41 Million Views in 3 Days

This launch trailer dropped 3 days ago and already has 41 million views. It has already made $600M in pre-orders and does not launch for a month. Projections suggest cumulative launch-week sales could reach between $3.25 billion and $5.2 billion. With development estimates scaling past $1 billion, it stands as one of the most expensive entertainment projects ever produced.

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A Model of Perception

Newly reformatted essay. Originally written in 2010. DOWLOAD

The image is of an old-school movie projectionist watching his own projection through the window of his projector booth. The image relates to an analogy given in Meher Baba's Intelligence Notebooks.

GTA V Biggest Entertainment Product in History

Grand Theft Auto V sold 225,000,000 copies. After 13 years it continues to generate $10 million a week. The online version pulls in $2.5 million a day. It has made more money than any entertainment product in history.

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When a poor person goes to a hospital in America

If a poor person goes to the hospital and they give them a $100.00 pill and the government pays for it, people are angry ‘their tax dollars’ went to a lazy poor person. But they are not angry that $30.00 of that went to a hospital chain worth billions, $30.00 went to a millionaire doctor, and $40 of it went to the pharmaceutical company that made the pill that is worth $161 Billion, as Pfizer is. 

None of that money actually went to the poor person.

Institutional tracking platforms estimate Peter Schiff's equity and stock portfolio holdings at over $856.6 million as of August 2026.

The Seductiveness of Imagining Substances

What sets EOP apart from all other philosophical theories that I’m aware of is that it does not posit any theoretical substances. It has no substances as basic or fundamental to its system. Instead what we think of as substances in our daily lives are viewed as outcomes of the system.

Instead of being based on theoretical substances it is purely psychogenic. Substances are a result of a psychic evolution, not a cause of it. 

In this paper I’ll show how theoretical substances have been imagined in the past as an underlying reality, thought to explain the things we perceive, and the many problems that arise from that habit — problems that EOP completely avoids by not having them.

But first I need to define what is meant by ‘substance’ or ‘a substance’ in philosophy. 

It has long been understood by philosophers that we don’t perceive objects directly. We perceive our internal states and infer the presence of outer objects as their imagined cause. The idea that we perceive outer things directly is called ‘naive realism.’

This leads to positing what those outer things consist of. The word ‘substance’ is a kind of placeholder for whatever that might be.

Substance is that which exists in its own right and does not depend on anything else to exist, acting as the "bearer" or "support" for qualities we experience like color, shape, or thought.

John Locke in the 17th century referred to this supposed ‘substance’ as "something, I know not what.” Locke noticed that we experience clusters of qualities (e.g., yellow, hard, and heavy for gold) going together. Because we cannot imagine sensations like these floating around freely, our minds suppose an underlying support—a substratum. Locke once wrote of this support:

The idea of corporeal substance in matter is as remote from our conceptions and apprehensions, as that of spiritual substance, or spirit. (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 1689).

René Descartes speculated that there were in fact two kinds of substance, corporeal substance (matter) and spiritual substance (mind or spirit), and that these somehow interacted in us through the mediation of the pineal gland in the brain. 

George Berkeley denied corporeal substance (matter), and preferred to refer to himself as an ‘immaterialist.’ He speculated instead that there was only a single spiritual substance, or mind.

 

Spinoza likewise claimed that there was only a single substance and he referred to it as ‘nature,’ by which he meant corporeal substance plus the laws of nature.

By the 20th century philosophers had come to believe in a single substance, which they called ‘matter,’ and began to refer to themselves simply as materialists or physicalists. This is only another way of saying, like Spinoza before, that there is a single corporeal substance. Today this view has become so mainstream that a cursory glance in a modern dictionary will reveal the word ‘substance’ defined as ‘matter,’ and the word ‘matter’ defined as ‘substance.

Regardless of whether philosophers speculated about there being one substance or two, none of these substances were themselves observed. They are merely placeholders for that thing we cannot see that is causing our experience — a hidden ground or substratum assumed to be reality. 

