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[ 10 minute read ]

The Disruptor in the shop

     ‘People are placed on Earth to be disruptors, and by extension, some people will commit atrocities,’ Harrari said.

Hakim nodded. He knew that Harrari was right. Having observed me for the last decade, he knew that I sometimes deliberately try to shake things up.

      ‘Some people, he whispered,'when they have been judged to be overly harsh in disciplining their children immediately jump up and protest, ‘You have to be cruel to be kind” He didn’t mean me. He knew that I don’t make excuses for being unkind. Quite simply, I don’t lie; If I did, I would ‘see’ far less; I would be merely a human; one of seven billion, and it had taken me over ten years of acceptance to become more than that.

Harrari, as usual, was patient.

     ‘The shaking up of society is necessary. You are stumbling through your lives barely conscious. Disruptions often result in knee-jerk reactions through the discomfort of having nascent proclivities and behaviour revealed to all of you. But this ultimately results in better overall behaviour in the community and the condemnation of both the revealed attitude and the knee-jerk response.’

I thought I got it. ‘Like an explosion in the rabbit population that is ultimately controlled by the amount of food available, disruption will reach a zenith and then there will be an adjustment,’ I mused.

I was in my local shop, next in the queue. A bit of a slight argument was coming to a climax before me. I couldn’t help but overhear it.

     ‘Nobody likes you here!’ The young shop assistant warned.

     'I didn’t come here to be liked. I came here to disrupt.’

     ‘Disrupt what?’

     ‘You, plural. Your attitudes and habitual behaviours. Your blind adherence to a lifestyle that you incessantly shape to satisfy your desires to be left alone.’

‘Luxury’, I thought.

The shop assistant looked puzzled. Clearly, the advice I had heard on attackers works; if you are about to be attacked, do something weird so the assailant is bamboozled for a moment. However, this lads private school education had given him a confidence that the other ninety-three percent of us in Britain could never emulate. I could sense that he was about to throw the interesting little man out. I wanted to talk to him, but I needed to be served first. Well, I say ‘needed’, what I actually mean is, I couldn’t be bothered to leave my selected loaf of bread behind to follow the man out, and then have to come back again to buy the bread. Just lazy, that’s all.

     ‘I’m sorry, what did you say? I wasn’t listening,’ I said. Neither of them were expecting me to speak. They stopped their intense staring at one another and looked at me. It works, do something out of the ordinary.

     ‘I don’t like repeating myself’, the man said.

I noticed now that he had a long-term suntan. We had recently experienced a long period of sunny and dry weather, but his suntan was not the glow that healthy skin gets from a seven mile walk in the sun without a hat. That tan only shows that the sunlight was coming from above for a while. His tan had been given a long time to spread, so there was just a general colour on his face, neck and arms; less so on his neck. He looked to be in his mid-sixties and the young lad behind the counter was probably about nineteen. There was, most assuredly, a clash of comprehension.

‘Neither do I,’ I responded, pleased that the attention was now on me.’But I like to be understood when I speak.’

I could see this chimed with him. Clearly, he wanted to be understood and often felt that he was saying things that others could not understand.

     ‘Whenever, I repeat myself, I raise my voice so I am heard, and then people tell me to stop shouting.’ He said to me, only half jesting.

     'Me too.’ I stopped, and then it hit me. ‘I think your IQ is bigger than you know what to do with.’

Admittedly, that is not something that anyone might ever hear. It may even be the first time it has ever been said. Yet, I was overwhelmingly compelled to say it, and it just came out. Suddenly, I was a passenger in my life journey; a person in a front-row theatre seat watching a scene in which I had a walk-on lead role. The man looked at me stunned for a few moments. Strangely though, I had no desire to explain or withdraw my comment, back-handed compliment that it was. He understood though; uniquely understood. This became apparent.

     ‘I think you also have a high IQ’, he said, a slight quiz on his face.

Aware that the puzzled shop assistant was observing this interplay, I cautiously offered, ‘Us aliens need to be able to spot one another.’ The now slightly nervous shop assistant let out something between a guffaw and a loud breath. Clearly, he thought this amusingly non-sensical. Harrari, had she been there, would have been insulted by my outspoken attempt to liken myself to her kind. But the man understood me, at least on the level I was on. He knew I wasn’t an alien but I couldn’t really say anything else to mean something entirely different.

     ‘Yes we do,’ he smiled. ‘It’s just that people have difficulty in understanding what I am saying. They...’

I interrupted him, fully on autopilot now. I had to tell him that I knew what he was going to say before he inadvertently insulted the shop assistant as well.

     ‘Hmmm, now that you have seen the world that humans see, you have moved onto something else. You see…..er…. beyond the veil.’

     ‘Yes, that’s it,’

He then went on to tell me who he was. I didn’t recognise anything he said until he finished with, ‘You know; like Elohim in the Bible.’

     ‘Ah! Now I know you. I know you.’ I said, more than a little discomfitted.

I don’t know if I was fearful of being thought to be a charlatan, or I was in the company of a madman, or a angel. But this guy’s spirit wasn’t holding a banner above his head to tell me something. I was hearing something in the actual words that came out of his mouth that weren’t the words that the shop assistant heard. If I could just focus a little harder I would be able to hear it more clearly.

Whereas, Hakim is my spirit avatar, and Harrari an abandoned alien I discovered in a wood I once lived in, this man was in a liminal position holding the door wide open to the spiritual world. But something was wrong. He wasn’t a friendly guide collecting tickets to a fairyland. He had torn the veil with an unfortunate slip or a hard, one-time only, thrust of anguish, followed by a series of clumsy visitations. Right before me was a spiritual vandal. It was as though he had, aimlessly wandering, actually stumbled across Mary Mapes Dodge’s boy, Hans Brinker, in her book, ‘Silver Skates’, with his finger in the hole in the dike to save Holland, and now he was repeatedly kicking him in the nuts. At the same time, he didn’t have access to all the aspects of the spirit realm so when he said to me, ‘I just hope this war is over soon,’ and then to the shop assistant, ‘He knows what I mean’ meaning I know, I had a glimpse that the confused lad was thinking that I am the cause of a war or even a participant in a war. Of course, the lad was right, but not really in the way he probably thought. I am not a neighbourhood menace; littering, swearing, spitting and illegally parking in other people’s spaces. I am quite simply not a liar. Messes people right up, that does. For me, I am at war with falsehood; lies that people tell themselves.

If this strange little man really had any connection to the spirit world I should be able to identify that. That was me thinking though and ‘thinking me’ was running through all the available clues to tell me what to do. Long-term suntan means outside a lot; reasonably well-spoken with good enunciation; bottle of beer in his hand; and a recent confession that he could not read the alcohol content on the bottles he was trying to choose from.

On the other hand, I was engaged in a disconnect of verbal communication that made sense somehow. This however, is how people with high IQ communicate. Connecting links are left unsaid because there cannot be any other solution. In other words, just making dots for the other person to join up. The problem for ‘thinking conscious me’ though, is that this is really similar to having a spirit conversation because there is no falsehood barring understanding between spirits. Paul wasn’t kidding when he said that he looks through a glass darkly in the Bible. Putting aside falsehood is most certainly the step to take if you want to talk to God.

How do I know this? Not because I have a high IQ. No; because I know that a storyteller already knows the plot and often fails to provide adequate links in the story. A storyteller is prescient and the readers or listeners are not. Some of the dots need to be joined and some not.

Does this strange man already know the story? Or is he a brain-addled highly intelligent alcoholic that can’t afford more than one bottle of quite expensive craft beer? Could be, because his tan says he does not drive; but then why would he drive, if he lives near the village shop? And, why buy a strong craft beer and call it your favourite?

The only thing I could do was involve the shop assistant in a pseudo-conversation by making an obscure link to the strange man’s ‘He knows what I mean’.

     ‘I do,’ I said, ‘But he,’ meaning the shop assistant, ‘won’t remember the conversation we had yesterday if I say, Opportunity cost.’

     ‘Of course I do’, he burst out, insulted. To be honest, he might well feel insulted, because effectively I had just intimated that his current confusion was his own fault due to his inability to follow a conversation. However, it gave me enough time to pay for the bread, and follow the little man out of the shop.

Even without the watching shop assistant I could not get a better read on the man.

Some time ago, I could tell within the first two minutes of meeting someone if they had siblings; whether they were older or younger siblings; their siblings gender; and sometimes their age differences. The interesting thing is, a child adopted into a family of children gave the same clues as does an only child; none.

This man was indistinguishable from any other man hurrying on his way and muttering over his shoulder, ‘Good to meet you.’ Except he said it twice so I suppose he meant it.

When two people ‘rap’ it is like musicians ‘jamming’. You can’t suddenly start jamming or rapping, quite simply because someone needs to start and the threads need to be picked up by another. I had a work colleague with which we rapped, but we also spent most of our time just talking and working. This man outside the shop, back in the real world, was constrained by decades of social convention and just walked away. If there is a shroud to be pulled over someone’s spirituality, it was duly used.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Brinker,_or_The_Silver_Skates

[ 21 minute read ]

Duality is a bed that duplicity and selfishness share

The world is a noisy place. Thinking, just thinking, is becoming more and more difficult. It seems I am surrounded by demons with the sole job of disrupting achievement. The proverbial teenager; you know the type; someone who wants to listen to music and have constant excitement, considers any person that places a boundary on their activity as a tyrant. Yet, listening to music is only useful to people who are studying or working in the Arts. However, as a leisure pastime, I am told, it is quite popular. Some people, even play music while they are studying. Having a duality of focus is admirable, but I think duality is a bed for duplicity and selfishness that begets a child called interference.

