Believe nothing
“Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.” -Buddha
That quote by Buddha is one of my favorites, and I apply that reasoning to my life on a regular basis. Not believing in anything without deeply thinking about it has helped me form a much more rational view of the world than I ever would have if I had just listened to what other people “believe.” Or at least I believe that to be the case.
One of the things that I always find shocking is how many people just adopt a belief without even thinking it through.
It seems to me that there are a lot of mysteries in this life, and mysteries bother people. Instead of recognizing that there are some questions that just can’t be answered, a lot of people like to try to wrap things up in a neat little package with a tidy explanation that they will argue until they’re blue in the face. I’m not just talking about religion either. Some of the biggest “believers” I’ve ever met actually don’t believe in religion.
They claim to be too intelligent to believe what they consider to be ancient fairy tales, but they’ll quote every wacky theory on alien abductions and talk in depth about how the ancient Sumerians documented the creation of human beings from lower primates by Aliens mixing their DNA into them.
I enjoy watching UFO shows on TV, because those motherfuckers to me are often just as wacky as the dudes spending their life looking for Noah’s Ark.
Ever since I was a little kid I’ve been obsessed with UFOs and aliens. I would watch every show about them that would air on TV, and when I first got onto the internet way back in 1994 on with AOL and a 14.4 baud modem one of the first very first things I did online was download UFO documents. The first night I got online I stayed up all night like a retard downloading and printing what I thought to be important documents on “the truth.” I was sleepy the next day working on the set of “newsradio” because I was obsessed with stories about aliens.
I’m still very much interested in the subject, but I have a completely different take on it now. Back then; I was convinced that UFOs were real, and I would argue the point until I had a heart attack.
Today I have a completely different take on it. I’m not saying that I don’t believe in UFOs, but I am saying that I don’t believe most of the people that say they’ve seen UFOs.
Have you ever seen that show “UFO Hunters?” It’s one of my guilty pleasures.
One of the things about it that is so interesting to me is that the guys looking for the UFOs really, really believe in them.
A lot of these guys have been looking for aliens their whole life, and most of them have never even actually seen anything themselves. They’re just studying evidence.
These dudes have spent most of their lives going over grainy photos of what looks like hubcaps tossed through the air. I mean, have you ever seen any of the evidence? It looks like shit.
They got crystal clear video of a guy from Seinfeld yelling out “Nigger!” and they can’t get a single cool video of a UFO? They all look like shit.
Looking at it as an objective observer, it always seems to me that a lot of these “UFO researcher” guys on these TV shows are just seeing what they want to see. They’re studying grainy photos saying shit like, “If you look here, it appears to have some sort of magnetic propulsion system…”
Right.
Or… that’s a fucking hubcap, and you’re retarded.
That’s a hubcap dangling from a string, and you’ve wasted the last 20 years of your life studying a bunch of crazy liars. That’s pretty possible too, dude.
Now, I’m not saying that all UFOs sightings are fake, because how could I possibly know that?
No one knows. It’s impossible to know, there’s just too much space out there. The possibilities are endless. The possibility that there are intergalactic travelers that occasionally visit earth is certainly believable to me. I mean, just look at what we humans can do, and we’re fucking retarded.
Who would have ever thought the same species responsible for the KKK, Fox news, and suicide bombers would also be able to figure out how to get people into space? That’s pretty fucking crazy. The way I look at it when it comes to alien space travelers is that there’s levels to everything. Monkeys are a million times smarter than worms, we humans are about a million times smarter than monkeys, Nicola Tesla was a million times smarter than Sarah Palin, and it’s entirely possible that there’s something out there in space that’s a million times smarter than him. Literally anything is possible. It might not even have a physical form. Intergalactic traveling alien life could be a super intelligent entity that exists in the form of a living idea. There might be alien life out there that’s so alien we can’t even perceive it any more than ants can see you when you wave your hand over them.
It might not even exist on a frequency we can register. Intelligent alien life might very well be around us all the time, but operating in a completely different domain.
To me that seems much more likely to be what alien life is going to be like. It’s going to be REALLY fucking alien. It’s probably not going to buzz cornfields in a flying hubcap hoping to be captured on film.
