Badlands Media will always put out our content for free, but you can support us by becoming a paid subscriber to this newsletter. Help our collective of citizen journalists take back the narrative from the MSM. We are the news now.
Intro
Q asked us to expand our thinking, but how does one do this, exactly?
It’s surprisingly easy to get the false impression that one’s thinking is “expanding” when it’s merely being reinforced, or even narrowing down to a point (absent a truly logical or compelling reason to do so). Even the most brilliant people on Earth can mistake the reinforcement of a premature dogma for “thinking”—luckily, there are ways to reliably overcome this obstacle. You don’t have to be a super high IQ genius to expand your thinking, but you do need to be able to develop a certain attitude towards novel information. This will take some explanation.
We don’t want to become so calcified in our beliefs that we become impervious to novel information; and on the other hand, we want to retain at least some solid ground upon which we can stand, lest we find ourselves adrift in endless “possibilities” of thought that never go anywhere productive. The key to solving this dilemma is to recognize that, essentially, your brain is doing two things at once, all the time: it is creating maps of the world and experiencing the world directly.
Hypnotic Deletion of Sensory Information
Did you know that you can hypnotize someone to become invisible to them? (Reality is Plastic, by Anthony Jacquin and James Tripp’s Online Deep Apprenticeship both contain instructions on how to do this). The reason this can be done is because our mental maps of the world can be mistaken for the real world, not just “theoretically,” but quite literally. Amazing as it sounds, it’s entirely possible to perceive an empty room despite the presence of other people in it, because your mind, on some level, has already created a “map” of said room absent the addition of people.
Have you ever been driving your car and took a turn only to be startled by the presence of another car that you didn’t see moments ago? Again, this is because your sensory experience of the world is one part direct experience, and another part a projection of your internal maps. A similar mechanism is often at work in people when you try to share with them a truth that contradicts their belief system. People are prone to mistaking their map of the world for the world itself, particularly when under social pressure to comply with a given narrative or belief.
In essence, to be able to “expand your thinking” means learning how to update your internal maps with new information. Our internal maps of reality are our comfort zone, and so the process of doing this can at times be very uncomfortable. Nonetheless, one’s comfort zone can become one’s coffin if one doesn’t leave it from time to time.
To use an analogy, working out at the gym isn’t always the most enjoyable experience either (not all the time, at least), but the long-term rewards for doing so are far greater than the short-term rewards that come with staying locked in your comfort zone. Expansion of thought, like the building of muscle, is a process best undertaken in manageable steps.
They say that “ignorance is bliss,” but the exact opposite is true. There are few things in life as pleasurable as that moment when you know for sure that you’ve truly learned something new and valuable.
With that in mind, let us learn a few things about how our brains work, because this information will prove vitally important for helping us learn how to expand our thinking—just as Q asked us to do.
Hemispheric Specialization is a Fact of Neurology
Neuroscientist Ian McGilchrist has written several books regarding the unique ways in which the hemispheres of your brain perceive the world. His most recent book is a two-volume set, standing at a whopping 1,500 pages per volume —ergo, what follows cannot help but be an oversimplification of his work, so keep that caveat in mind as you read.
Indeed, as you’re about to learn, one of the greatest hazards of the left brain is that it can mistake its “map” of the world for the real world itself.
Alas, maps aren’t meant to replace reality; their purpose is simply to help us navigate it, and nothing more. Unfortunately, modern science is held hostage by its own maps and presuppositions regarding the nature of reality, and this situation robs the entire world of a more comprehensive understanding of the world in which we live. This is a huge problem because we desperately need to understand the world around us, at least sufficiently enough to live and work in harmony with it.
In keeping with mainstream science’s insistence on imposing its maps upon, it has been considered as a “given” by a great many neuroscientists for many decades that the hemispheres don’t, in fact, specialize in different kinds of cognitive processes. (Ironically, this is a very left-brained way of looking at things.)
When scientists explore the functionality of the brain, they give people various types of stimuli (or inhibit stimuli) and see what parts of the brain “light up” on a monitor. Though this information is undeniably helpful, it is not, in and of itself, a complete picture of what’s going on. Indeed, I can type words on my keyboard and watch various bits of visual information flash across my computer screen, but is this truly the equivalent of comprehending what’s happening inside the computer?
Many neuroscientists have prematurely declared that there is no substantial difference between the way that the two hemispheres of the brain perceive/interact with the “stuff” of experience. This is because it has been observed that both hemispheres engage in language processing, information acquisition, emotions, orientation in spacetime, and so on—so, naturally, we must conclude that the hemispheres are redundant like identical, dual processors, right?