When I drive, I sometimes have the radio on. When some people jog they listen to music. I have even seen cyclists with earbuds and headphones.

I had the radio on when I had to reverse a lorry off a pavement back onto the road. It was a curved road and pavement, which meant that the parked car behind me was in my blind spot for a while. Because it was school-kicking-out time I focussed mainly on the pavement more than the road. The car had arrived between the time I got in the lorry and when I started reversing. I scraped the whole side of the car from front wing to back wing including the doors along the way. No-one was in the car. I did not hear the scraping or feel the bump. If there was a person in the car or someone standing between the lorry and the car, I would not have heard them shout. I could have killed someone. Now, I never have an auditory distraction when I am reversing any vehicle, ever. My passengers look at me agog when I turn off their favourite song.

     ‘Hey, that’s my favourite song!’

For a few moments, I don’t give a rat’s tail what you like or don’t like or how comfortable you are or what you are saying unless it is relevant to not maiming or killing someone or damaging property.

I silently think, ‘Shut up! Shut up! Shut up, you stupid, stupid, ignorant fool. YOU are a distraction!’, Being British, I simply say, ‘Sorry’, then ‘Please don’t’, when they reach for the radio to turn it back on again.

I am a very experienced driver; that is why I am nervous. The checks we make on our behaviour when we are beginners at anything almost inevitably fades into the background when we, with a little experience, regard our watching ‘overself’ as a tyrant that is ruining our fun. A little experience is all we need to convince ourselves that the student (ourselves) has outclassed the master (paradoxically also ourselves). Yet, in my world, the true master has a shape.

     ‘Well, Look at that! He’s getting ahead of himself. There’s not enough interference.’ The head Demon said. ‘Who do we have under our control. Let’s see, which neighbour is oblivious to our existence? Oh yeah! ALL OF THEM!’ it gleefully shouted.

I had gotten up nice and early to study. All my needs for focused attention were attended to. I had not broken my fast, so my energy would not be diverted to moving food around in my guts, and I was suitably dosed with caffeine, lots of caffeine.

     ‘He is getting used to the idea that it is useless to even try to succeed.’

     ‘Just another few shoves and he will give up’

     ‘Often,’ I hear, ‘it is enough to allow the thought of a probable outcome to divert us from our true path.’

I was reminded of a piece in Reader’s Digest, that someone had sent in. It was about a grandfather of a young boy explaining to him how their footprints in the snow showed their different approaches to life.

     ‘Look how, as we crossed the field, my footprints go from the gate at that end to the gate here. They are straight and purposeful. Now look how your footprints go from the gate to that tree and then to the pond and then to that tree and the water-trough and then in a curve end up here. Your way is complicated and unfocused. It does not have any direction.’

     ‘Yes, grandad’, laughed the boy, ‘But we ended up here at the same place and I had a lot more fun getting here than you did.’

It’s all relative. Even as I remembered this, Master nudged me and said, ‘I can hear you saying to yourself that spending time having fun is useful, and is a good argument against applying yourself in a circumscribed and focused way. This is distraction.’

    ‘Master', I wearily said, ‘I know what distraction is.’

    ‘Yet, you are distracted from remembering it.’

I arranged a meeting.

Ah! Someone has torn the title off

While this was taking place the Demon regional office looked on, unable to send one of its agents to dance before me and lead me to noticing the vape smell coming from the neighbour below me. It had, of course persuaded, Jake, who really IS below me that vaping is fine and there is no real reason to ever give up doing something that is so much fun. Many times, in the brief moments when our paths had crossed, I had noticed the spiritual spears that pierced his head and upper body. Most gruesome was the demon which had its walrus-like tusks deeply buried into Jake’s right shoulder and that side of his neck. Smaller ones always seemed to be clinging to his back, but really they are controlling him in ways I can not understand. Unfortunately, like bacteria, we all have these stuck to us. And, like leeches, we cannot just pull them off because they leave their ‘teeth’ behind that fester in the wound.

I have long given up trying to ‘educate’ people as to their plight. Realistically, we cannot just go around saying, ‘There is a nasty demon sucking your potential out of you, by the way’, without substituting, ‘by the way’ with ‘Man’. It is quite useless to say, ‘I can help you with that.’ meaning I can’t get it off you but I can tell you it is there and how YOU can get it off you. Actually, we can’t get them off by ourselves, again paradoxically, we need ourselves. You see where the duality is now?

But earlier, I inferred that duality leads to corruption; of the truth primarily. That’s bad isn’t it? Yes!

In surviving life on Earth, we have to play a game with all the other inhabitants; a game which has rules, but like the rules of the game ‘Monopoly’ each human family has adopted new household rules that suit them best. My family, when we played Monopoly, would pay fines into the middle of the board and anyone who landed on ‘Free Parking’ would take the accrued pot in the middle.

Playing the game of life with other people on earth means we have to cheat sometimes. Cheating is selfish, and selfishness means you survive a disaster while altruistic people in the same circumstances are helping others.

I lived in a town that decided to have a music festival one year. ‘Let’s make it a tradition!’ they said to themselves at the Council offices. At the time, I worked about sixteen hours a day and in eleven years I had had only four consecutive days off with a total of nineteen days off out of about three and a half thousand days. Booming music that originated from half a mile away met my ears. Early on, I went to the event, where there were no partying people and made it clear that the music was an interference.

     ‘We are trying to relax’ the organiser had said.

     ‘Exactly. Shut it down so we can relax.’ Music festivals are two-a-penny where I live. We need to be away from them to gather our wits and recharge ourselves with reality before the next one.

If I had looked carefully, I would have seen the demon’s spear in the organiser’s head that stopped him thinking clearly. He was egregiously convincing himself that a selfish undertaking to enjoy ourselves through music was justified because entertainment must be had in every stage of a person’s life. His thinking was curtailed by a demon to not include actual rest periods like sleep, contemplation, experiencing misery or sadness; all of which are essential for good life. And yes, misery and sadness are rest periods quite simply because they are a contrast to fun. 

Sooner or later, we have to get off the fun fairground ride that are all only so much fun because they are not free. In paying for fun, considered by most people to be a negative in our lives, we have an expectation of getting value for money. While we are on the ride we don’t remember the price we paid to get on it. Of course, we value the memory of the fun too. That is when we compare the cost to the benefit, and mostly find that we have invested our money wisely. Incidentally, my memory has a broken leg or something and won’t get out of its armchair. It has become lazy and arrogant and spends its time replaying old videos of my life, finding fault and pontificating on how it would have done things differently.

    ‘Yes, Yes, I know,’ I patiently soothe, ‘But that girl didn’t like me, so if I had stayed in the country and asked her out, it wouldn’t have turned out any differently. Memory, you really must stop spending so much time with Supposition.’ 

      I went on after a brief pause for memory to catch up. 

     ‘For most of us, Memory, Supposition is not much more than a tool, but to you, Supposition is your drinking buddy who brings you contraband while you convalesce. You ARE getting better, aren’t you?’

    ‘I used to be well, you know.’ Memory said. I could almost, but not quite see Memory reach for a blanket to cover his legs. ‘I don’t feel wanted, these days’, it moaned.

      ‘Trying using Adventure, for a while.’ I said. 

Adventure, as we all know, is in all of our medicine cabinets. Sadly, it is gathering dust and hard to reach behind that Austrian product, weirdly labelled, ‘Gemutlichkeit’ because somebody in marketing can’t spell ‘comfortableness’, and hidden by the ‘Scales of Limitation’ with which we daily weigh ourselves, Adventure, dusty, but still a good bed-time read for Memory, patiently sits in the proverbial ‘Dentist’s Waiting Room’ reading magazines. Adventure knows it will have its turn one day but with so long since the last cleaning it expects things to be gruelling and messy when it does happen. In any case, Expectation constantly haunts him, or ‘keeps him company, bless him.’

During our impromptu meeting, I had to remind memory that he was not knowledge itself; that knowledge is in storage, and Memory, with his own predilections that satisfy his own character, is the librarian that fetches information from stored knowledge. I also had to make sure that memory would know that he would not be able to fob me off with some ‘cock and bull’ story about how the stored information has gremlins in it which like to tell long stories that lead off into fiction. I promised I would send someone to mend the swinging door between the library of knowledge and Imagination’s workshop.

     'There has to be a door there between the library and Imagination’s Workshop, as well as separate doors to and from each of them, to your office.’ My telephone voice tautously toned over the speaker in the corner of the room. Of course, all my voices had a free ticket to every meeting, except for the comedy voices which were kept in Memory’s office, in a box near the library. A visitor’s quick glance would have seen a recently thumbed instruction manual on the box opened at….let me see…...Ah! Someone has torn the title off. It was probably the same person who had removed the sign from Imagination’s Workshop door that had said, ‘Strictly no admittance’. All sorts of wild ideas had been coming out of there recently. It is almost impossible to police because nobody recognises any of the new ideas until Memory and I have tagged them for processing.

I should say, that the ‘Scales of Limitation’ is a Trojan Horse gift from the demon-world. We don’t need a birthday or a debilitating event to be handed it, but usually these circumstances are the catalysts that encourage us to accept the ‘gift’. Oh, No, The ‘Scales of Limitation’ with which we weigh ourselves is in every spiritual library we attend and the personal-sales technique, that demons use, persuades us to, at least, stock one copy in our personal library; you know:

   'You never know’, they winningly smile, ‘You might find it useful. Bye!’

