The Emerald Tablets of Thoth

[Trent Wray]

I think there are a couple of ways you can approach this for yourself Marshmallow.

1) If you try to understand the underlying truths behind everything, it's quite possible you will be debunking for the rest of your life. You will explain one thing and be satisfied, but then something else will pop up that will catch ahold of you. I think it could easily be like a yard full of weeds for you .... you pick a few out of the ground, wipe your brow and feel good ... turn around and more weeds popped up.
2) Just my 2 cents ... but I would say that the fear itself is something that needs to be dealt with ... not the focus' of the fear, but what causes the fear in the first place? Learning truth isn't replacing it for you. It's still there.

What do you think it would take for you to not be afraid of these types of things .... REALLY? No matter what it is, what would set your mind at ease overall do you think? What brings you peace and calm and the ability to think rationally?

 

[Moss]

Everytime someone mentions shapeshifting humanoid reptiles I have to think of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

 

[Marshmallow]

I think this is an excellent post. I know some people in the CT section have accused you of not being genuine, but I'm not one of them.

I hope the critical thinking works out for you and you can overcome the fear of these things and appreciate them for what they really are: Entertainment.

Thank you for your support, Brainache. It's much appreciated. And thank you for giving me the benefit of the doubt.

Hi Marshmallow. No, you're not a scaredy cat. I can relate to what you're going through because it was only relatively recently that I was cheering on David Icke from the stalls of the Brixton Academy and thinking everything he said was true.

Like you, I found the biggest drawback to believing in conspiracy theories is that they leave you feeling so vulnerable, to the point where you're traumatised by believing this rubbish. Becoming a skeptoid is liberating in many ways, but I am trying to be an open-minded sceptic (ifyouseewhatImean).

Now I'm on that journey where I apply the critical thinking that I apply in other areas of my life to conspiracy theories also. Like you, I still think that there is some non-physical reality and I think that science will be able explain this in good time. But that doesn't mean there's reptoids living there.

No fear my friend!

Thanks a lot for your words of encouragement, 23_Tauri. And it's always good to know that there's someone who understands what I'm going through.

Exactly the point I was trying to drive. The more you learn about how fiction is constructed and the patterns it uses, the more you are able discern it from facts. Hence my previous linking to tv-tropes.
You need to learn how to unsuspend your disbelief!

I think I'm starting to see how maybe this could just be a "trope". The difference about this one is that people actually believe it's true. I still wonder where it originated.

There was ever anything new about the new age movement. Just the same old nonsense dressed up in a new set of clothes.

Although I don't see what you think shapeshifting reptilians have to do with new age stuff. The new age was all about spirituality and feel-good stuff about universal oneness. Preferably involving crystals. Quantum ones if possible. The reptilian stuff is a completely separate bunch of conspiracy theorist nonsense, usually proclaiming plenty of doom and gloom and about as far from new age as you can get.



Further back than you thought, maybe. I don't think Icke has ever made an original claim, he just regurgitates any ideas he comes across, provided they're insane enough for his tastes. I quite like the comparison between him and L. Ron Hubbard - Hubbard wrote some bad sci-fi and turned it into a religion. Icke read some bad sci-fi and turned it into a religion. Hubbard at least gets points for originality.

I mentioned the New Age movement because a lot of the things these (possibly non-existent) tablets say is very New Agey. Also, David Icke was heavily into New Agey stuff around the time he started making these wacky claims.

One or two people mentioned that I might have OCD, and I'm not going to rule out that possibility. I do have at least one relative with OCD. I'm not an obsessive hand-washing, tin can-alphabetizing type or anything like that, but I do worry about stuff more than most people.

I want to say thanks to everyone who posted. I don't really have time to respond to everything posted on the previous pages right now, but I read all of the posts on this thread and I appreciate the feedback.

 

[Marshmallow]

I think there are a couple of ways you can approach this for yourself Marshmallow.

1) If you try to understand the underlying truths behind everything, it's quite possible you will be debunking for the rest of your life. You will explain one thing and be satisfied, but then something else will pop up that will catch ahold of you. I think it could easily be like a yard full of weeds for you .... you pick a few out of the ground, wipe your brow and feel good ... turn around and more weeds popped up.
2) Just my 2 cents ... but I would say that the fear itself is something that needs to be dealt with ... not the focus' of the fear, but what causes the fear in the first place? Learning truth isn't replacing it for you. It's still there.

What do you think it would take for you to not be afraid of these types of things .... REALLY? No matter what it is, what would set your mind at ease overall do you think? What brings you peace and calm and the ability to think rationally?

