements have been found to inter-react with the cell by a vibrational frequency or by a light transfer to correct the DNA. Any incorrect part of the DNA is corrected by the precious element."
This looks to me, not to put too fine a point on it, like pure fiction. I challenge you to present this "standard literature" talking about "correcting DNA" by "vibrational frequencies".
DEAR DANIEL YES YOU ARE CORRECT IN STATING THAT REALITY IS RELATIVE TO PERCEPTION THAT IS THE KEY ALSO YOU SHOULD KNOW THAT WHEN YOU PRAY YOU SHOULD PRAY WITH SINCERITY AND FAITH NOT MERELY HOPE HOPING DENIES THAT YOU ARE GOD AND IN CONTROL OF YOUR CREATION THE STONE DOES NOT INDUCE A PSYCHEDELIC EXPERIENCE IT BREAKS THE BOND OF DUALITY IE THE ILLUSORY PERCEPTION OF SELF AND OTHER GOD IS IN A STATE OF ONENESS PS THERE IS NO ACTUAL PROOF FOR ANY FACTS EVEN THE BEST EVIDENCE IS RELATIVE TO THE INDIVIDUAL (FLAWED) MIND OF THE OBSERVER THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION DANIEL GOD BLESS YOU
At this point, I gave up on our little chat. I'm sure AURUM™ will have something similarly enlightening to say to me in another year or two, though.