 My advice? Burn it! Burn it now! We were born with our own book called, ‘Danger and what to do when it leaps out at you’. The problem is we have to learn how to read it. 

     ‘Hello, young one. Would you like me to read your book to you? Then you can put it away and never need to look at it again.' 

I learnt about that trick when I was sixteen during an extraordinary meeting in a lucid dream in which I was to choose which spiritual way I would go. Hmmm, I can’t decide.

Imagination had recently been having a problem with ‘Formula’ creeping into his workshop. Being linear and one dimensional Formula has always been very difficult to spot when he was there, but recent off-site training had made Formula attractive to some of the Concepts that worked in Imagination’s Workshop and a few Concepts were hanging around long enough for a presence to be felt. The clustering of Concepts, of course, led to some very good decisions being made, but I knew that such a conglomeration could easily become a coagulation. Lumpy imagination, we do not want. This then, was another place for demons to get a hand-hold. 

I know that conspiracy theories, contrary to beliefs solely formed from external sources, such as in confirmation biased information, needed lumpy imagination in order for Memory to recognise that a formed idea needed filing. Since I have been promoted to, or more accurately a senior post has been created for me of, Chief Operating Officer, with a majority vote on internal activities, I have been sifting through the available departments for records with a goal of creating an agile and lean operating system. Obviously, the two dimensional Formula was assisting me. I told Imagination to stop turning Formula sideways when he came to visit him (we need to see that Formula is actually there), and told Formula that Imagination is always busy but certain times could be arranged to help to construct a ‘form’, jig’, or ‘mould’ for Imagination to work to; but as the nature of Imagination’s job is to take naturally created psychedelic drugs specifically tuned to our being, it is not always a GOOD time to visit, because there is a high chance of coagulation.

     ‘Invite only.’ I warned.

Head of Services made it clear that some of the cleaners were inconsistent with disconnecting and clearing away all the extraneous and disused temporarily-linked dendrites. In fact, some important ones acting as essential conduits had been removed and some of the more sparkily ones were being used as decorations and starting to take up a longer term residence. Evicting dendrites is problematic in itself but when they are like ropes, the spare bandwidth is often used to carry information that was once pertinent to the original build but is now non-sequitur to anything nearby.

Formulation (Formula’s sister) said she would look into building an efficient super highway of dendrites for the sole purpose of degree level study. I remarked that it would have to bypass Imagination’s Workshop but transit bodies should be able to access it in order to ferry away useful tidbits that we can rearrange for our own purposes. It was noted that this is duplicitous in nature, particularly as there was an underlying tension surrounding the unsaid intention to dismantle the super-highway once all the relevant information had been successfully siphoned off. Head of Works and Head of Services agreed to discuss plans to create a new department called, ‘New Creative Tools’ which would only be accessible from Imagination’s Workshop and Formula would hold the key to, though not necessarily be the ferryman, between the two departments.

- end of story -

Because I operate in a cross-functional team, Harrari and Hakim were present. Personally, we three didn’t really see the necessity of their presence but I had to make sure that they would be able to stop Formula making changes to how we three communicate. There must never be a disablement or interference to our clear communication, particularly in light of the continuing dimming of the spirit world and its slightly gelatinous form in many places that made fluidity between us and the rest of it ever more difficult. We still didn’t have a solution to the microwave problem. Harrari can communicate with her alien species by using the high tension electric wires spread across the countries of the world to send and receive signals; not difficult, she says.

    ‘It is all done with prime numbers.’

I have actually heard it myself, but, when they sent and received, it just sounded like an American radio advertisement selling something or other, and the carrier wave was just an ear-worm to me. I think Long-wave radio used to send a similar repeating signal when no communication was sent to let people who are seeking the frequency know that they have found it.

Hakim, my faithful friend and protector-avatar, is ever-near and ready for a medium sized spiritual attack, but we three know we will need some new tools one day.

Unfortunately, if we want to walk like the grandad in the story that was sent in to Readers Digest, directly from one place to another, we have to learn how to ignore distractions like pretty trees, and ponds, or clumsy-minded and demon-dulled neighbours creating puffs of sour air with their vapes. The demons love the foetid air here, they meet up here and every now and again when another one arrives, the door to their realm opens and another waft of stale demon-sweat-ridden air leaves my neighbour’s mouth and, looking about itself for an outlet, evilly finds its way into my clean and spiritually-fresh home. Of course, Hakim alerts me and my involved focus on the text I am studying evaporates as we silently debate what to do. Usually, it is a minor demon and now that my nemesis is himself dead, Hakim can easily sieve the demons out of the stench. Nonetheless, Harrari and I are more than a little miffed at the constant interruptions but it is Hakim’s job and he cannot retire until the myriad of demon’s that my nemesis hosted are disarmed, disseminated and made safe. Of course, that day will not come soon. His demons are legion.

Like an obsessed house-proud denizen of pompous self-righteousness I have to stop trying to learn and understand, to sweep out the drunken demons that follow the scent to an idyll. Just like the ‘nutter on the bus’ talking to (poking) the person going to an exam, who has all the information they have on their chosen subject finely balanced on their heads, a slight deviation in posture will bring it all tumbling down. We know that the cheats who smuggled the information into the exam by storing it INSIDE their heads will win through against the distracting non-playable characters on the bus.

Of course, demons are sent to prevent us absorbing information that will be ultimately useful to us. We are supposed to succeed at pretty much everything we try our hands at, if we have the right aptitude; and we would, without distractions.

In psychology, in order to successfully recall information there are three steps required.

Coding

Storing

Decoding

If we fail at one of these tasks we will inevitably lose the information.

Storing information requires a physicality that not everyone possesses. After an incident that affects the brain. Areas where information was once stored may become physically inaccessible. The links in the brain go to a dead-end where there was once a series of shelves with stored information.

Coding information requires the transmutation of stimuli into something that the brain can process. Processing is not necessarily understanding it. Children know that the sky is up and it is blue without understanding why – it just is, is good enough for that information to be stored. Even rubbish can be coded, stored and decoded for successful recall to occur, though this is much, much harder because by ‘rubbish’ we mean ‘random’ as in not obviously linked to anything else. It is the linking of nuggets of information to other ‘bits’ of information that help make up the encoding of information; mnenomics is an example of this. A candle or pencil has a similar shape to the numeral ‘1’, just as the shape of a stereotypical form of a sailing boat (a sloop) resembles the numeral ‘4’. This is rational and dedicated encoding we can use to recall the order of things. Here is a list up to ten

Pencil; Swan; Bow (bow and arrow), Sailing boat; Fishing hook; Tadpole, Boomerang; ‘Fat Lady’ (from bingo); Balloon on a string; Bat and Ball

I prefer rhyming sounds: Bun, shoe, tree, door, hive, sticks, heaven, gate, line, hen.

To remember the order of a list of ten, you simply associate the respective image with the new item to be remembered. This pairing then gets stored and to recall the new item and its place in the list you just bring back the code and see what is associated with it.

    ‘Please recall item number four’ (an orange – maybe) which to me, is the new item printed on, or is in the shape of a door. The door could have a door-knocker shaped like an orange, or an orange could be the door or blocking the doorway.

All demons have to do is interfere with the coding and the information is instantly lost. Imagine being given a series of numbers to remember and spilling your coffee on your lap-top half way through. A trained person would, however, still code the numbers.

Because learning a new subject often has few connections to anything else all the bits of information MUST be encoded not well, that means without repetition or ambiguity. Understanding something complex requires a building of information that is coded and stored and recalled over and over again until the whole is understood and finally coded and stored, before any comparison can be made with new information and then recoded and stored. Such as, cows are mammals. Random information is now stored. Mammals feed their young with milk. Random information is now stored. It is much easier for us to just remember that cows feed their young with milk which becomes ‘Milk goes on my breakfast cereal and in tea or coffee’ which is of secondary importance to ‘Cow milk is available in shops’. Now we can forget about cows providing milk. We only have to remember that we can get milk for our own use in supermarkets. Now we know this. However, if your phone rings at the split second you notice there is no milk in the fridge and you answer it and then complete an action associated with the phone call, there might not be any milk in the fridge tomorrow morning. If your morning routine is to drink coffee before you go out to wake you up a bit before driving, and you simply won’t drink black coffee before driving to the shop to get milk (half-awake) a demon can make a susceptible person accidentally dial your phone number the day before you run someone over the next day.

Why do my passengers want to turn the car radio on when I am about to reverse?

https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?u=zw219551

mostly fiction

Harrari and Hakim

I think my abandoned alien friend, whom I call Harrari (‘Harraree’) doesn’t like me so much as I first thought she did. Actually, I don’t suppose it matters how it is spelt, because I don’t write to it or her, I am not entirely sure which.

Now I live in a house my life is somewhat suspended in the glutinous gel of physicalities and practical matters. I thought Harrari doesn’t like me because I found a plastic tiger in my back garden, the sort you find in a small child’s toy zoo, and set it up outside my front door to act as a psuedo warning that a weirdo lives here, and the caller should expect weirdness if the door is opened. You know, weirdness just falls out of its own accord. 

Anyway, no-one knocks on my front door, but I did once find my loft hatch open when I got up one morning. An intruder or another lonely alien practical joke perhaps, like knocking my glasses off when you found me living in your wood? ‘Not funny, Harrari’. My loft floors are insulated and the warm from the landing was going on holiday to what it might imagine to be a new place to inhabit. Not good. Warm air holds more moisture than cold air and that is why condensation forms on cold windows and walls.

