CONSPIRITUALITY is an unconscious tendency against including one’s pet views from self-inquiry. It is a positive bias toward distrust and a negative bias against trust. People who lack self-confidence view trust negatively because it challenges their sense of agency, causing them to question their need to control events, which produces anxiety.

Consequently, it skews, perhaps distorts is a better word, their personalities. Conspirituality is a manifestation of duality.

Non-Duality

Vedanta (self-inquiry), on the other hand, does not accept the idea that reality is a threat. It sees reality as non-dual and benign. If reality is benign, it can be trusted to look after one’s best interests, mitigating the need to control events and the attendant anxiety. Trust integrates the personality into a well-rounded balanced whole. Vedanta reveals the non-dual nature of reality.

Recently I read an essay by a woman who realized that her elitist dislike of a particular group was a red herring that demanded a scapegoat in this case the “rich,” which wokeher up to unacknowledged loathing and envy, which conflicted with her religious values. She realizedthat she was virtue signaling because of her identification with the idea of “justice,” a zero-sum principle if ever there was one. She believed that it was “unjust” for rich people to play golf while poor people don’t have pots to piss in. Evidently, she didn’t canvas the rich.

Justice Isn’t Real

But does any particular cohort, in this case, “the rich,” deserve contempt? From the non-binary point of view, no, because justice isn’t real. Something is real if it can’t be dismissed, which is to say that it is always present and doesn’t change. Anything that is dependent and subject to change may seem to be real but doesn’t provide a dependable foundation for one’s state of mind.  Justice depends on the idea of injustice. They aren’t the same, but they aren’t different. They support and reinforce each other. As such “the poor” are equally deserving of contempt. If you are unaware that yourself is non-dual, you will discover that you are riddled with biases. You will discover that you are a prejudiced person who disrespects people who think differently from you.

Here is the logic:

• Ignorance of your non-dual nature leads to
• a sense of incompleteness and otherness, which causes
• comparison, which morphs into
• competition and conflict, which gives rise to
• frustration, anger, and hatred, which eventually culminate in
• inner conflict, culture wars or real wars and
• the breakdown of society, which is not always desirable.

To avoid this slippery slope, the following comments will help you confront your shadow self.

Knowledge and Knowledge Bubbles

Knowledge, relative and absolute, is something that can’t be dismissed. The Earth always revolves around the sun, a fact that is always true and can be verified by experience or inference. Knowledge doesn’t come FROM the human mind; it comes TO the human mind. It is. It has always been. It is waiting to be uncovered.

Knowledge bubbles are generated when a person becomes focused and attached to a particular field of knowledge: physics, psychology, law, politics, art, sports, communication, ethics, and whatnot. They

eventually burst because relative knowledge is defective as a vehicle for lasting happiness. Once I discover the limitations of a particular branch of knowledge, I try to find satisfaction in another field. Once I get financial security, for instance, I may want to understand pleasure and love. Once I discover the limit of pleasure-seeking and/or relationship love, I will definitely seek something else.

Finally, information, which is easily confused with knowledge, is “me” sensitive. It is also unreliable in terms of happiness. Beliefs and opinions are subjective events that are usually taken to be knowledge and are almost invariably the enemy of truth.

My Full Potential

As long as I am encapsulated in a particular knowledge bubble, my growth as a human being is compromised, because all parts of myself only work together if I am a well-rounded person. Focus on a particular kind of knowledge or a particular aspect of a particular kind of relative knowledge, may be helpful for survival but not for actualizing my full potential. So, I must ask myself, “Am I only here to survive?”

Only steady concentration on “absolute” knowledge will actualize it. Absolute knowledge is simple knowledge of the unborn whole and complete Self, which includes relative knowledge but renders the quest for the identity of the apparent self obsolete. “Absolute” knowledge is knowing that you are that because of which everything exists.

Particular information-events—ideas, beliefs, opinions, desires, emotions, thoughts, fantasies, memories, etc.—may or may not refer to knowledge. Because they are “me” sensitive, taking information- events for knowledge will be revealed to be a mistake in the fullness of time. A knowledge bubble is caused by an innocent curiosity for a particular type of knowledge and generates a positive or negative bias as one investigates the knowledge field.

Echo Chambers

Echo chambers are the confirmation bias on steroids. I have a doubt about what I think and need others to validate it. They evolve because denial of my non-dual wholeness causes insecurity and low self- esteem. They are enemies of nuance, the anthesis of openness and the essence of duality, the belief that differences are real, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding. They are the perfect psychological environment for dull gullible people, secular or sacred, who need to think they are “right” and “smart.” Echo chambers develop around every conceivable kind of knowledge, not to mention beliefs and opinions. They are the evidence of unacknowledged spiritual dissatisfaction and the number one enemy of growth.

An echo chamber is an obsessive dislike leading to distrust of people who are seemingly different in a myriad of ways from you and your tribe. It is a cult-like social group that aggressively and perversely grooms doubt under the aegis of certain knowledge. Evidence-contrary, it is hard, cold, and humorless, not fragile like a bubble. Echo chambers are unsubstantiated beliefs, opinions and impulses based on an uncritical attachment to a pernicious emotional impurity – fear. And what is the fear? Being “wrong,” discovering that you are a fool.