I had this idea in my isolation tank once that alien life is probably not going to come here in a ship, but rather travel as an idea and go directly into our minds. I’ve had some psychedelic experiences where I felt like ideas were actually living things, or a part of a single living, gigantic thing and that every single piece of creative work ever done by people is actually all connected by the same string of consciousness, but to follow it and see the connection you would have to put together every single person contribution that’s ever lived. Of course this would be impossible for a person to do – but if they could connect it all they would see that all human life is just one great work. What I thought was that we think of ideas as being these abstract, lifeless constructions, but what if they’re actually a life form. What if creativity is actually a living thing; that it’s a symbiotic life form that lives along side us and relies on our ability to tune into it for its procreation. It doesn’t give birth to babies, but it impregnates our minds with creations; art, comedy, innovations, inventions, inspirations – always inspiring activity and feeding off its past accomplishments to create an ever more advanced and complex material world.
That we need to feed off the cells of vegetable and animal life in order to stay alive, it needs to motivate human beings to create for it’s survival and evolution.
It might just be that our own personal filters are so coarse – protecting us from thinking about all the potential variables in our lives and in our environment – that we don’t have enough left over awareness to tune in to our actual thoughts and monitor them thoroughly.
That’s one of the most amazing things about the isolation tank. When you get in that thing it removes the entire world. No touching, no seeing, no hearing, no weight – all of your thoughts completely un-tethered from the signals of the primate body.
And when you do that thoughts become a very different thing. They don’t roll in and scroll down like text on a movie screen. It’s much more like you’re laying down in a river of consciousness, and wave after wave of thoughts just roll over and bury you with ideas. You try to decipher this torrent of ideas into a way that you can recreate later, and you try to hold on to the good ones as much as you can, but in order for the trip to work you can’t guide it. You gotta just let it all go.
If you stop and write something down or even just concentrate on it too much, you’ll lose the connection to the source. Your ego steps in trying to control the situation, and it’s self centered thoughts of trying to record and preserve ideas are the wrong frequency to keep the connection with the wave. You try to remember what you can, but you really have to just let it go and ride out the experience.
What’s really important isn’t just that you learn something from the trip, but also that you can let go and surrender control to that moment. When you get deep enough into a tank experience to have that happen it really feels like you’re in contact with a living organism, and the only way to tune into the frequency it operates on is to completely abandon your ego and abandon all ideas about control, and just give in to it.
It’s really hard to do, because it feels freaky as fuck. It can be very scary to let everything go. There are layers and layers of control that we exercise on ourselves and our thoughts and our perceptions of reality, and when you abandon them all, slowly, one at a time with a steady and balanced effort over a long enough time to allow you to keep this focus going and get really, really deep – you feel like there’s a lot of shit out there, just out of reach. The more you can let go, the more you can tune in, and the more you tune in, the more you think you might possibly be going insane. On a regular basis I experience things that are absolutely beyond description and completely defy logic. But they happen, and they happen to me all the time. I don’t have to take any drug, I just get in the isolation tank and relax, and slowly let go, and go deeper and deeper into the connection that my consciousness has with the energy of the universe until I break through the lowest membrane of control and drop down into the current of ideas and bathe in it’s love.
I think it’s entirely possible that we’re connected not just to our fellow humans, but also to everything, including things we haven’t even recognized or considered, like ideas.
I’ve always said that when I’m at my best performing stand up it feels like I’m just “tuning it in,” and that I don’t exist anymore. I just become these ideas and let them flow out of me. It’s a crazy feeling, and it comes and goes during a performance, but when it’s “on” it’s the one of the most magical feelings a performer can experience. Funny shit just comes flying out of your mouth in the perfect order far faster than it seems you could have ever thought of it. It comes out intact and perfectly timed. It just happens sometimes, and it really doesn’t feel like you’re doing it. It really feels like you’re tuning something in. I buy that, but UFOs and abduction stories – not so much.
We had this thing we did on this CBS show that I hosted called “Game Show in My Head” where we had people do funny things with hidden cameras and one of them was a thing where the contestant had to pretend to be a news reporter and get a person on the street to lie about seeing a UFO. Just watching these people willingly, easily lie about their UFO experience just because they knew they were going to be on TV changed my thoughts about how many of the UFO stories I believed. I haven’t discounted the possibility entirely, but man it’s disturbing to see how easily people lie about shit like that.
It was SO easy for them to do. People just started talking – “Oh, it’s was hovering in the sky, and it came down and they took me aboard”… straight faced, no smile. Just lied out of their ass. Not just one person, but a lot of people. Not only did they lie, but when they found out it was a hidden camera show and that their lies would be exposed on camera to the whole world, they STILL agreed to sign the waiver. There are a lot of us out there that are just plain full of shit, and we have to factor that into the equation whenever we’re looking into anything crazy, like UFOs, or Bigfoot, or black republicans.