Well, it turns out that the unique natures of the hemispheres reveal themselves when people suffer brain injury on one side, and not the other. The differences aren’t unique to any patient, but are exhibited by everyone. Hemispheric specialization can even be observed in animals just as much as in humans. (Refer to McGilchrists work to learn more about all this.)
Among other things, when the right hemisphere is damaged, people can develop a condition known as palinopsia. What happens in this condition is that a person’s vision becomes “atomized” and broken down into a series of still frames, much like the individual frames of a movie. In other words, when the left hemisphere must operate on its own, it separates the “flow” of life into discreet images, thus demonstrating that the left hemisphere’s “specialty” is to see things in isolation, rather than as connected. The “flow” of time that we experience is due to the activity of the right hemisphere, not the left.
The Map-Maker and the Reality-Experiencer
In Iain McGilchrist’s book, The Divided Mind and the Search for Meaning, he tells us “The left hemisphere’s take on things comes from assessing thousands of points of information in turn and trying to reach a conclusion about the whole picture that way … [and] the right hemisphere … sees things as a whole, never as isolated particles independent of a context.”
In a nutshell, the left brain is responsible reducing reality into static, manipulatable “parts”. It does not experience reality directly, but instead renders the “stuff” of reality into a map. This helps us accomplish things more efficiently—we would never get anything done were it not for the fact that we have the capacity to reduce reality to easily manipulatable parts. Again, the trick is to not mistake such renderings for reality itself.
When you encounter something new, the right brain is activated, but once the novelty wears off and you’ve “categorized” (or, put another way, “compartmentalized” or “normalized”) what was previously novel data, that’s the specialty of the left brain.
Signs of Left Brain Imbalance (aka Dominance)
Returning to McGilchrist, he tells us that the left brain, absent input from the right brain, becomes “demonstrably self-deceiving, and confabulates—it makes up a story, when it cannot understand something, and tells it with conviction …”
He further says, “research shows that, unlike the right hemisphere, which tends toward self-doubt, [the left hemisphere] takes a distinctly flattering view of its own capabilities … It is not reasonable. It is angry when challenged, dismisses evidence it doesn’t like or can’t understand, and is unreasonably sure of its own rightness. It is not good at understanding the world. Its attention is narrow, its vision myopic, and it can’t see how the parts fit together. It’s good for only one thing: manipulating the world. Its world is a representation, a virtual world, only … it prioritizes the procedure, without grasp of its meaning or purpose. And it requires certainty where none can be found.”
Basically, the left hemisphere, if it becomes too dominant, will impose its own “reasoning” on reality and refuse to acknowledge any direct evidence of the senses that contradicts its cherished maps/beliefs. A funny example of this refusal to accept the direct evidence of the senses can be found in a book entitled The Process of Persuasion. In it, we learn the story of a farmer who had never seen a giraffe in his life, until the circus came to his hometown, and, upon seeing a giraffe for the first time, pointed at it and exclaimed, “there ain’t no such animal!”
Some Crucial Takeaways
No doubt, many readers here at Badlands have had the displeasure of attempting to share new information with others, only to be prejudicially shot down (prejudice literally means to pre-judge, by the way). Mainstream culture has “installed” certain maps of reality in the minds of many people, who credulously believe that anything coming from the mainstream must necessarily be true (not that “alternative” media/culture can’t have its blind spots from time to time).
The left brain is more concerned with utility than with meaning or truth—and so it will build maps of the world primarily for the purpose of enhancing one’s ability to manipulate ones surrounding environment. The search for holistic meaning—a comprehension of the true nature of things when viewed in a greater context—is the specialty of the right brain. People who are just going along to get along, and therefore don’t engage their faculty for exploring deep truth for its own sake, will generally become more left-brained imbalanced/dominant over time.
Again, we need to be able to form maps in our head of the world that allow us to navigate life more efficiently. We don’t mean to imply in this article the left or right hemisphere is the “better” hemisphere, but rather that we can become stuck, more or less, in a “reality” of our own creation without the benefit of regular infusions of right-brained awareness into our day to day life.
Preventing Terminal Left-Brain Imbalance
It may be tempting to read all the above and think to yourself that you don’t suffer from left-brain imbalance, but this assumption may itself be a symptom of said imbalance (which I believe afflicts us all from time to time, including myself). Most people sincerely believe that they live in “real” reality, and yet we know that a great deal of what we perceive about the world is conditioned by our internal maps. A healthy degree of humility about one’s own comprehension of things acts as a powerful safeguard against losing the ability to differentiate between one’s mental map of the world and the world itself.