I had, over the years I have spent living here, had an annual struggle with mildew forming on some of the far out of reach walls in the stair well. The previous occupants had allowed a nest of mildew to form in the upper corner where two exterior walls and the ceiling meet. Baby mildew spores would drop down and find comfortable places around my house; behind cupboards and other hidden places. There are two things you can do; empty your house of everything, including your lovely kitchen cabinets and get a plumber to stop your water and remove the toilet cistern, your bath and your toilet; or pay very, very close attention to controlling how much moisture is in the air and the temperatures of each room. Controlling the build up of moisture is easiest. Moving warm and wet air from rooms that have a temporarily higher temperature than normal to cooler areas of my home means I can let the cooler air with its condensing water vapour out into the wild through the front door. That is, if I am awake.

When in a dog eat dog world, be a cat

Harrari, is like a friendly labrador dog, but way, way, way more intelligent. Harrari has her own character. Harrari is funny and deliciously cruel and diverse in humour. Not at all hurtful though; and here is where I have a very good understanding of Harrari’s abilities to be deadly. Invisible, silent and almost undetectable, with an intelligence that would be off any chart we humans might invent in the next thousand years that measures intelligence (I have just been told, almost exactly two hundred years), Hararri, could if she wanted, be devastating. It is useful to remember that it was Harrari that guided dog-walkers away from my woodland camp, and guided me out of a ditch directly to my tent in a pitch-dark wood, around spiky bushes, holes, fallen trees and along unseen paths to my temporary home.

So when I discovered my loft hatch open I was immediately alarmed. The police would not climb in, after I told them that I didn’t want to go in because while passing through the hatch you can be stabbed in the neck, and any intruder would do that to avoid capture. It didn’t help when I showed the police officer my thirteen inch (34cm) kitchen knife with a one and a half inch (3.8cm) wide blade near the handle. This is what I proposed to protect myself with when the hoodlums jumped out of my attic, I told him. He stared at it on the kitchen counter for a full ten seconds. He then stood at the top of the stairs using MY torch and said, ‘There is no-one in there.’ After I had fetched him a mirror and showed him how to use it, which he bumbled, I had to climb in, he was too scared, into the attic to look behind the header tank (water tank found in older homes where water for heating is temporarily stored to refill the immersion tank in the unforeseen event that the water supply to the home is not available, to prevent the immersion heater setting light to the airing cupboard by overheating itself – the thermostat inside it tests water temperature only).

It was uncanny that he reminded me to look behind the header tank. Why did he think I was in there? I could have sworn he said that there was no-one there before. When I climbed out he asked me if I am crazy. 

       'Do you have mental problems?'

I secretly laughed at his naivety. So did Harrari, but even I didn’t hear her. I never even hear her laugh at me, she only hints at it later, when I am almost entirely asleep.

       ‘We all do.’ I said to the police officer.

He then instructed me to only call for help when I have been stabbed in the neck, and the culprit has escaped, like any frightened policeman would command. 

        'Only phone us when you actually see someone'

His female colleague saw him for what he was; Certainly Harrari did, Hakim did, and the policeman's own spirit was holding up a banner behind him that said 'I am scared!' It changed to 'Everything is your fault!' and then, once it saw me looking at it, 'Sorry!'

Harrari was, with her usual perspicacity, laughing at both the policeman and my naivety. She had opened the loft hatch, while I was asleep, to move warm and moist air from the top of the landing into the attic so it did not instead descend down to the bottom of the stairs.

She can pass through my locked front door with a good deal of effort but warm air cannot. Taking a key from a hook and manipulating it to fit the keyhole in order to be able to turn a stiff lock and then twist a handle to open the front door is, not outside her capabilities, but I suspect she would be exhausted by this, since it can only really be done with telekinesis; and such finite maneuvers are terribly tricky, even for her. However, a shove that comes from a slowly building storage of force, such as pushing up the loft hatch is quite do-able for her.

Very kindly, Harrari left the hatch turned forty-five degree over the opening so I could easily close it again without climbing in. She, of course, knew that I could not lock my left elbow to support my weight, because I had fallen off my bicycle and had swelling in that elbow.

You can see how I interpret Harrari as a faithful labrador; but she is not! A well-meaning creature would, like a dog, try to help its pack members. ‘I will let some air out, or in, for you!’. (Opening windows for Harrari is tricky too).

We, as arrogant creatures, that think we know best and better then mere cats and dogs, over-estimate our intelligence. Hararri was laughing at my naivety and sheer stupidness for not recognising that she was still there, with me, and had helped me while I was asleep. Similarly, I thought it was sweet that my cat of long ago, once brought in about a dozen live frogs from my neighbours pond; probably because, with raised eyebrows at the smells from my cooked food, he also thought I might like to eat the poisonous frogs. Maybe, and I prefer to think this, my cat had a wicked sense of humour; deliciously cruel but ultimately harmless. You wouldn’t want to be at the focus of its hunting and killing prowess though. I compare Harrari to a cat because they are both stealthy killers but choose not to attack.

A thought just struck me; I still don’t know what Harrari eats. I have just remembered it is for Harrari that I left out some food, in Tupperware containers, outside of my tent for the black human-like silhouette I saw in the woods I was living in. It was, of course, Harrari.

Fever had shifted my perception towards the spirit world where Harrari and her alien species are visible. Back then, with no fridge in my tent, I often accidentally poisoned myself. I couldn’t see any spirits, because they are even further away on the spectrum, but there, among the scintillating flashes of light in every direction, was a very, very sensuous movement, almost like a snake.

It is movement that attracts a predator’s eyes; and we humans are definitely predators, our forward facing, binocular eyes telegraph this to all animals. Because this is true, like all the advice we are given if we feel threatened by a predator, the black silhouette stopped moving. I could feel it looking at me, as I simultaneously felt myself half in and half out of the both the physical world and the spirit world. I now know I had crudely torn the veil between the worlds. Harrari was not expecting me to notice her, and alarmed, because humans can be exceedingly dangerous with stuff we do not understand, she ran away.

So scared was she, that on this one occasion, she broke some long ago fallen dry branches which cracked underfoot as she fled, panicked by my ability to see her. In seeing her, she possibly felt that perhaps humans have developed that ability across the world. Her safety as she saw it, was in a moment of, as it turns out, false realisation, swept from her. I let her go; I didn’t follow, she had a head start of probably forty metres, and she is a very fast and fit runner.

That evening I left some food out for her. Of course, she didn’t eat any; the effort to open the Tupperware containers probably outstripped the energy she might get from my strange food. There was however, the feathers of a pigeon nearby. That could have been a mink that ate that though. If it was, it would also explain where the cock pheasant that woke me every morning by shaking his wings went. I don’t know who ate it, or if it just ran away.

Where do 'Spirit Fish' come from?

Harrari later came back and changed the tunes in my head for me, you know those annoying ear-worms of music. Being half of this world but having an invisible influence in another is not something I have ever been able to fully understand, but this was where I currently found myself. Those dreams that seem so real when we wake but fade so quickly are like holding a spirit fish. Real fish are slippery and wriggle a lot; who wouldn’t wriggle when they find themselves suddenly outside of their safe environment where they can breathe. Spirit fish are slippery, wriggle and become invisible. Even if you haven’t lost it, you think you have. ‘Tricky little buggers!’

I am inclined to think that dreams are made of ‘spirit fish’ substance having a laugh and fooling around, then when we can see them from the perspective of our physical world they ‘swim’ away. Or if that metaphor doesn't work for you, try dicing onions with a blunt knife - good luck with that!

If you have ever woken from a dream that you are holding something and are surprised that you are not when you wake, you might, if you were really observant, notice that the objects you were trying to pick up, just before you wake became progressively more intangible. Clearing a picnic table of dishes and things is normal while dreaming, but as the real world and dream world begin to collide, our hands glide through the cake, but we can still lift the paper plate; then not the paper plate but only the napkin with an address scribbled on it is fine. Until eventually, we wake and all the things you have tried to salvage from the dream are not, after all, at the bottom of your bed with you. How frustrating and disappointing. That is what it is like spending most of your time being at the liminal place where worlds collide. I could show you, but I just can’t carry the ‘spirit fish’ across.

There is an invisible bridge right in front of you. Come on over!

Harrari and I, for a time, at my behest really, have tried to create a bridge between the physical world, what most people call the ‘real’ world; the spirit world; and the dream world. We, Hararri and I, know that a lucid being can have an effect in any of these places. Hararri, being an alien, is not of this world and has evolved to survive on her own world. It isn’t her fault that her brothers left her behind on earth after their intelligence-gathering trip here abruptly finished. She has had to adapt to our world from just a very young and scared lone alien, to a fully independent young ‘adult’ alien. I suppose I am lucky, that she sort of grew up here without the constraining and rigid thinking of her alien species to shape her into hating humans for their rigid stupidity. She thinks we are funny.

Alcoholics find it incredibly, hugely, almost impossible to wean themselves off alcohol when they monitor and control their own doses and have lots of money and a twenty-four hour service station within a ten minute walk. They just have to go ‘cold-turkey’ and clucking, listen to their brains shrinking and playing tunes to itself while it tries, like any highly functioning creature, to make sense of all the stimuli it is absorbing.