Ignorance, which is not solicited, makes fools of us all. Acknowledging and accepting one’s foolishness is the solid foundation on which successful inquiry and spiritual growth is built.
On the surface, it doesn’t make sense that individuals seek to reinforce negative emotions and cultivate relationships that buttress them.

However, insecurity is born out of denial of the benign nature of reality and identification with the belief that life, a consciously designed matrix, actively conspires to harm itself. Harm exists but only because the non- dual nature of the self is left undiscovered. And/or the conviction that it is an opportunity for growth.

Unbeknownst to votaries of echo chambers, beliefs and opinions are unreal because they depend on their opposites for validation. If I believe that something is good for me, I need to believe that something else is bad. That I prefer day to night depends on the undesirability of night. Caught in a twilight zone of knowledge and ignorance, I don’t realize that if something is bad, the goodness that negates it is also bad, since an effect is only seemingly, not actually different from its cause. If I don’t believe something is “bad” I won’t promote a “good” idea. It will be natural to me. What is natural only requires validation if my knowledge of my complete Self is incomplete.

The fact that I need to promote or attack a particular idea means that I have an unconscious doubt about the truth of it. A rich person who claims that he or she is free of the need for money, and who promotes his or her method for gaining it, isn’t free of the need for money unless he or she grants free access to his technique.

A living being is gender-neutral and only becomes a man or woman when he or she thinks of the opposite gender. Plants and animals have sex organs and sex instruments but are genderless because they don’t think. When I am not identified as a man or a woman I am just a human being. Except in certain gender-related knowledge bubbles and echo chambers, most of our me is occupied by non-gender related thoughts.

Although it offers a steppingstone to our limitless non-dual identity, even the idea that I am a human being sets me apart from other living beings, animals and plants for instance. Not only that, but it subjects me to further delusion and, as we see, leads to the destruction of our habitat and peace of mind.

Conceit being what it is, I may imagine that human status confers “dominion over fish and fowl,” to quote the Bible, because I am “the roof and crown of things,” to quote Shakespeare. But I have dominion over nothing in so far as everything that I value, acquire and possess comes from the world, which is not created by me.

If I think that I am a creator, I am only a creator of one small thing— my idea of myself and the world. My creation is only seemingly useful and therefore “my” reality is subject to cancellation by “your” reality. That I care that insignificant others cancel me is only a testimony to a lack of self-confidence. I am not indifferent to the opinions of others because I claim ownership of my reality only because of a need to cancel “yours,” which creates doubt about mine unless we are stuck in the same knowledge bubble or echo chamber.

Confronted with an opposing view, a person identified with a particular view immediately becomes fearful and may withdraw from or aggressively attack the person who holds it. When fear arises, he or she is unable to connect to the context—his or her gender-neutral human identity—not to mention our limitless non-dual identity—because negative emotions command attention like no other. “If it bleeds it leads” is the holy grail of news organizations, whose success depends not only on providing useful and entertaining information but on carefully invoking and grooming fear.

Positive information is cheap and easy to acquire if you just open your eyes and look around, yet the media feels inclined to prominently peddle negative information. The takeaway close, the foundation of many marketing and personal relationships…”I will only love you if you do what I want”…is based on the universal zero-sum fear of missing out. FOMO is zero-sum because the mind
is denied its natural bliss when it is fear-oriented. The bliss because of which I wish to live
in spite of many miseries is the nature of the Self, so it is always available and begging to be uncovered.

I want an endless stream of happy thoughts because a mixture of happy and unhappy thoughts is unacceptable. Unfortunately, I believe there is no way to control my mind—it spews forth the positive and negative without so much as a by your leave—when methods for controlling the mind as old as the hills are available at no cost. Ironically, beliefs are zero-sum because knowledge is always present for those who have eyes to see. If I knew this fact, I would abandon beliefs and opinions and convert the rest to hard and fast knowledge. Those who know don’t believe. That I am an incomplete inadequate entity is only a belief, which is only evidence of itself, not evidence of inadequacy.

Both thought bubbles and echo chambers are unreal. When you enter an echo chamber, whose sole purpose is to cultivate negative emotions under the aegis of “reality,” you are perversely taught by fear-oriented “authorities” that fear is smart, a message that makes you feel good.

You enjoy echo chambers because your sense of agency, not to mention your sense of righteousness, gets a much-needed boost. You think you are very intelligent and that nobody is going to pull the wool over your eyes, particularly the rich and powerful, but your happiness is simply found in the pleasure of joining a group of like-minded souls. Delusion loves company.

When everyone in my echo chamber is angry, somehow my anger is amplified and justified, which is one of the downsides of sloth, whose sole claim to fame is denial. That anger feels good is only because my attention has been moved to the belief that I am nobody’s fool and/or the belief that anyone who doesn’t think like me is “wrong” or different. I can’t accept evidence that negates my belief, or I will again become aware of my suffering, which is always unacceptable. I can’t tolerate differences because ignorance has separated me from the knowledge of my whole and complete Self.