Some researchers say that mankind, many thousands of years ago, lived primarily in his right-brain, in complete contrast to the mass consciousness of the modern era—and this accounts for the fact that many ancient people saw the “stuff” of nature as something akin to a unified, living language of God. Is it not fascinating that this very perspective is the one most likely to be ridiculed by modern academia and science, which bears all the hallmarks of left-brain imbalance?
Indeed, this is a good description of the basic way that the right brain perceives things—such a worldview is a natural consequence of seeing reality as “alive” and as “one”. It stands to reason that if we exercise the part of our brain that sees things in terms of linguistic/symbolic associations and correspondences—rather than seeing things as separate, discreet, manipulatable objects—then we can access this mode of thinking deliberately (at least to some degree).
Now, what if we could exercise that part of our brain AND at the same time further the mission of Q and the Patriots? Can we do both at the same time?
I’m glad you asked …
A Challenging Website Provides Us with a Training Ground
Q told us that the cabal’s “need for symbolism will be their downfall”. Ergo, symbolic thinking is precisely the kind of thinking we need to develop as anons. If it is indeed true that the cabal uses symbolism to communicate out in the open without “giving themselves away” to the masses, then all that needs to happen is for the people to decode said symbols, and the jig is up. (Easier said than done, yes, but at least we have a way forward here.)
Right-brained, associative/linguistic thinking is a vital key we need to develop for defeating the cabal.
Towards that end, I want to share with you a website whose entire purpose is to decode cabal (and Q) symbolism in the news and pop culture, with thorough reference to Q drops. This website is called, simply enough, Decoding Symbolism. There are plenty of websites that purport to do this, but this website appears to me to be one of the most in-depth websites I’ve ever found working on this task.
I don’t agree with everything that is posted on it—some of its claims stand in diametric opposition to many things I believe to be true about the present 5G war—but that’s beside the point. It’s the methodology it employs that’s important to learn. The author, whoever he is, has clearly spent years looking for associations and correspondences between symbols used in news and pop culture, and his work is among the most original I’ve ever seen.
The left-brain wants to jump to belief or disbelief, but to do so prematurely is to narrow ones thinking, not expand it. We need to cast a wide net and consider as many possibilities as we can, otherwise we can’t hope to come anywhere near grasping the Big Picture of what’s going on. We also need to reconcile the fact that even the most erudite researchers out there will have blind spots that will seem nearly irreconcilable to us and our own conclusions.
It’s not our intent to officially endorse Decoding Symbolism. Rather, the goal here is to learn how to expand our thinking, and, if nothing else, Decoding Symbolism is an extremely useful resource for training the mind to see symbolic correspondences in unlikely places (while remaining within the framework of the Q drops). Not only will this help us learn to use both hemispheres, but, at the same time, it furthers the mission as well.
Keep in mind the fact that every innovation of human understanding was only made possible because someone, somewhere was willing to go beyond the maps of “accepted” reality.
For all you know, by training yourself in this type of thinking, you may be the next anon to piece together a comm that changes the game for everybody.
Badlands Media articles and features represent the opinions of the contributing authors and do not necessarily represent the views of Badlands Media itself.
If you enjoyed this contribution to Badlands Media, please consider checking out more of my work for free at American Hypnotist.
Agree.
Everything has been a preparation for what is coming.
We are simultaneously undergoing a revelation and training phase. For example.
The Kari Lake repeated lawsuit failures, while comedy gold for the enemy and its increasingly less vast audience of legions of non-participating characters, is a positively Pavlovian teaching cycle for all, Americans and foreigners alike.
Constant repetition of clear demonstrations of the systemic corruption pervading every aspect of American public life is gradually searing itself into the unconscious psyche of EVERYONE.
At the same time as the revelation cycle, we are being made to understand how this systemic corruption is going to have to be broken.
We are being persuaded to be mentally and spiritually open (ie being desensitized) to the necessity of using the most severe penalties against the evildoers, in order for the new America to be reborn.
Unfortunately, I don’t think that process has yet reached its peak. Many more atrocities are going to be experienced by we the people.
We must remain steadfast.
Everyone seems to be writing about 'discernment' today -- can't be a coincidence. I believe the community might be anticipating some sort of revelation about to come, of which the pre-shocks are just starting to register...