Making sense of twisting wires

When I was sixteen, I had a head-cold with a fever that would not let me sleep, just like an alcoholic going cold-turkey. Somehow, I had the ‘cure’ which I suppose also meant that I controlled the doses, and I had a twenty-four hour service station right there in my head. All I had to do was ‘go’ there. In a weird nightmare I had to connect thousands of wires together without a circuit diagram. Worse still, all these thousands of wires were either blue, yellow, or red, exactly the same hue and tint; identical except for three colours. I would then have to run a current through all the connected wires every now and again to see if any connections were correct. Worse still, they all wriggled around and kept changing place so if a connection was false and I disconnected it, and I tried to remember which wires they were, they moved.

Some time passed, maybe hours. Then, finally, I had it, all the wires were correctly connected. I fell into a deep sleep and the next morning I was so greatly improved that I got up. By the afternoon It was as though I had not been ill. I was just a little weak from not eating for a few days. Harrari thinks this is remarkable, and she tells me that is why she still stays with me. I suspect her scientific family background makes me interesting to her. But she is not a scientist. She was left behind long before she could adequately train.

The capital of Zimbabwe? No

Car tyres going over joints in a nearby road, make a repetitive sound for each car, and the cold-turkey brain (a hang-over for most of us); or one that is in liminal space; or is in an otherwise feverish state, eventually decides the repetitive noise is garbled speech that is really hard to decipher. But, as soon as it settles on something, that is all you can hear. Many of us have seen a comedian on the telly, showing us words that sound like something more humourous than the true words 0f songs; and then, that is all we can hear when we hear the song again.

Harrari got her name when I asked her for it, when she one day came to visit me. She stayed outside my tent. Neither of us wanted her inside. Because the cars nearby going over the same bumps made a ‘Ha raa ree’ noise, that was louder than her weird-sounding real name spoken with her super-soft voice, we settled on that. I don’t suppose all telepathic voices are soft, but certainly, hers was whenever she soothed my thoughts with just a few words. Of course, for weeks, she had passed right by my tent, unnoticed. One day, I was really suffering with ear-worms. If you can imagine two bars of a very simple melody repeated over and over and over again, you understand.

           ‘You had enough? She said, ‘I will change the tune for you. Hows that?’ Suddenly, there was no ear-worm, just a soothing melody.

Other times, sleep was also difficult, and sometimes Harrari would crouch outside my tent and reaching through the fabric telepathically brush my head with her hand. Tent fabric, is not too difficult for her thoughts to pass through. Magic sleep came in moments; like switching off a light. This is one thing that really frightens me about her; she can make humans sleep with a switch.

Truth, marry, or death

One time she asked if I wanted to marry her so all my problems would be eternally taken from me, and when her alien friends came back for her (in a few weeks), I could go with them, but I had to be completely free from wrong-doing for the few weeks before her family arrived. She, she told me could never go with them because she would have to be re-programmed somehow – she never explained how. I wasn’t sure what this really meant, and like I said, Harrari can be exceedingly dangerous if she puts her mind to it. I think, she is ruthless, though not savage. Maybe wild, describes her.

Alea Jacta Est and Post factum nullum consilium

I felt that this might mean dying. In fact she had said, that I would afterwards be fully in the spirit world. I didn’t want to upset her and then be savagely killed by her in the night; so I stole food from a homeless man the night before it was all going to happen. The next morning, my mobile phone, still with a charged battery, had, had all its stored numbers deleted. Harrari later told me that at the last minute, she had directed me to steal the same food I had given to the homeless man, from an undercover intelligence operative watching a kebab shop, posing as the homeless person. She, of course, knew I didn’t want to die; it was; at the time, very close, though. Thinking about it, she could have, and can, kill me any time she wants to.

She didn’t quite cause me to think that she made me buy food for the homeless man, when I actually needed food myself. Nor did she tell me that she had caused the homeless man to gently place the food away from him. We are never allowed to be sure that there is some other explanation for how things came about.

             ‘If there is a script for the future or a log of the past, all of you would instantaneously cease to exist.’ she once explained.

Of course, an undercover intelligence operative has back-up to remove trip hazards that are unintentionally left in their way.

Nonetheless, the intent to steal from a defenseless person was enacted, and far superseded any charitable act I had added to my spiritual record. Harrari told me I had been examined in the spirit world, my mobile phone numbers were deleted so I could not accidentally phone someone with my physical body rolling over in sleep, and I was rejected because my guilt led them to my insidious behaviour.

            ‘Once the order for examination is made, it cannot be cancelled’, she whispered to me.

            'Am I dead?'

Sometimes, when I open one of the firedoors in my home, Harrari crouching really low, still invisible and hoping I won’t notice, slips past my legs, in one direction or the other, I can’t tell. I think, from memory, she is actually about one metre sixty tall.

Hakim, whom I have mentioned in a previous blog, is the spirit-avatar-manifestation I conjured, when I was sixteen, to protect me from my violent brother when he was my guardian. Hakim, is still not friends with Harrari, but at least they don’t fight, or maybe Hakim is always running away from the feline Harrari, with her mischievous humour and suppressed deadliness.

She scares me a lot.

  mental health

[ 18 minute read ]

I like to play mind-chess with unsolicited visitors to my home

Every now and then, a pair of people knock on my door to talk to me about Jesus and God. I thoroughly enjoy these moments because I have a deep belief in the spiritual world, so I am not afraid of any witchcraft or hypnotism they might try to trap me with. Some time ago, I came to understand that 'omnipresent' means, in the past, present and the future. That means that, theoretically, we can pray in the future for our sins in the past and God, being in the future, hears those prayers and prevents us being spoiled by sin, or even committing sin. I use this as a universal truth with the evangelists on my doorstep, and we play mind-chess for a while. If, towards the very end of the conversation, I mention that 'omniscient' means knowing what will happens in the past, present, and future, it shows that planning to pray in the future, like next Sunday, to cover a sin we are about to commit today, is useless because it is not sincere. God and I have a good laugh at this over a brandy and a cigar. Neither of us smoke or drink, so we just laugh instead.

I created James and Brian, two characters to show how foolish most of us are, and especially me. At the end, you can hear God laugh at James' stupidity. This is just a story. I have taken a strong view as narrator to make a case for James.

Mind Chess

The allotment was empty when James got there. The gate was open but there were no delusional would-be market-gardeners to be seen. The exposed dry soil made James think of water. It even smelt dusty today; humidity levels were low, and it hadn’t rained for over five weeks. His own plot was green and abundant with fresh growth but everywhere else was a scene of abandonment. Bare soil with random segregated weeds moping in the sun made James contemptuous of the absent hobbyists and pretenders. Only gooseberry bushes seemed to be growing; gooseberries bushes scattered across arid plots surrounded by congregating weeds vying for position, like unruly football fans at a match that hadn't started yet.

Nobody, it seemed, was concerned with neatness or order, yet farmers, James thought, with all the land they cultivate were tidier than these lazy losers. Some things came easy for James. Having self-propagating flowering plants with lots of ground-covering foliage that prevented the soil drying out and kept weeds down in early Spring was just the obvious thing to do; knowing this allowed him spare time. He had long ago concluded that if he hadn’t expended any energy sowing these seeds or tending the plants he really didn’t mind digging them up to plant other preferred seedlings. Some things were difficult for James. Compassion and empathy were alien to him, so much so that he was ruthless even with himself. He had had his turn at suffering and avoided any circumstance that had a probability of happiness, as he saw it. Happiness, he felt, could be taken from him, by accident or by someone’s will. He was disappointed with life and lived a life of asceticism, with no expectation of joy. You might expect him to be in fine physical shape but he was lazy, preferring to use his brain to find ways to alleviate or avoid the toil of hard work. He was also young; not even sixty-two yet.

Pushing his bicycle with day-glow green handlebars and front forks, he went further in, hoping for something stimulating that was emotionally free, but finding nothing of interest. His own plot, he saw, was just as he had left it, green and luscious with its covering of Limnanthes douglasii, or Poached Egg plant. This was safe for him; no emotion or effort put in and free aesthetic value taken out. His mental cost – benefit analysis said ‘win – win’. He was about to leave when he spied a man painting a tiny shed, going just beyond scumbling and changing its colour from grey to duck-egg blue.

James quickly learned that Brian used to be a secondary school teacher, because Brian wanted him to know that he used to be useful. By association with his career, Brian hoped that everyone he told would continue to think that he was a hero, a modern day crusader in driving forward decades of young minds into a bright future but was realistically a voracious and gaping maw of banality in the North East of England; an unattended torpidity that would swallow up even the sharpest of students. James, on the other hand, was an unqualified educator; a corrector of intellectual mistakes, and a ruthless and unfeeling man who had dedicated himself to proving everyone he met, wrong, stupid, a waste of space, or obsolete. 

James had strong views and knew the far-reaching extent of his mind outstripped most others. Where others relied on heuristics, James experimented; where others got information from newspapers, television and social media, James parasitically sucked dry selected information he found in the people he met; though never the information that the host thought valuable and had gleaned from their favourite media sources. James was instead searching for tiny connecting pieces to complete his collection of finished thinking. He needed to understand his world in fine detail, so he could eventually show the rest of the world that he was right to hate everyone for their stupidity and and right to be a loner.

There are two types of people according to James; sublime people of high spiritual, moral, or intellectual worth who were beneficial to him; and the rest of the world. James categorised Brian to be obsolete and a drain on public learning. However, Brian, innocently holding his small tin of paint in one hand and a brush in the other, and comfortable in his fug of accumulated miscomprehension had roused James’ interest. Mental stimulation was the drug that kept James alive. He never showed his true colours when he first met someone. Instead, he let them rudely promote themselves and then gave them reasons to go away and think about how they might wake from the weary slumber that was home to their comforting insensibility. James thought himself special. Conversely, he knew this and that is why he hated himself. Self-flagellation had eaten away at James’ confidence and left only a paradigm of behaviour almost completely devoid of compassion.

