The truth and everything but the truth

It is often the case that "New Age" aficionados tend to drift from one thing to another, blithely ignoring the obvious disparity amongst then, now, and next. "Aliens", astral projection, refractive mineral specimens, necromancy, Chinese interior decoration, multiple mutually-exclusive systems of divination, bits and pieces of major and minor world religions, their own fevered imaginings and addictive fantasies of the End O' The World—in short, an admixture of unrelated and often incompatible beliefs, "lifestyles" and what passes with impunity as the truth, with the resultant collage, when viewed from a nominal distance, a shade of pseudo-color that can only be referred to as "brown".

In a mind-space where anything can BE at any given instant, practitioners of this wildly malleable yet mediocre art are often able to mix and blend within each other with remarkable ease. All the contradictions and pesky details are easily passed over; the lack of simple, basic clarity a given.

Fortunately for these highly mockable people there is the Internet, an unathoratative place where their disparate thoughts can coalesce into a false vacuum (Hawking radiation does not occur here; there is too much anti-gravity). Yesterday, I trained a long-jaundiced eye upon one of their hives of dissonance:

My Telekinesis

The sound you "hear" is that of unbridled ass, a form of noise that even the cleverest exponents of chaos theory have been unable to grapple. The shear variety of stuff at this crap-in boggles even the stoutest mind. Clicking a few links at random wanders you through a highly divergent, self-involved universe occasionally punctuated by threats of eternal damnation by passing followers of the cult of The Dead Man On A Stick™, who by definition know better than everyone else.

Others have remarked on this phenomenon. I quote from an article [dead link] by Robert McHenry, a former editor-in-chief of the Encyclopaedia Britannica:

"The central, unexpressed tenet of the Butterfly Theory is that the truth is ever-elusive. Like a butterfly, it flits from place to place, alighting perhaps for a moment here but then skittering over to there, never setting anywhere. It exists but can never be caught; it is glimpsed but never known. It is not even necessary that it have any content, that there be any there there. Its function is simply to beckon, like the maguffin in an Alfred Hitchcock movie. What makes the beckoning irresistible to multitudes follows from a second tenet of the theory, that the truth, whatever it may or may not be in substance, utterly charms. It is particolored and it shimmers; it is lovely to behold and even lovelier to imagine beholding. 

"So sublime is the charm of this sort of truth that each glimpse of it rewards and emboldens the beholder as powerfully as might actual possession of another, more robust sort of truth by a more skeptical sort of seeker. Those who succumb to this charm do so not merely willingly but eagerly."

The link to the article quoted above is dead. PM me for a copy.

As "Bob" once said:

"The SubGenius wants no part of the "New Age," it is already here and it obviously sucks."—SubGenius® Pamphlet #1

Or kill me.