Always remember that there’s an incredible amount of people out there that are either nuts, or full of shit. Whenever you hear a wacky story, you’ve always gotta throw those two variables into the mix.
In the end, I think Buddha said it best.
Now, of course the ironic thing about me posting that quote from Buddha, is that I think to a lot of folks reading what I wrote it probably sounds like a bunch of crazy nonsense. I guess the important thing though is that it makes sense to me.
I love your views, and I don’t think your crazy. I’ve had some similar thoughts on creativity, I think that is one quality which is unique to the human species. Meditation has given me some crazy ideas, but I have to say, if I had the money, I would definitely invest in an isolation tank. I’m jealous.
P.S Have you seen the History Channel 2 hour special about Ancient Astronaut theories? You would probably love that one. Crazy shit.
You are the best!
)
interesting stuff man. are you familiar with vipassana meditaion? given your interest in consciousness, you may like it. its described as the technique that gautama buddha taught his followers. zero dogma.
( http://www.siri.dhamma.org/#vipassana )
anyway– i’m loving your twitter (i hate the word tweet), keeps me laughing.
thanks
–dosadi
Another Amazingly thought provoking blog from Joe. Love it Joe!
You sir, know the way of the master…go therefore…and make disciples…of all the nations…
Seriously though…great ideas man. Please keep feeding this stuff to me I love it. You’ve given me so many good things to meditate on and this blog isn’t any different. Keep ‘em coming.
Joe,
I really enjoy reading about your experiences in the isolation tank. It has made me seek a place out in my area that offers services for a tank experience. It is easy to tell you genuinely believe in this meditative exercise. If only we all could “tune in” wouldn’t that be something!
hey joe, check out the billy meier abduction case.. hes got some good photos of his abductors ufo in strange and awkward positions in order to prove the impossibility of its hoaxing. i assume your aware of the possibility of human looking aliens??
You should check out a book called The Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore, it basically talks about the evolution of ideas… it would probably blow you away if you happened to stumble upon that concept by yourself.
The concept behind meme’s is that ideas are really just using our bodies as means to continue to replicate and evolve.. some really interesting stuff. The concept of there being “life” within perceptual thought is a possibility. It definitely goes along with how consciousness and thought process are really physical things.
Blah, enough blabbering. I’ll be seeing you at the Brea Improv Apr 11, at your last show. Can’t wait, Apr 10th is my 21st birthday so I’ll be sliding right in! Hah, take care Joe, your stuff is really inspirational. You make me just wanna get up and do shit, talk about stuff, go live. That kind of an affect is rare to find in people, keep doing whatever the hell that you think you’re doing. =)
The thing that’s interesting about UFO people is that you can put them all in a room together and they’ll have no cognitive dissonance about the matter whatsoever. What I mean is that you can have the Arcturian contactees, the Zeta Reticuli channelers, and the people who were abducted by the Pleiadians all in the same room and they don’t seem to have any problem with the fact that they’re all receiving messages that contradict each other.
A lot of these UFO types seem content to tell their story and they treat their supposed experience as if it was just that, a story. You don’t get any sense of trauma from most contactees.
In Rick Strassman’s DMT studies, some of the volunteers ended up creating a support group because their contact with entities in the DMT state was such an earth-shattering experience. You rarely see such a thing with UFO contactees, relative to the number of people claiming contact, even though you’d think a close encounter of the third kind would be as reality-shattering, if not more so, due to the fact that they couldn’t scapegoat the drug and try to brush it off as just a hallucination.
First time checking out your blog. Blew me away. Absolutely loved reading your thoughts and have to say they really have an impact. It’s not often you read something and want to shout out YES, I hear what your saying and it’s awesome. Will be back often and will continue to follow you on twitter.
Joe, love your perspective. I sum it up as the Universal Mind…a place in which all thought of all people move about, thus mediums and religous peoples insight. Not to say that these methods are true to their theme, just the concept. Mental connection to all beings based upon meditation, etc. Does make one feel like we are all interconnected by some oneness. I think a good reason a lot of belief systems have been made, is a rooted sense of being incomplete. At least I do when I focus. I was raised Christian, although I have since become Atheist…gave of pretending…but its interesting to note the chrstian doctrin of “the body of christ”. It would be even their theory that we are incomplete and ultimately become one upon death…a vapor of energy, universal and interwoven with all others. So many good thoughts, so many avenues to wander.