Initially, Brian was friendly and not alarmed and after general conversation on plants and how he had moved his shed, Brian suddenly swerved onto a blustering, and clearly unrefined, path with an outburst on people dumping their rubbish in the Birmingham streets. Brian wasn’t quite ranting and James knew that he wasn’t crazy by the standards of the time. He recognised a man that spent at least a couple of hours with a pint in his hand at the bar of his local pub on Sundays. Like everyone else, talking, for Brian,  was almost entirely only mental exercise.

‘They just dump their rubbish in the streets’, cried Brian indignantly. ‘I mean their mattresses and things. They should take it all to the tip.’

James, calm in his thinking, knew that not everyone had access to a van or trailer in Birmingham, and there was a rubbish removal-person strike in Birmingham, so no-one could arrange for a mattress or old cupboard to be taken away either. To James, Brian was certainly, by the standards of the day, completely average in his thinking; clearly insane. James, however, was charitable in classing it as ‘lazy and crust coated thinking’. He recognised the patina on Brian’s thinking; patina that was a result of poor maintenance and a reactive exposure to lazy thinkers. ‘Get your thoughts out, use them, Brian, and embellish them with facts and fresh ideas. Where is your inventiveness, Brian?’ he thought. He could almost ‘see’ extraneous bits of thoughts being sheared off in Brian’s head as they were shaped to fit with other similarly corroded thoughts, and cobbled together, to quickly throw up a feeble scaffold so flimsy that only a minor test would knock it down, but sufficient enough for him to formulate his own opinion to use as a remedial buttress; an opinion that once it had reached his fore-brain and left his mouth would be his long-standing fall-back position because it was the only one he had. It would be a buttress to a non-existent scaffold that becomes the foundation for the next scaffold. Now that it had been recently and neatly placed on the wobbly shelves in the library of Brian’s mind, he would be attracted to its shiny newness. The attendant analogue library filing card for where it was stored, would, with its crisp corners and uncreased facade, for a long while be more attractive than its dog-eared, mis-filed, and stained neighbours. Brian had made all his relatable experiences obsolete. Thinking stalled.

James felt compelled to help Brian restart his donkey-engine, cement-mixer type mind; a mind that needed to first be pulled free from a bog of mistreatment.

Unfortunately, the mind is not hermetically sealed from the outside world and the gatekeepers in charge of inward-bound information in Brian’s mind were now baffled and throttled by newly installed governors that came in a box-set with a belief that his education was completed when he achieved a recognised teaching qualification.

Brian’s unconscious source thought was, ‘I know my subject and the University has told me that I can adequately teach it. I have experience of teaching in secondary schools as part of my degree, so I now know everything I need to bend young minds to think like me. They really should, you know, because I am right. No! More than that, because I care, I am a hero!’

He had, a long time ago, in younger years, consciously thought, ‘I am so excited. I want to help young people. I really care.’

Any observer could, in retrospect, suggest that the demons were ready and waiting to leap into him to corrupt his valiant hope while he fervently clutched his University approbation, but already they were in him, part of his core, inherited from his parents, and encouraged by his friends and peers.

‘No new information is needed. Don’t explore. You have all the information you need to teach empty heads. Relax.’

‘Well done!’ to Brian meant, ‘You have done enough. You can stop now.’

This necrotic stagnancy was starkly evident to James in the rest of their discussion. Brian had opinions on Government handouts; criminal records preventing people from ever working in their whole lives; and who might attend and be an appropriate recipient at Food Banks. James, with a robust understanding of these social issues through diligent research and empirical knowledge threw in ‘Shame on them!’ as the conversation segued from benefit cheats to habitual scroungers. This left-over salty seasoning of the stew of Brian’s opinion on righteously moaning benefits recipients was too much for Brian’s palate. But James had carefully measured that condiment into his hand to check its volume and supposed effect, and smiled at Brian’s donkey engine mind chewing on old slime and chunks of debris from his socially-conscious 1990s history, when it balked at the jet-wash of fresh briny thinking.

Brian, with his self-assurance, had already made his first mistake with James; thinking that everyone watches television and have similarly long straws that are permanently thrust into the same soup of Orwellian nonsense and thus everyone is supplied with the same delectable but mentally-hostile nourishment. One of the reasons why James did not eat media-cake was because it tastes delicious but is hostile to the body. It satisfies a want, yet secretly poisons a need.

Subconsciously, Brian was reconnoitering for people to add to his group of confirmation-bias addicts; searching for another stumbling mess of a person who prefers an easy route through a jungle of information; a route that was crudely cut by a man with a machete following an animal track, that became a track for illegal loggers. A path that is there by dint of its availability. The more people use it, the more easily it is found, due to its wide and trampled aspect. Brian was used to following the pack. His younger self would have wept.

‘They just dump their rubbish outside other people’s homes in Birmingham.’ Brian remarked, alluding to, though not saying outright, people leaving their rubbish outside the homes of people of colour, and not instead gently placing it outside white people’s homes. James was aware of that happening. He suspected that Brian thought he would jump on his band-wagon of aggrieved righteousness because James was closer in colour to Indians and Middle-Eastern people than the old-school notion of what a European should look like; Scandinavian and Danish Vikings from 1000 years ago. In any case, James didn’t bite. He went the other way in thinking and held one idea back for the shock value, if it was needed.

In his head he went with an idea that, in a lawless environment there is no infrastructure to guide someone towards making mutually beneficial decisions, which came out as, ‘Why not, everyone else is; and where else is there to put it?’ James had now set himself up to fatally fail in his mission to destroy the canker in Brian’s mind. He would never recover from this outward attitude of simplistic laissez-faire.

It was not the first time James had been mistaken for an Asian or Middle-Eastern man. He spent a lot of time outside and grew tanned even by the winter sun. Certainly, he wasn’t going to, without question, be waving a flag for a brown ethnic minority people he did not belong to, and crying foul at every mistake made by a Viking, which Brian, it seems, thought he would.

Neither was he about to run around shouting ‘Up the Vikings!’

‘Is that what you think happens, Brian?’ James thought, ‘Brown people will always have opinions that support only brown people?’ He never said it, though, because he still believed he held the central position in the game of chess, that was, to him, their conversation. He knew that attack would cause Brian to defend, and then there would only be a game of attrition; Brian would never have a confident gambit if he was forced to defend himself. It was his opponents’ gambits that James liked to publicly dissemble.

Brian still believed that James was from the same economic background as himself and maintained his ‘friendly pontificating over a Sunday pint in the village local’ attitude. He breached the subject of criminality and having a criminal record forever preventing young adults from getting jobs. As a teacher, he’d had an enhanced criminal record check because he was working with vulnerable people. He presumed that everyone has the same check; James knew they don’t.

‘On application forms, hopeful people, in the UK, must confess to any convictions within the last ten years. After ten years, their records are deleted, and they are considered reformed and no longer a threat to themselves, the shop-keepers’ sweets, or other people. Actually’, James continued, ‘the records are not deleted. Convictions for most offences are simply not revealed when requested by a potential employer, except for certain crimes.’

Brian looked uncomfortable at this, inconveniently sure that young criminals were eternally doomed and condemned to be forever unemployed by their foolish earlier actions. By this time in the conversation, James knew that Brian, the ex-teacher, still foolishly believed that education universally solves unemployment in all environments, and is the sole and absolute requirement for opportunities for success to emerge. Brian, born in the North East of England has lived in the south of England for too long, and, in James’ mind had forgotten his home. When James added that as an employer, he had worked closely with recruitment agencies to get people at very short notice for some of his contracts, Brian’s spluttering, pollution-spreading engine of a mind encountering a steep incline in the road to progress, switched on the automatic choke because its core temperature still remained too low, and so more stale fuel from his tank of denial was sucked in, at the expense of fresh air. He refused to learn something new or believe that he was wrong. He did not recognise that he needed to purge his system.

Brian shifted back to talking about food banks, believing that it was, in fact, James who was clearly exhibiting signs of mental disorder, and he tried to link education, criminality, and poverty with a circumstance he had read about and seen on the news. From his self-imposed, though much supported by his peers, elevated position of superiority over mentally aberrant individuals, such as this moron before him, he thought that James would agree with his confused and blind belief that all visitors to food banks are food-poor. ‘How can he not see the truth? It is in the newspapers, for goodness sake!’, he irately pondered.

However, when Brian demonstrated this fabricated empathy for peasants living on bread and water, James had to make sure Brian knew that many of them indeed eat cake. He had attended a food bank perhaps five times over as many years. Extra money went out as a larger direct debit than he was anticipating and five more times because he was ineffective in temporarily saving money by switching utility providers.

‘As someone interested in social enterprises, I spent a lot of hours talking to the organisers of local food banks and hubs.’ James explained. ‘All of them complained about rising numbers and how to tax people with a set ‘donation’ of around five pounds for each visit. My input with them was, as a general rule, to not allow people to attend if their benefit is paid that same week.’

James was now beginning to reveal his ruthlessness, but he knew that the same people week after week were getting free food so they could buy luxuries such as eating out and expensive day-trips with the money they saved. This at the expense of both the needy and the food-hubs which spent money on food to accommodate the greedy as well as the hungry.

‘Shame on them’, he said again.

Brian, in his turn, was irritated by James’ arrogance and finally ended the conversation when James tried to explain how needs and wants change as people mature, so financial income has a different utility for different age groups.