You have a point, there.

I'm not really sure what else would most effectively stop me from fearing these things, but I'll have a think about that.

I think that maybe I should spend at least a little more time holding up a flashlight to the things that scare me, though. It seems to be helping. Maybe one day I'll get to the point where I no longer need to do that.

Everytime someone mentions shapeshifting humanoid reptiles I have to think of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Never seen it, I'm afraid.

 

[Elizabeth I]

1. Get a life.

2. Get some outside interests - cooking, painting, dog walking, setting the world's record for standing on your head.

3. Seek professional help. IF the suggestion about OCD is true, there's very little you can do on your own. And if you see a competent professional, at least you will know if the suggestion has any validity.

4. Ask yourself, "Even if it were true, what's the worst that could happen?"

5. Remind yourself that all kinds of things - human sacrifice, female circumcision, the execution of witches, slavery, the divine right of kings - that a whole lot of people have believed in and practiced for a long time are rank nonsense and in many cases actually harmful. Just because an idea has been around for more than the last five minutes doesn't mean it has any validity at all.

6. Follow through with your declaration in another thread here and quit reading crap. I would suggest not even fiction, since you seem unable to tell the difference.

And if you keep up with this stuff don't be surprised if fewer and fewer people reply in a sympathetic manner. You say, "thank you," and "that's interesting," but you never seem to put into practice any of the extremely useful suggestions you receive, and you don't stop. You've only changed your tone, not the substance of your posts.

 

[Irish Murdoch]

One or two people mentioned that I might have OCD, and I'm not going to rule out that possibility. I do have at least one relative with OCD. I'm not an obsessive hand-washing, tin can-alphabetizing type or anything like that, but I do worry about stuff more than most people.

No, not all of us are--it's a very common misconception about OCD that the hand-washing/checking thing is all there is to it. The Pure-O side of things is very much to do with excessive rumination and "what if?" thoughts, accompanied by lots of anxiety.

Of course, I'll emphasise again that I don't have the first idea whether you have it or not. You'd need to get a professional opinion on that. In the meantime, why not take a look at this site: http://www.ocduk.org/. See if anything rings true.

One thing's for sure: if you do have it, then seeking reassurance in the form of constant debunking is the worst thing you can do--it feels like what you need to do, but it will only ever exacerbate the condition.

 

[Marduk]

Reptilians first featured prominantly in the works of Helena Blavatsky,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helena_Blavatsky
she mistakenly assumed that Ignatius Donnelys ramblings about the lost continent of Lemuria were true
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignatius_L._Donnelly
Her Lemuria was populated by super advanced reptilians,
This was around the 1880s.
It all grew from there.

fact of the matter was that before modern plate tectonics was understood scientists used the idea of lost continents to explain the distribribution of species across our planet.
In the case of Lemuria it was first put forward By a geologist (Philip Sclater) in 1864 to explain the spread of Lemurs between Madagascar and India
he wrote

"The anomalies of the Mammal fauna of Madagascar can best be explained by supposing that... a large continent occupied parts of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans . .. that this continent was broken up into islands, of which some have become amalgamated with ... Africa, some ... with what is now Asia; and that in Madagascar and the Mascarene Islands we have existing relics of this great continent, for which ... I should propose the name Lemuria!

The idea of lost continents was completely destroyed in the 1950s when continental drift was discovered.

no one seems to have informed the woos of this occourence though, and they seem to busy pocketing the money of the gullible to worry too much about factual science

 

[Marshmallow]

1. Get a life.

2. Get some outside interests - cooking, painting, dog walking, setting the world's record for standing on your head.

3. Seek professional help. IF the suggestion about OCD is true, there's very little you can do on your own. And if you see a competent professional, at least you will know if the suggestion has any validity.

4. Ask yourself, "Even if it were true, what's the worst that could happen?"

5. Remind yourself that all kinds of things - human sacrifice, female circumcision, the execution of witches, slavery, the divine right of kings - that a whole lot of people have believed in and practiced for a long time are rank nonsense and in many cases actually harmful. Just because an idea has been around for more than the last five minutes doesn't mean it has any validity at all.

6. Follow through with your declaration in another thread here and quit reading crap. I would suggest not even fiction, since you seem unable to tell the difference.

And if you keep up with this stuff don't be surprised if fewer and fewer people reply in a sympathetic manner. You say, "thank you," and "that's interesting," but you never seem to put into practice any of the extremely useful suggestions you receive, and you don't stop. You've only changed your tone, not the substance of your posts.