Joe, I share your skepticism of crazy people making crazy claims. I agree all things need to be properly analyzed and digested before conclusions can be drawn. However, in regard to the UFO issue while there are many nutjobs and charlatans within UFO and ET circles there are also many credible and credentialed people who have worked in the CIA, DIA, NSA, Pentagon, FAA, Air Force, Navy, etc. and they also have made some pretty fantastic claims. Now when your average person off the street says something like, “yeah, we have ET technology that could bring the world into a golden age.” Of course i’m not going to take his word for it, but when hundreds of professionals who have worked in such defense contracting agencies as Lockheed Martin and Boeing or intelligence agencies like the CIA and FBI say that same thing under the threat of violating their security oaths, suddenly it becomes way more real. You should check out the Disclosure Project: http://www.disclosureproject.org/ There is also a ranch up in Trout Lake, WA that is open to the public and supposedly it is a UFO hotspot and people from all over the world and from various industries/agencies have visited there. Most people who go there give testimonials about being blown away by what they’ve seen, mostly UFOs. I want to get out there myself but haven’t had the time. You should definitely go, maybe you can look for a house out there too, it’s absolutely beautiful in that area near Mt. Adams. It’s called the ECETI Ranch: http://www.eceti.org/Eceti.IndexII.html
Wow weird, i just had a dream where a subwoofer woke me up at the exact time when my alarm was suposed to go off “you know the one you forgot to set last night?” anyway i hopped on here and joes talking about outer dimentional intelligence and ideas. thats just awsome haha. its weird really i feel like my life is always changing just latly its speeding up like before i would notice a funny sequence of events at work. nothing major but it always left me with a slightly different view of my reality. now its waking me up out of bed! its like this guys trip but the good version “www.badexperiment.com/” anyways i gotta go to work. Joe if your reading ive always admired your quality of honesty and wisdom. Namaste
An atheist is just an agnostic who’s actually thought about it.
Joe – I can really relate to some of what you said in this post..
most of my life I’ve been one of those people whom just “accepted” beliefs without really thinking about it. I was agnostic most of my life until i sat down and really devoted allot of brain power to “religion and god” and in about 2 days i became an atheist and have only strengthened that position over the last year.
I’ve applied the same techniques to other aspects of life.. I’ve really taken the time to think things through, to let my mind go down all paths and even when i know something is not right from the get go, i still allow my mind to go down that path, so i may have a more complete picture, both right and wrong. it helps solidify my take on what’s what..
so again, i can really relate..
As to UFO’s. our galaxy is about 120,000 light years across (the milky way)
so it would take 60,000 years just to travel to the center of the milky way at the speed of light. AT THE SPEED OF LIGHT..
NOBODY is coming here in some tiny silver disk.
I 100% believe life exist on other planets throughout the universe.
but i do not believe they are coming here..
Apply “deep thought” to this issue with some common sense, will help convince anyone who does so.
our planet is so small, that it does not give off enough light to be see from far away.
with our most powerful telescopes we can see stars, like our sun, but we can not see planets like our earth.
so other aliens will not be looking for us..
the reason people think that is because we are so fucking ego centric.. we think we are SO FUCKING special, that aliens everywhere just want to run to earth and hang out with us retarded humans.. but again.. as you frequently say – it’s a biological trick.. we are egotistical mother fuckers.. and the truth is, we are just not that important.
is it possible for some other civilization to come here. yes.. have they ever? maybe..
but any “UFO” reports/abductions/sightings.. etc are all bullshit.
When I try to hold onto things in the world, beautiful or horrible, it stops the rate it was moving in and I distance myself from that rate. When I let it all go through me like water I become apart of the stream and am no longer alone.
My thoughts about UFOs and extra-terrestrials have evolved on the same timeline in the same way. I could have written that part of the blog myself.
Maybe the whole ideea of evolution is: us growing to the point where we’re gonna be able to perceive another realities that co-exsits with/in our reality.
Mr Rogan, I know you’re a busy man, but by coincidence I’m writing a book about aliens ( this is how I get here) and my theory is soo much resembeling with yours that I think we should talk about it.
So if you can overcome the natural thought that i’m just another internet crazy fan and what i have asked you it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense:) please write me an e-mail.
i couldn’t really find your adress
Oh, and the post is aboslutely amazing. First I have rolled onte the floor laughing and after i let my self breeth deeply for the first time in years, because it seems i’m not the only fruitcake nut case on planet earth.