In spite of very good intention on the part of these philosophers, this way of approaching the problem of explaining experience is really the root cause of many of the problems we face in metaphysics. A good example is the mind-body problem. Simply reducing things down from two substances (such as in Descartes) to one (such as in materialism) does not solve the problem. For we still must answer the problem of how physical events in a material brain can produce subjective experience. Australian philosopher David Chalmers has famously called this the “hard problem.” Other problems such as how the brain causes functions like muscle contractions he sees as the easy problem.

I wish to explain what is wrong in this thinking in terms of substances as explanations and why such problems are inevitable so long as we continue with such thinking. There is a major logical problem in it.

When we go to imagine substances, we inevitably project onto those substances the likeness of objects and materials we find in our experience, when all the while it is our experience that we are trying to explain by such substances. I have referred to this as a kind of loop of circular reasoning. Unable to perceive the cause of our experience, we look around us and project what we see onto what we assume is its cause.

This logical fallacy has a name. It is called the historical fallacy and was pointed out by philosopher John Dewey in The Psychological Review in 1896. 

A state of things characterizing an outcome is regarded as a true description of the events which led up to this outcome; when, as a matter of fact, if this outcome had already been in existence, there would have been no necessity for the process.

I’ve pointed this out so many times. A copy of the thing being explained is read back into its explanation.

The alternative is to realize that we perceive substances all around us, and it is these substances that we need to explain. Thinking another just like them that we can’t see is responsible for them doesn’t solve the problem, for we are left with our invented substance to explain.

The alternative has always seemed obvious to me. Our experience (the event or verb of our perceiving) is the ground of being — and that it has evolved from a more primitive and primordial state. Hence the evolution of perception.

The evolution of perception succeeds where previous systems didn’t mostly due to what it does not include — causal substances. The cause is the evolution, not another thing we will inevitably be left to explain.

Of course the evolution of perception concept readily allows that we find objects and materials that constitute them all around us all the time. But their appearance is an effect of this evolution of perception, this psychic emergence. It is substance in the sense of ‘stuff’ or ‘material’ in the colloquial sense. But it is not ‘substance’ in the sense used in philosophy as something mysterious and unseen that exists in its own right and does not depend on anything else to exist. Its appearance depends on the evolution of perception to emerge. It is the completed result of a process and is entirely psychogenic. This is the meaning of the title of my first book, The Evolution of Perception & the Cosmology of Substance. The theory of EOP does not rely on a theoretical substance; it explains substantiveness found in the phenomenon.

JJ gets another Jiu-jitsu belt.

No longer a white belt. JJ is now a grey belt.

EOP Plain and Simple

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GTA 6 has an Arthur Morgan problem

My Latest Substack Article on Darwin

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How Nestle Got Japan To Drink Coffee 😵

Why We Need Reincarnation in the West

Why am I eager for the West to embrace reincarnation to the point of being common sense? While the West went through a philosophical Enlightenment period with some impressive movements in modernized thought, it was incomplete when it ended about 250 years ago. The post-Enlightenment and post-modern periods that followed in philosophy swiftly degenerated and lost the ground it had gained. In contemporary philosophy the West has degenerated into complete dreck. It can no longer advance. Its theories now move in hopeless circles around implausible entities like time particles that foster skepticism, naive realism, atheism, nihilism, and general malaise among the public who know nothing of what philosophers are talking about nor do they care anymore.

In short, the West is behind and needs revitalization. Its materialism, which doesn’t actually explain existence, needs a new path. I believe that Meher Baba introduced a way forward that takes the best of the new and old, and revitalizes it in a way that the West can understand if people make an effort to clarify it. A major sticking point is the West’s refusal to try to understand and accept reincarnation as basic. 