I am trying to change ways of thinking that I've held onto for a very long time. These things don't happen overnight. I can't expect it to happen all at once. Isn't it at least worth something that I'm starting to think about these things in a different way and starting to question them more thoroughly?

I do have a life and outside interests, and I spend a lot of time focusing on those things. However, every once in a while a thought will start nagging at me. I'll start remembering something I read during my full-on conspiracy theory days. I guess these are the obsessive thoughts mentioned on the OCD websites.

You seem annoyed with me. If that's the case, I apologize. However, I thought this was supposed to be a place to discuss things like conspiracy theories and the paranormal openly.

No, not all of us are--it's a very common misconception about OCD that the hand-washing/checking thing is all there is to it. The Pure-O side of things is very much to do with excessive rumination and "what if?" thoughts, accompanied by lots of anxiety.

Of course, I'll emphasise again that I don't have the first idea whether you have it or not. You'd need to get a professional opinion on that. In the meantime, why not take a look at this site: http://www.ocduk.org/. See if anything rings true.

One thing's for sure: if you do have it, then seeking reassurance in the form of constant debunking is the worst thing you can do--it feels like what you need to do, but it will only ever exacerbate the condition.

That sounds a lot like me. I think I'll bring it up and see what my doctor says.

By the way after reading my post again and I realize how it might have come across. I want to apologize for if it seemed like I was generalizing about OCD. I didn't mean to, I just meant to say that while I may not have a lot of the most commonly recognized symptoms, I may have some others.

I checked the site out and read about the symptoms of OCD. It seems that I have some of the traits.

Reptilians first featured prominantly in the works of Helena Blavatsky,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helena_Blavatsky
she mistakenly assumed that Ignatius Donnelys ramblings about the lost continent of Lemuria were true
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignatius_L._Donnelly
Her Lemuria was populated by super advanced reptilians,
This was around the 1880s.
It all grew from there.

fact of the matter was that before modern plate tectonics was understood scientists used the idea of lost continents to explain the distribribution of species across our planet.
In the case of Lemuria it was first put forward By a geologist (Philip Sclater) in 1864 to explain the spread of Lemurs between Madagascar and India
he wrote

The idea of lost continents was completely destroyed in the 1950s when continental drift was discovered.

no one seems to have informed the woos of this occourence though, and they seem to busy pocketing the money of the gullible to worry too much about factual science

Thanks for the info, Marduk. I figured the reptilian stories must have started from a single source somewhere.

All I knew about Helena Blavatsky is that people say she started the New Age movement and that she worshiped Satan. I sort of avoided finding out more about her.

LOL, so Lemuria was named after lemurs? I wondered where the myth of Lemuria started. Now I know.

Thanks again.

 

[Irish Murdoch]

That sounds a lot like me. I think I'll bring it up and see what my doctor says.

Good idea.. If you get diagnosed, you will for one thing learn that ruminating on or trying to "out-logic" the intrusive thoughts is not the way to deal with them.

By the way after reading my post again and I realize how it might have come across. I want to apologize for if it seemed like I was generalizing about OCD. I didn't mean to, I just meant to say that while I may not have a lot of the most commonly recognized symptoms, I may have some others.

Oh no, don't worry, I didn't get that impression at all.

All I knew about Helena Blavatsky is that people say she started the New Age movement and that she worshiped Satan.

Nah, she was just a plagiarising buffoon who was thoroughly proved to be using carnival tricks. She's not one to worry about!

 

[Elizabeth I]

You seem annoyed with me. If that's the case, I apologize. However, I thought this was supposed to be a place to discuss things like conspiracy theories and the paranormal openly.

All I'm saying is that in your thread in "Conspiracy Theories" you said you were going to quit reading the junk that gives rise to these possibly obsessive thoughts (because I'm not going to diagnose anybody, how arrogant that would be), and within a week - certainly within two weeks - you're back in "General Skepticism and the Paranormal" going on about some book about the Emerald Tablets of Thoth.

I am glad to hear that you are considering seeking medical advice. If you suffer from some form of obsession that is really the most likely route to get some relief.

 

[Marshmallow]

Good idea.. If you get diagnosed, you will for one thing learn that ruminating on or trying to "out-logic" the intrusive thoughts is not the way to deal with them.



Oh no, don't worry, I didn't get that impression at all.



Nah, she was just a plagiarising buffoon who was thoroughly proved to be using carnival tricks. She's not one to worry about!

I understand that. I guess it just leads to more similar thoughts.
And I'm glad you didn't get that impression from my words.

I did a search on Blavatsky, but I didn't find pages that debunked her, though I found lots of pages that tried to refute the debunkings. I wonder if anyone could direct me to one, as I'm interested in stuff like this - how frauds can build up such a huge following.