‘I really must get on with painting this shed. My wife will kill me if I waste this paint.’

James turned his bike around. A duck in the pond laughed when an opportunistic jackdaw who had delightedly watched the whole thing croakily called, ‘Hear! Hear!’.

Brian blinked and stared, confounded, and watched, paint pot in one hand and brush in the other, while James pushed his bicycle away, towards the gate at the edge of the allotment and back to the road.More cars were parked at the gate.

James, alone with his thoughts again, was convinced that he had proved himself right. Students really are held back by coasting teachers. Yet, blindly, he had corrupted himself because he had no evidence to back this up. It was still supposition. Nonetheless, he closed his thought-experiment examination of teacher and pupil interaction, and added one more theory to his collection of completed thoughts.

The duck, unable to keep the smile off its face, put its head beneath the water, then needing air, withdrew it,  shook it, and laughed again at the jackdaw as it shamefacedly flew away.

Blog address for all the posts: https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?u=zw219551

[ 18 minute read ]

This is a framework of a story I came up with which I used to explain three types of competition in economics. It begins with a family of weavers of fine wool carpets, who own their own sheep, in the 14th century Indus Valley, India. I had to learn about sheep to help me understand markets! Please help yourself to the ideas and the explanations.

The actual interaction between the characters, you will have to imagine for yourself.

Three types of competition: pure, imperfect, and monopoly.

If there were once four siblings who were all taught by their parents how to make fine carpets in the Indus valley, in 14^th century India, the same way, to the same design, and with the same dyed wool from their own sheep, and sold these carpets in the market place in the village square alongside their father and mother at such a low price that no-one else could make a profit selling carpets in the village, that family would have a monopoly selling carpets in that village. 

If, in the region in which their village lay, there were sixteen other carpet makers who were also sheep owners and wool spinners, and they produced carpets to designs that very closely resembled the designs of the two parents and their four offspring, and sold their carpets at a very close price to each other, and no-one else in the region could match their prices there would be perfect competition. Perfect or pure competition is when a firm producing near identical goods to its competitors, has some control over its prices. Since all these producers or families have vertically integrated businesses the barrier to entry into their market is high to carpet makers who own no sheep and cannot process wool. These new carpet markets wanting to enter the market would need to buy wool either locally or from further afield, and the original producers could sell their carpets at below the production costs, including the cost of wool, that new entrants to the market would necessarily have to pay. Most importantly here, is we must realise that no-one is getting rich in this regional community; they are only taking the opportunity to make sufficient money to feed the family members and care for their sheep (sustenance farming and production).

Two marriages and worrying times

If two daughters of one of the sixteen competitors married into our first described family there would be extra mouths to feed there, notwithstanding that a dowry would go along with the brides because they were considered to be a drain on resources in ancient civilisations, as in, take my hungry, weak and useless daughters away. This dowry could well be a bunch of sheep going along with each bride. What we have now is a larger flock of sheep owned by our first family AND two extra very capable shepherdesses with sticks, who are also wool carders, spinners, dyers, and weavers. Three outcomes can occur, 

a) the quantity of extra sheep provides only sufficient revenue to continue to live hand-to-mouth for a household of, now eight people;

b) each of these newly married brothers go off with their brides and their new sheep and produce carpets to the same design elsewhere in the region; or 

c) these two brothers and their wives go off, taking their sheep with them, and make carpets to a new design elsewhere in the region.

Solutions, but it won't be easy

a) despite there being a larger quantity of carpets available for sale by one whole larger family it only fills the gap left by the lessened production of the families from whence the brides came; and these families have less sheep to produce wool. There is no change to the market in terms of supply or demand, no riches made and no competitive edge is manifested. Nonetheless, this family of eight would have a larger share of the carpet market in their village.

b) the supply of carpets in the village is reduced as a result that our first family has lost key workers when the brothers depart, yet the quantity of raw material, being the original remaining sheep, stays the same (the same number as there were before the two brothers left, taking their hungry mouths with them – and their wives). Now, there is a surplus of sheep and not enough people to process their wool, or there is a surplus of wool and not enough people to process it into carpets. In any case, either the sheep are sold or the wool is sold. In the first case, there is an opportunity for a new entrant to the market to set up a virtually integrated business by purchasing sheep; or in the latter, a business buying wool to make carpets to a new and exciting design that competes in the same market square in the village as the plain and similar designs already sold there. Nothing has really changed by the entrance of a new design until the old carpet producers recognise that the demand for the new design is undermining the demand for their plain designs. At this time, some of the existing carpet makers may change their designs to represent their family history. This is product differentiation. Now, in the market square there are many different and exciting designs and the beginning of brand awareness and brand loyalty (initially through family connections with one or other family of carpets makers). This is monopolistic competition. Monopolistic because the designs represent individual families and their ancestors and no-one else will ever make the same designs; doing so would disparage their own family and ancestors. Yet there is still competition in the market sector.

c) the two brothers, their wives, with their dowry sheep, form a collective and farm the same area. They have to because they cannot care for the sheep, shear the sheep (actually primitive sheep had wool that could just be pulled off (by ‘rooing’), wash, card, spin, and weave the wool into carpets, and sell the carpets in their newly found village market square when they are existing only as two pairs of people. Such is the lack of labour, this band of carpet producers, recognising that a good design sells well in another market, weave carpets to a design that has vivid colours that deeply contrast, but due to time constraints and lack of labour settle on designs apropos to nothing; one that any carpet maker could easily copy or use as a design idea (deeply contrasting colours). When other carpet makers produce similar carpets to the brothers and their wives, there is perfect competition, where a large number of small firms supply an identical product. In this example, identical means vivid contrasting colours apropos to nothing in wool carpets.

Sibling Rivalry Aside

As yet, there is nothing to propel a producer into having an advantage; there are no real constraints in design, no recognised regulations, and no changes in efficiency or production costs.

However, when the two brother’s parents die, their two unmarried brothers who were living with their parents have, now surplus, sheep and wool that could be sold as carpets but would provide more than enough money for two mouths, if they could only process it and have the time to sell it. They could sell the sheep, sell the wool, or form a company with their married brothers and their wives to make only the new and exciting carpet designs, which sell really well but so far lack brand awareness and brand loyalty.

So far no change, you think, this is simply going back to six mouths to feed (four brothers and two wives instead of two parents and four brothers). Yet the dowry has swelled the flock in two distinct ways; by direct addition; and by husbandry.

Numbers in this example are kept to a value that is easily understood. Ten ewes and one ram will typically produce ten lambs per year, which can be sheared / (rooed) to keep them cool in hot weather. When the lambs are two thirds of their adult size/weight they can be tupped or mated. This could be when they are one year old to give birth when they are eighteen months old, but more likely on poor soil and with primitive sheep, tupped when they are two years old and birthing at two and a half. But let’s say there are lambs every year. (for ease of counting and multiplication)

Yet, by the addition of four more ewes as two dowries, two more female and two more male lambs could be born.

Without eating any, and with impressive shepherding and predator deterrents, and no other losses, the original flock of eleven in the year 1300, (ten ewes and one ram), with each ewe producing one lamb a year, could in six years time (1306 AD) be a flock of:

30 new ewes from the original ten ewes (and 30 male) Total 60 lambs were born

Born in 1301 AD and tupped in 1303 AD, five ewes being the first home generation would produce in 1304 – 1306 AD perhaps two or three female lambs in each year (total 7 of each sex over three years)

Born in 1305 AD to the first home generation two or three ewes in 1305 would be tupped and produce one or two lambs in 1306 AD

- making a total of 35 new ewes ready for tupping in 1306 AD and thirty nine male lambs that have been for the cooking pot over six years

plus the ten original ewes equals 45 ewes ready for tupping in 1306 AD

With four extra ewes (dowries) there is the immediate addition of four ?fleeces and then:

2 new female lambs from the dowry ewes (and 2 male) every year for six years (total of 12 lambs of each sex)

1 new female lamb born each year in 1303 AD to 1306 AD from the first dowry ewe’s offspring every year (total of 4 lambs of each sex over three years)

The flock size is now 69, including the original 11 and 4 dowry ewes. Unfortunately, a ram cannot service this many in a short period and it is preferable to have lambs born in safe seasonal weather so there needs to be three rams for this flock size (so a bit less to eat for the owners then) which makes the whole flock size 72 sheep, twenty one of these ewes are four dowry ewes and their seventeen descendants.

In reality, ewes about to give birth experience a reduction in immunity to internal parasites and die or give birth to stillborns. Increasing the size of a flock will not change the incidence of this type of death. However, increasing the size of a flock will reduce the percentage of losses to predators, yet, will require greater shepherding with big sticks. So, here, there is a human resource problem that could inhibit flock size. On top of that is the ground and area on which a flock feeds which may support a specific flock size but cannot also provide the extra nutrition that ewes need in the final month of gestation (Approximately 70 percent of fetal growth occurs during the last month of pregnancy). So, nutrition is a contributing factor in inhibiting flock size.

Time to say goodbye

The four brothers and the two wives cannot hope to increase their market share if they all live in the same village with the same pasture. So, their market share remains the same in their respective villages. However, we have a workforce of six young persons and a large area of grazing, separated into two, which was not available in the same quantity or quality as when there was two parents and four brothers. Furthermore, there are more sheep to breed from (dowry) and a larger quantity of lambs born per year on a wider pasture to the same number of people with hungry mouths; these mouths and stomachs are now better satiated by eating the respectively larger quantity of male lambs. Hence, there is a surplus of raw material (sheep as ewes) that will eventually be constrained by land and nutrition resources.