Just became aware of your blog back in jan.,and I haven’t left a comment until today. Keep doing what you do, and I’m looking forward to you coming back to Austin. Peace.
Great Buddah quote, its similar to my favorite, “If on the path to enligtenment you find the Buddah, kill him and take another path.” Such a large portion of our species seeks to find satisfaction in the form of enlightenment, salvation, happiness, however you want to phrase it. The key to fnding these goals to to reach them yourself, not through someone else’s experiences. This is why I walked away from organized religions and their suggestions as to how to find happiness. Not saying their suggestions can’t work for the others, but it is foolish to think their path can be another’s as it may not agree with one’s reason and common sense. Sometimes the most profound and beautiful discoveries are hidden in the simpliest and most obvious places.
I’m a relatively new reader here and just wanted to say cool the isolation tank seems. I have tried various forms of meditation and inevitably my weak-minded ADD kicks in and I start focusing on things outside myself. Our 24×7 media culture has made it harder than ever to develop and nurture out ability to spend time in deep thought. (I’m the first to admit that my feable monkey brain would be a prototype for an Emperial Storm Trooper Clone, quick to let Obi-Won and Luke pass declaring, “These are not the droids we are looking for,” but TV, text messages, IM, etc certainly hasn’t helped to lengthen my attention span.) A tool like the isolation tank physically removes all the variables our minds are so quick to focus on. That is genius.
Developing out deep thought abilities is so incredibly important to success in life, in anything. Our brains are physical organs, not magical spiritual mysteries that over the centuries our ancestors believed them to be. The food we eat effects them and the exercise we give them are important to their function. Our brain’s fucnction allows us to do amazing things, not only mentally, but physically as well. When Joe describes being “on” while stage its the result of his brain functioning at a higher level. Words aren’t processed on the way to his lips, they just come out. Its the same as Micheal Jordan when he winked at the announcers after hitting his sixth 3 ball in the first half of an NBA finals game. The same as Tiger Woods going 15-under in 4 rounds at Pebble Beach in 2000. The same as Roger Federer creating angles and shots his oppenens have never seen. The same as Anderson Silva rolling his head and hands looking for the perfect opening to striking, peotry in motion. The same as Dustin Hazlett turning a wizzer into an armbar without ever practicing the move. Athletes call it being in the zone. Jazz musicians call it being in the flow. Its a beautiful thing. Its a hard place to achieve and only through exercising our brains can we reach that place more often where our mental capacity allows us to do things physically that are amazing.
The isolation tank seems to be a excellent tool to help one train their mind to tap into that “zone” no matter how you express yourself more often.
Great stuff Joe.
Dear Mr. Rogan,
Thank you for taking the time to jot down your thoughts. I have a question, but I will save it to the end. Hey, remember when the internet just started… my Dad was the computer guy for a school district so he/they had one of the first internet connections in the U.S. and he was showing it to me…. and we connected to this college that had a couple of text pages up… and we just looking at it going “okay that’s really neat…. that we can connect over there… but there’s nothing really there…. there’s no… like…. where’s the show?” So anyway…. flash forward to now and the connections are so much faster and more people are there and more stuff is there it’s just this awesome world, right? So anyway, on to my question….. It’s a 3-parter. One: how come sometimes you seem like such a cool guy and sometimes you seem like such an a-hole? Do you think one of the personalities will eventually win? If so, which one? Also, do you sometimes try to be gross just so you can see how gross you can be and still not be completely and entirely sexually repulsive? Is this like a contest with yourself? I’m just asking. Love, Bongo.
To believe only after thinking places your belief in thought.
http://twitter.com/misbeliever
Joe,
Big fan bro, since your early UFC days. Sorry didn’t watch Fear Factor.
You ought to condense your blogs into a novel. We need a new Kerouac, Bukawski, Burroughs, Fante, etc… They all just took from their experience and wrote about it.
You have some great insights and good writing, go for it! UFC announcer, comedian and Novelist.
If you are unfamiliar to Fante, let me know and I will send you a book.
Might see you at Legends soon.
Peace.
Mark
And why are you saying you don’t believe in aliens? If you wanna believe in aliens, believe in aliens…. jeebus. I won’t make fun of you.
Love,
Bongo
In the province of the mind what one believes to be true, either is true or becomes true within certain limits. These limits are to be found experimentally and experientially. When so found these limits turn out to be further beliefs to be transcended. In the province of the mind there are no limits. However, in the province of the body there are definite limits not to be transcended. John C Lilly – bardoworld.com