Taomeow

I resubmit that you still don't know what people are talking about when they are talking about the Mandela effect. It is not a conspiracy. It is a mystery. It has to do with how Time works, and with the possibility of the existence of phenomena, whether wild (not likely in this case) or technologically engendered, that can interfere with its workings. No one makes any claims as to this hypothetical technology having been used on purpose toward editing a "timeline" nor can assert that changes occurred as a side effect of using it for an entirely different purpose. No one replaced any bibles manually. No one sneaked into my cupboard to replace my bottle of Bragg's Apple Cider Vinegar (a preferred brand bought for 25 years and looked for, and then at, at least once a week, to a total of at least 1300 occasions to see it) with Bragg (no 's) it is today. The company changed the name? Thousands in my shoes went to the company to ask. The company said, nope. Never. Has always been Bragg. You want proof? People find what has become known as "residue," "pre-effect" artifacts that somehow survived -- e.g. biblically inspired artwork of the lion lying with the lamb, or an apple cider aficionado's Bragg's T shirt from her hippie years, or a Ford loyalist's tattoo of the Ford logo that Mandela-affected folks remember and that does not exist in this-here reality. None of which will be accepted as proof by the unaffected -- nor even by the critically inclined among the affected. I for one wouldn't accept it. Like I said before, it's nothing you can prove by any methods available, and how it can be proved by methods not available to me or you or anyone who's not in the loop, or even to anyone in the loop, I don't know. Unless it happens to you, there can be no proof. You're stuck with either respecting the possibility that it happened to some because they say so, or not. I suspect I know what you will choose, and I can't blame you. I would too, given a choice. But that damn vinegar! And the rest of it! Not someone else's -- mine. Mystery which I would file under "mistake" if it wasn't replicated for so many and in such an uncanny, improbable way. As for the meek, yes, we're in agreement. The meek won't inherit the earth. At least not for a while.

It's not about any one person's memory, whether idiosyncratically poor, failing, or just inaccurate due to inattention. It's about a social pattern of large, in some cases international groups of people "misremembering" exactly the same thing while remembering an exactly the same different thing. Normally, different people misremember different things, I'm sure your memory lapses don't overlap with mine. But when native English speakers in large groups stumble across the same wolf which, in the context of its encounter with the lamb, lives in every single Russian's memory as a protagonist of, not the bible but the single most famous fable everybody learned by heart in school, "The Wolf and the Lamb," by Ivan Krylov, the most celebrated 19th century fabulist whose lines are the single most famous source of proverbial sayings, this particular fable having been turned into idioms every single Russian will recognize, things start to appear a bit interesting. Your chronic mocking tone as though talking to your intellectual inferiors is duly noted once more, by the way. I hope you will reconsider your delivery style or I'll have to bail out on reading any of your comments, and not just in this thread. Up to you of course.

Or the Hide-and-Seek button. (You hide, they seek.) Maybe even, per liminal suggestion, the Clementine button.

So, I posted something, then decided I wanted to give it some more thought and maybe add/subtract later, and hit "hide" in the "options" menu toward that goal. Yup, it's now hidden -- but where do I look for that post if I want to unhide it? Thanks from the bottom of my technophobic heart for all returns.

More like hundun.

Thanks for the idea, thelerner. I'll have to pass. By now that particular post is no longer needed, and the solution I'm looking for is along more general lines. I.e. for the person who's hidden her own post (with utmost ease -- just a "hide" button) to be able to unhide it herself (with similar utmost ease, with an "unhide" button like in the PPD. Say you hit "hide," the post turns pink, and you hide it from everybody else but not from yourself, LOL. I would never knowingly "hide" a post which I would have to ask someone else to go on a wild goose chase to retrieve.) Without giving any extra work to the mods. That would be copacetic methinks.

Still censored back then, never even mentioned in the school program (thank god, come to think of it... it is part of the program now and this was conductive to raising a generation of kids who hate it and of critics who cater to that sentiment.) Back then, however, for me, it was part of that scene where they give you an unobtainable book if you've karmically earned it that I was talking about earlier, which adds a special flavor to the read -- you can never get as much excitement out of a book you buy or borrow from the library no matter how good it is. I was visiting a friend during winter vacations, on my first unsupervized trip to Moscow -- I was 17 -- and had about three days to read it. Needless to say it thwarted my vacation fun plan something horrible.