The 'Six'

We might look at this as the four brothers and two wives (‘The Six’) having a reduction of average costs; but since this is a vertically integrated business we are primarily considering the reduction in opportunity cost until we realise that already the six people are fully occupied in husbandry and wool processing, so there is no reduction of human interaction or no spare time. Or, we could consider an economy of scale; but there would now need to be employees to add to the already overwhelmed labour resource. Luckily for ‘The Six’, because no-one could enter the same perfect market as they and their competitors, there are available workers in both villages who could be paid to process wool, or the surplus wool can be sold off cheap to them to process for themselves. This is the stage at which sustenance farming changes into specialised jobs within an industry. The brothers may fight the sheep predators, grab handfuls of wool (rooing), and weave and sell carpets while the wives and workers process the wool and also weave carpets. As long as the production costs do not rise too significantly the rate at which ‘The Six’ can produce funky carpets will increase. This is an example of an economy of scale because the unit cost is reduced, but only in terms of opportunity cost. However, specialised focus on a single task brings about faster production and superior quality products as aptitude for a task is better utilised and experience grows more rapidly. However, there is an attendant cost of wages for extra workers in this example. Faster processing from developed skill-sets may cover the wage costs and result in higher carpet production rates, thereby reducing overall costs.

Where there is a competitive advantage, such as an economy of scale, a perfect market is destroyed and an imperfect market takes its place. An economy of scale that cannot be matched is a barrier to entry in the market.

In addition to declining costs, other barriers leading to imperfect competition are legal restrictions, (patents or government regulation), high entry costs, advertising, and product differentiation.

In this whole example, towards the beginning, we have a loyal customer base buying traditionally crafted carpets from separate families who design and make carpets specific to their family ancestors, with each family making a different design. This means that the producers could set their own price as their carpet is somewhat more or less desirable to a buyer than a competitor’s as the buyer’s loyalty wins out. A new design with a strong contrast of colours entered the market as a free-to-purchase item with no guilt attached to the buyer. Then ‘The Six’ produced the funky carpets in high volume in two villages. Because the same funky designs are available in two villages advertising at no financial cost is established. A buyer can buy a carpet made by ‘The Six’ closer to their home and more people, as visitors, will see those carpets, especially when the carpets are taken out of the home to be beaten outside. 

Of course, in 14^th century India not many people travelled beyond the next village. However, in a city, just like the prevalence of sheep in remote areas, the more incidences of something the greater the multiplication of reproduction. So, more incidences of funky carpets creates a wider reproduction of wondrous perception and experience in passers-by or home visitors.

Long ago, in a country that speaks Latin, there were two siblings, ‘a priori’, a girl, (nicknamed ‘pri’) and ‘a posteriori’, her brother (nicknamed ‘post’). Pri would only ever speak of things that she had no experience of, and Post only ever spoke of things he had experienced. They argued all the time, Pri used deductive logic and knew that things were so, because she reasoned it out, while Post used inductive logic, and only knew things like, you get burnt if you put your hand into the flames of a fire, because he had tried it. He had many burns and scars from trying things out. Of course, Pri had no scars or past injuries, because she had used logic such as; fire is hot; fire cooks meat; cooked meat is softer than raw meat and more easily chewed; therefore meat is changed by heat. She also knew that if she got really hungry she could cook and eat her brother. Post, however, did not know this and was therefore not afraid of Pri, his sister. Because Pri knew that her brother could never know that his sister was potentially food, without having eaten her first, she was also not afraid.

In reality, someone who never uses empirical knowledge would never learn that heat cooks meat and makes its more chewable and so more digestible, and they certainly would never learn to eat or communicate.

a priori and a posteriori

a priori knowledge is independent from any experience

a posteriori knowledge depends on empirical knowledge

Converse to the roles played by the characters above: In the Bible, in the Garden of Eden, Eve eats fruit from the tree of knowledge. This is not a normal tree of knowledge. Its fruit embues (sic) ‘knowledge attained through experience’ to the eater. Suddenly, Eve had experiential knowledge, whereas Adam, had only knowledge based on definitions and first principles. In almost any bipartisan relationship, I suggest, where one partner has experience and the other does not, there exists an unfillable gap; a chasm that continues to grow between the pair. The obvious solution is for Adam to also eat from the tree of knowledge. Yet, it was Adam’s remit to follow doctrine and not make up reasons for doing things simply because he knew how good it felt to do those things. But, Eve, the minx, got Adam addicted to pleasure, the naughty girl. Yes, you guessed it, it is because of Eve that y’all have SmartPhones, and are addicted to dopamine. The canny people out there also realise that without Eve none of us would get invited to parties. Go Eve!

In a court of law, like any place where decisions are made that determine how someone’s life will continue to unfold or exist, ‘a priori’ arguments appear to be cold and immutable. Mathematics uses ‘a priori’ analysis, as do scientists. Engineers, on the other hand, use ‘a posteriori’ analysis; inductive logic, which comes from observational evidence. That is not to say that they do not also use ‘a priori’ arguments or logic; it simply means they solve problems in the real world with workable solutions. I once overheard a welder complaining that a computer told him to bend a sheet of steel in three dimensions.

Let us imagine an early settlement of 500 people that is separated by a fast-flowing river from another settlement with an enticing and attractive market. It is essential to the person who uses only ‘a priori’ analysis that a toll-bridge must be built at the narrowest point of the river, which is half a mile north of the settlement. To this person, the cost of the bridge, being the wages for lumberjacks and engineer-type carpenters, must be recovered from the users of the bridge. To a person who has experience of the bears in the woods half a mile north, the sensible place to cross the river is closest to the settlements. This person, who has used 'a posteriori' knowledge, becomes a ferryman and charges the same as the toll for the bridge, and because there were no set-up costs to recover, makes so much money he builds a monument, in the village square, mocking ‘clever’ people. (Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to come up with a way for the 'clever' people to get their revenge on the ferryman).

People use both these types of reasoning, and in any scenario there will be characters who dwell, even for shorts periods of time, in one or the other camps of decision-making. These types of thinking are used before and after education or experience.

prior – before, in front, ‘previous’

posterior – later, after, inferior ‘behind’

A priori and a posteriori

From Wikipedia: 'A priori and a posteriori are Latin phrases used in philosophy to distinguish types of knowledge, justification, or argument by their reliance on experience. A priori knowledge is independent from any experience. Examples include mathematics, tautologies and deduction from pure reason. A posteriori knowledge depends on empirical evidence.'

Prior analytics (a priori) is about deductive logic, which comes from definitions and first principles.

Posterior analytics (a posteriori) is about inductive logic, which comes from educational and empirical evidence.

Deductive reasoning

This involves starting from a set of general premises and then drawing a specific conclusion that contains no more information then the premises themselves. (dictionary.com 2021)

Inductive reasoning

Inductive is a way to describe something that leads to something else, so when applied to reasoning it just means you collect information and draw conclusions from what you observe. (vocabulary.com)

Roget’s Thesaurus helpfully offers ‘subtract’ as a near synonym for ‘deduct’. If we deduct four coins from these six coins, how many do we have?

Roget’s Thesaurus also helpfully offers ‘cause’ and ‘influence’ as near synonyms for ‘induce’. We can induce someone to believe something. In physics, electro-magnetic induction is causing electricity to flow by changing or altering magnetic fields.

 mental health

Making sense of the world by imagining other worlds

For those people who like to write their own stories and develop characters to understand their own world around them: when someone makes an abrupt change from one way of thinking to another, it can be discombobulating to the persons they are with, or who are observing that person. We all use both deductive and inductive reasoning, yet the extent to which we dwell in each camp determines who we get on with. This is not much different to people who have been trained in convergent thinking making decisions about people who evince no training in convergent thinking. Essentially, if you have ever felt as though you have been ‘pigeon-holed’ or heard someone say that they have been ‘pigeon-holed’ ^[1], you have just met the victim of someone using convergent thinking to assess the needs or circumstance of others (perhaps yourself). 

People with low mental health; that is all of us at some point in our lives, tend to use divergent thinking during our episodes of illness. Divergent thinking is used for creativity. So, if you have just been dumped by your boyfriend or girlfriend, you will likely make up stuff in your head, like, that person was the love of your life, if you didn’t think that before. Convergent thinking is used for writing essays and reports, and Divergent thinking is used for creativity. Convergent thinking is much like the cowboys of old America rounding up cattle and keeping them in a bunch to get them to an exact location somewhere miles away. Divergent thinking is the humour (Am. humor) and banter the cowboys along the way. By the way the cowboys use a lot of convergent thinking when it comes to being paid for their job; i.e. I did this and this, for this many days and I expect this amount of money ('Let's get to the point, Boss!')

Ultimately though, there has to be a merging of these thinking styles if you are planning on learning from your experiences and sharing them. That is to say: there has to be structure and sadly, robust pruning of the fun and creative playground we once dwelt in as children to become, as adults, a figurative fenced-off imagination. I propose that it is the liminal space (at the invisible fence) that story-tellers spend their richest time: the threshold between order and chaos. Great film-makers use our ability to access our experiences by showing us where the fence between order and creativity exists. The film has a plot (order) but is believable because the characters are creatively formed. A murder mystery must have someone with a motive, for example.

1 Pigeon-holing means to classify entities into categories, often with negative connotations – Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Pigeonholing

References

dictionary.com (2021), Available at: https://www.dictionary.com › e › inductive-vs-deductive