As for the worshiping Satan thing, she was always talking about Lucifer with admiration, etc.:

http://keithtruth.blogspot.com/2009/07/helena-blavatskys-view-of-satan.html

This is just a page I came across in doing a bit of research on her. I haven't read his other pages on "exposing the NWO", etc., nor do I plan to. It's just that he uses a lot of quotes that demonstrate that she did seem to worship Lucifer. I don't know what to do with that information, though. I just ask myself whether it means she was really Satanic. If that's the case, would that mean that the New Age movement was based on something Satanic?

All I'm saying is that in your thread in "Conspiracy Theories" you said you were going to quit reading the junk that gives rise to these possibly obsessive thoughts (because I'm not going to diagnose anybody, how arrogant that would be), and within a week - certainly within two weeks - you're back in "General Skepticism and the Paranormal" going on about some book about the Emerald Tablets of Thoth.

I am glad to hear that you are considering seeking medical advice. If you suffer from some form of obsession that is really the most likely route to get some relief.

You're right, but it's been really difficult for me. The thing is, I didn't read the "translation" of the Emerald Tablets after I made that post. It was something I read last year. I started having all these thoughts about it and I couldn't get it out of my head for some reason.

Other posters may be right - I think there is a very strong possibility that I might have OCD. Even when I don't believe the thoughts about these things, they keep repeating and the "what if" thoughts keep repeating. I don't know how to make them stop. Even when I try to distract myself, my mind wanders back to them and I get anxious all over again. Even when I don't read anything new about these things, I keep remembering the stuff I've read in the past. It's not psychosis or anything like that - I don't actually believe it. I just can't seem to stop the "what if" thoughts?: "What if there's even a small chance that some of it might be true?" "How do you know some of it's not true? You can't disprove it," and so on. It's almost like I have two conflicting beliefs at the same time.

I do plan on seeking medical advice and I hope there is something that can be done to stop me from worrying about these things.

 

[Irish Murdoch]

I haven't read his other pages on "exposing the NWO", etc., nor do I plan to.

Don't read any of it, it's clearly doing you no good.

Other posters may be right - I think there is a very strong possibility that I might have OCD. Even when I don't believe the thoughts about these things, they keep repeating and the "what if" thoughts keep repeating. I don't know how to make them stop.

If you do have OCD, it's very, very important to realise that you can't stop them. Every attempt to stop them will make them come back 10 times stronger. What you've got to learn to do is to be unconcerned about them. That may seem nearly impossible (if you really do have OCD, then it will), but CBT and (for some people) medication can help.

Instead of reading Blavatsky, try this: http://www.ocdonline.com/ , especially the articles.

 

[dafydd]

That makes sense.

I am not a reptilian conspiracy believer, but I have an irrational fear of such things turning out to be true. Even when the rational parts of mind argue that it's bullcrap, the irrational part is screaming, "What if it's true? What if it's true?" It's like how some people are afraid to be alone in the dark after watching a scary movie, even thought they don't really believe they'll be attacked by fictional movie monsters. However, this fear holds more power over me because there are many people actually claiming this stuff to be true (whether it is or not). So, let's just say I go the extra mile to try and debunk these things. Basically, I'm the official scaredy cat of the JREF forums.



I've never watched any of those shows (except for parts of Star Trek here and there), so you could be right.

Lol thanks a lot for that mental image.

No need to be scared,it's not true.

 

[Marduk]

I did a search on Blavatsky, but I didn't find pages that debunked her, though I found lots of pages that tried to refute the debunkings. I wonder if anyone could direct me to one, as I'm interested in stuff like this - how frauds can build up such a huge following.

You don't need to debunk baloney, take her claim that she learned from Ascended Tibetan masters, at the time Tibetan culture was totally unknown in the west, so she could make up what she liked about its esoteric teachings and its people and no one was any the wiser.

Lobsang Rampa is another of the same type,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobsang_Rampa
His excuses when debunked are typical of pseudo science, he moved the goalposts, but his real name was Cyril Henry Hoskin

Thesedays if someone told you that they had an esoteric master teacher from Tibet, would you believe them ?

 

[Moss]

Thesedays if someone told you that they had an esoteric master teacher from Tibet, would you believe them ?

You mean like the baldy living in Dharamsala teaching things like the Kalachakra Tantra?

 

[dudalb]

Everytime someone mentions shapeshifting humanoid reptiles I have to think of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

I think of Dr Curt Connors aka "The Lizard" in Spiderman Comics.