Not in my school, luckily, hardly anyone read it where I come from, but of course in school they did it to our own genius authors. I did, however, in college, have to write a term paper on Moby Dick, but I had great rapport with my teacher of American literature and admired him and had a minor crush on him, so it was fun.

I didn't say I liked nothing he did, I liked the literary device of inventing and ominously referencing a book that doesn't exist, a device tried and true (and in its turn possibly invented in China and taken all the way to wuxia noves), and a few other things, of course. The modern Necronomicon (coupled with the new translation of Gilgamesh) sparked my interest in things Mesopotamia, and I suspect the suspected author, Peter Levenda, a fellow taoist, walked a similar path toward creating it. These things do get as bizarrely convoluted as Cthulhu's tentacles. Still I much preferred an earlier Cthulhu's literary counterpart and possibly inspiration, Moby Dick.

I was waiting for someone to mention the unmentionable. I may have criticized him (if you can call subtle perceptions I cited that) for all the wrong reasons. Truth be told, I found out he was somewhat of a chthonic character himself only after the fact, not before I discovered I can't take his writing style. And a great pity it was too, because I came to check him out from the Necronomicon, an earlier and much more enjoyable discovery, and was getting ready to love his craft.

@Nungali "Toxic negativity" is not controversial, but I will resist the temptation to address this observation to Captain Obvious. My first acquaintance with the bible took place in a country into which, at the time, it had to be smuggled. So there's two reasons I was reasonably sure that I was paying attention to what I was reading. One: it was the forbidden fruit, and trust me, you savor every bite when you're gobbling up one of those. (I pity folks who grew up without forbidden books in their life -- no not the fucking Playboy --- books you only got if someone trusted you with a lot more than not to get them in trouble with mom and dad. Trusted you with their everything. Folks who didn't have that in their life just don't know what kind of human experience they've missed out on.) Two: I was still young enough to retain my eidetic memory, a curse in disguise since I still remember by heart miles of printed material I'd rather forget. By the time the wolf appeared, that indelible "the lion shall lie with the lamb" was quite irrelevant yet there's no way I could mix up that paragraph. Besides, I read it in Russian, so all your references are sort of beside the point. You never got around to finding out what it is people (just people, not self-appointed sentinels at the gates of plausibility) are talking about when they mention "the Mandela effect," did you? If you did, you would know that it is impossible to disprove with references. That's one of the things that set it apart from any other cognitive glitch, such as an honest or dishonest mistake. Falsifiability, the golden standard of our "scientific method," does not apply in this case, anymore than you can apply it to the Big Bang. If you want to prove it's nonsense, you would have to find some other method. Me, I'm still looking.

Not me. I find it despicable every single time. One reason I wound up getting interested in Asian thought and practice systems at the get-go was that the first teacher I encountered in the US, who basically initiated me into the whole thing, a Dzogchen monk who spent 12 years in a Tibetan monastery before returning to the states, started out by telling his personal story, from the quest to get admitted to the monastery (3 years) to the gun he carried in his pocket at the time of our first encounters in a questionable-safety urban part of a metropolis to protect and, if necessary, defend his grandson for whose safety he was worried at the time. If he started out with nonduality sermons instead, I would never even take a second look eastward, and would think of all Westerners who "get into that" as sore losers.

My thought exactly.

An asteroid or a giant meteor would be too simple. I don't think we've earned any simplicity. We've earned interesting times and we're gonna get that. Thanks for corroborating the memory of the lion. "God provided," huh? What an asteroid of a cop-out! Please check your bible, it would be even cooler if you still had the same one you had in your sunday school days. It's wolf now.

Sounds nice, but I'm not sure it's got anything to do with my question. I meant the rest of humanity, not you personally. You described the joy of being you, and I am sincerely happy for you. Hope you realize though that your personal circumstances anticipated for the duration of spring down under is not what I was questioning. I was questioning some people's (let's not name any names) delusional and/or toxic positivity, with its cultish following and with many of its followers embracing this mentality as a socially acceptable, nay encouraged, form of narcissism. I know very little about asteroids and have never counted on one to solve any of humanity's problems. I know a bit more about some other dangers. But since you're exempt from those, I can only reiterate that I'm happy for you. Oh, and about those animals in the bible -- I just wanted to find out if you remember the lion. If you don't, you don't. If you do, I wonder if a sense of wonder ever visited you in conjunction with that animal. Is all.