The echo chamber leader’s authority, secular or sacred, is not based on objective knowledge, only on the intensity of his or her fear sanitized by anger, which lends it the appearance of truth. Fear sets the mind adrift like an iceberg separated from a land mass. Eventually, the individual sees his or her good nature dissolve into an ocean of unhappiness.

Reality transcends duality, the belief in the truth of differences. To understand this fact in a practical way is to “enter the kingdom of heaven” to borrow a phrase from a well-known Biblical parable.

Everyone knows that trying to point out the irrationality of fear as a helpful emotion to a normal person, not to mention an echo chamber denizen, is impossible. One can only keep one’s distance and love such people from afar. Because they are perversely irrational and deluded, echo chamber devotees migrate from one chamber to another when a particular obsession fails to deliver pleasure, as all thoughts and emotions eventually do. Sadly, in the process, they are denied the
benefits of the innermost self’s dispassion, which quarantines them from the benefit of common-sense logic.

Only with reference to fantasy can a mindless contrarian maintain confidence in beliefs unsupported by common sense. Because duality is temporal, people irrationally believe in me. The past is unreal because it depends on two equally unreal ideas, the future, and the present. Without the future where is the past? And where is the present without the past and the future?

Like an echo chamber, this kind of thinking imprisons me from womb to tomb. “The wrong side of history” is meant to prove that an opposing idea is false, but history refers to nothing other than memories, which don’t prove anything except themselves. If you think something is good or bad you need to know that the object to which these adjectives refer is value neutral, which is another definition of zero-sum. The zero-sum nature of reality is only a virtue for you when you know what it implies, which is freedom and non-dual love.

Is Vedanta a Knowledge Bubble?

Individuals caught in knowledge bubbles are not necessarily widely or wildly uninformed and may accept differing views backed by common sense logic, whereas echo chamber devotees are a hard sell. They usually only consider different views when they are laid low by personal tragedy, the loss of a loved one or the diagnosis of an incurable disease, for instance. And since they are suspicious by nature, it is difficult for an honest self-aware person to gain their trust. Basically, only saints have the patience to redeem them, in so far as they tend to be stubborn as mules.

To negotiate modern society, it is necessary to simplify and filter the type and amount of information and knowledge to which we are exposed. Knowledge bubbles, which are usually benign, become dangerous when they morph into echo chambers. Self-knowledge bubbles tend to be benign but can be dangerous because they may breed delusional self-confidence because incomplete Self- knowledge due to faulty listening often leads to a premature belief that the
incomplete self can’t be improved upon, which gives it free rein to do what it wants irrespective of the harm it generates. It can’t because it is not real, but in so far as I believe that the existent created me is inadequate, it is possible to develop a sense of adequacy by committing myself to unlock and actualize my potential with the help of Vedanta. Attachment to knowledge bubbles can be dismantled by practical experiments that reveal the adequacy of opposite points of view. Only a Self-knowledge bubble that is blessed with an impersonal means of knowledge and unbiased teachers is wholly benign.

Echo chambers (medical, dietary, financial, political, religious, spiritual, etc.) have rigorous selection criteria and use no-holds-barred tools to actively create distrust in their devotees. Members of the La Leche League distrust cow’s milk and mothers who “abuse” their babies with it. Cultlike leaders, secular and sacred, use manipulative code words to invoke latent childhood suspicions and hatreds to please their biased minions and convert them into powerful social forces.

They derive their power because life is a complex, completely dependent zero-sum organism dependent on death. It produces living beings and perversely instills in them a binding need to live and an ever-present knowledge of their own mortality. Because of modern life’s complexity, every bit of knowledge and information depends on long chains of interconnected experts.      A climate scientist analyzing core samples depends on the lab technician who runs the air- extraction machine, the engineers who designed and construct the machines, the statisticians who developed the underlying methodology, the programmers that generate the algorithms and so on.

Trust

Trust, however, implies vulnerability which inspires fear, which echo chamber leaders manipulate and amplify to gain and maintain control. Rather than think independently, cult devotees who are usually spawned in dysfunctional households with authoritarian fathers and compliant mothers or vice versa surrender their reason and place their trust in leaders who they choose to believe have their best interests in mind. Cult leaders are experts in propaganda, the sole intention of which is to misinform devotees as to where to place their trust. While surrendering trust is natural and rational in so far as we don’t survive unless we trust our parents, continuing to trust others out of habit as we age, even those who love us, is irrational in so far as you can only depend on yourself for happiness.

One simple emphatic, understandable but unhelpful heuristic opinion informs the echo chamber phenomena, “THEY ARE OUT TO GET YOU.” In fact, dispassionate analysis proves that life, guided by a logical impersonal means of self-knowledge, is a trustworthy teacher because it is a benign zero-sum matrix, not a perpetual threat. While it is rare to find a trustworthy human without a self-serving agenda, it is definitely beneficial to trust the eternal cycle of life, which brings us here and thankfully removes us in a timely fashion.