I discovered Lovecraft only a few years ago, bought a huge tome containing all of his works, and read about a third of it. Whereupon I donated it, convinced that I've had enough. I was left under the impression that it emitted the kind of qi I didn't feel comfortable having in my environment. It's a taoist thing. I'm sensitive to sha' qi. I've read worse -- the accounts (documentary ones dwarfing works of fiction in their horror) of, e.g., people who went through forced labor camps of the Stalin era, the cultural revolution in China, the Holocaust, the colonial exploits in Africa and South America, a huge amount of ponerology* literature, and yet I didn't feel I can't be in the same room with those books. That's because between the horror and the reader there was a cushion of compassion emanating from the author, blunting the despair, giving hope, and ultimately uplifting the human spirit because the author, if nothing and nobody else, was on its side. With Lovecraft, however, even though a lot of it I read as creatively (albeit bizarrely) reinterpreted fact rather than fiction, I felt the exact opposite. *ponerology -- the study of evil

What's next? Devil dinosaurs may know. Perhaps eternal peace, prosperity, an unimpeded pursuit of happiness successful in eight billion cases, the lion shall lie with the lamb (by the way, anybody remember it used to be the lion? -- in the current version it's the wolf and it's maintained it's always been the wolf, the lion is a glitch in the false memory of accidental amnesiacs -- which some of them, in their denial, call the Mandela effect), the meek shall inherit the earth, the trumpets shall sound and the dead shall be raised incorruptible? Or... Universal basic income in exchange for total control by global government, digital/medical concentration camp for all, the culling of the herd, mandatory everything or else, humans GM humanoids under AI guidance, the boot stamping on a human face forever? (©Orwell) Which scenario do you see as more plausible? I for one welcome our insect overlords. (©The Simpsons)

Thanks again. I'll have to pass -- the whole point is, I don't want anyone to read it in its current form -- not because it's offensive or anything, it absolutely isn't... but I'm sure you don't need a lengthy explanation beyond "I don't want it read before I review it." Like zeros before he was mod, I used to also be able to hide and unhide my posts anywhere, not just in the PPD, and it was a wonderful feature. I think I had it for years. It felt like a safety net. Some people believe that if they said something, it should never be unsaid, it's carved in stone for all eternity. Others say something and then get a better idea five minutes later. Sometimes I find myself in that latter category. Anyway, it's not that important. We lose many wonderful things along the way.

Not that I'm interested in any further discussions, but it was not a straw man by a long shot (references available but not offered for lack of party to conversation) and by far not the only thing you willfully ignore toward maintaining "your" opinions. Please accept my regrets over having attempted a conversation with you. Won't happen again.

Thank you, ilumairen. I thought I would be able to do it myself -- the whole idea of hiding was that I wasn't satisfied with it and didn't want it read by others until I determine and eliminate the dissatisfying feature(s). Well, at least I'll know for the next time. Thank you, zeros. I think ilumairen is right. :(

Ah, thank you for elaborating, I get the point. Whatever does not originate with corporate/syndicated media sources is a tyranny/conspiracy theory and these two terms are interchangeable. Yup, that makes total sense.

Thanks for asking -- yes, I do believe the story, since one way to interpret "purple cloud" is "purple qi." Here's more regarding that legend: https://immortalmountain.wordpress.com/2017/02/11/purple-qi-from-the-east/

It has to do with a 1000-year-old school of feng shui known as Zi Wei Dou Shu. Zi Wei (紫薇) - purple Rosa multiflora(薔薇). This color is related to spiritual aspiration. 微 is used for 薇 in ancient/simplifed Chinese writing. Noble rose referred to the North Star. Dou (斗) - 北斗星 Big Dipper constellation, North Star, Pole star. Shu (数) - calculation. This system was used chiefly (and for a very long time, exclusively) to chart the fate of emperors. It is complex, relies heavily on astronomical observations, and is centered around the North Star (the world revolves around it -- just like it revolves around the ruler, the emperor -- so it was interpreted as Emperor star.) To a cultivated eye, its color is actually purple and it looks like a rose, they asserted in the Tang dynasty. Modern astronomy seems to corroborate that assertion.