How did it get this way? There is a line, now considered by scholars to be anonymous, in the Bible that says, “And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the Judgment” (Hebrews 9:27). Our Western aversion to reincarnation is based on this line. However, written by an anonymous Jew, the line reflects an eschatology (story of the end-time) that was not originally Jewish. It was taught to Jewish rabbis by Zoroastrian priests in the Persian period following the Babylonian captivity and the freeing of the Jews by Cyrus the Great. After the Exile and the completion of the second temple in 516 BC the idea was codified in Jewish apocalyptic literature like the Book of Daniel. Later it was adopted into Christian ideology. The Book of Hebrews was written between 64 and 68 AD, well after the crucifixion of Jesus. So when you read in the Christian Bible today “it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the Judgment” ask who appointed this. It is not Jesus. It derives from Persian oral tradition of the time. You are hardly reading the teachings of Jesus Christ or Moses.

I look forward to the West adopting reincarnation for it is only when we adopt Baba’s cosmology that we will be able to move forward from this barbaric Darwinian materialism which has led us into this nihilism.

Once Upon a Time in the Middle East

My grandson the entomologist

My five year old grandson collects cicadas and wants to be an entomologist.

This reminded me of a funny scene from Louis van Gasteren's self reflexive film No Plane For Zagreb where Louis goes to see a famous entomologist in Paris who tells him the bug he is trying to identify does not exist.

Zionism Is Obviously A Racist Ideology

The Most Well Developed Character in History

Professor launches first-ever Grand Theft Auto college history course

Gaza

Mirandalorian Gets a Package

Mason Jennings - I Love You And Buddha Too

Featuring  Mason Jennings, Matt Costa, and Jack Johnson.

I Love You And Buddha Too was written by Mason Jennings for his album In the Ever released by Brushfire Records in 2008.

Amish Christianity

The Basic Teachings of Confucianism

Michael Row Your Boat Ashore

NOPIXEL V LAUNCH DAY! | Sep 8, 2026

Game Immersion

Mirandalorian Reacting To Her FIRST Cameo

Rob Wiethoff who plays John Marston in Red Dead reaches out to Game Reactor Miranda Lorian.

The power of rationalization

I have basically rationalized how Meher Baba could actually be right about his cosmology. There is no way to empirically test if Baba is right. But I showed it could easily be true using only scientific reasoning, making what Baba said the only plausible theory -- since I can think of no other. For there really is no competing plausible theory. All other cosmologies leave the questions I attempt to answer, using Baba's explanations, completely unanswered -- and in many cases they don't even ask them. 

Kant just says we can't know about the noumenon (how things actually are) and leaves it at that. And the materialists simply ignore the difficult questions, choosing instead to gaslight the public into thinking they can't see any. They are essentially non-philosophical. And this non-philosophy has become their position.

What I Now Think "Breaking the Silence" Means

In this incarnation of the Avatar, God (through Meher Baba) has "spilled the beans" or "let the cat out of the bag." He has told us how the Universe actually runs, for we did not have the concepts before that we needed to understand it. This idea is consistent with an exchange in the Bible between Jesus and his disciples as he was being arrested and led away:

Jesus being arrested

In John 16:25, Jesus notes that He had up to then been using figurative language, but promised that a time was coming when He would no longer use veiled language and would tell them plainly about the Father.

Jesus said this at his departing moments as he was being arrested, so clearly referred to a time after his death. So in this time period Baba uses the metaphor of a word being first withheld and then spoken, causing enormous change for the good. So he is literally silent his whole life, and leaves a book behind titled "God Speaks." It is as if through this book God finally explains things in the plain way he promised he would 2000 years ago.

Prior to this, in all past ages including Mohammad's time, people didn't yet have the concepts required to understand this message. These included:

1. Freudian psychology (the concept of the subconscious)
2. Gestalt psychology and apperception (how the mind contributes to what it takes itself to be perceiving and this is in terms of memories)
3. Evolution
4. Having things explained in terms of a process rather than a talismans
5. Other planets
6. Movie theater analogy
7. The concept of the algorithm

How 24 inspired Guantanamo Bay

 

This video is packaged as a comedic commentary but it’s well researched.

12 Rulers Who Converted Their Empires

History is full of powerful rulers who altered the trajectory of their nations by converting to a new faith. When a monarch converted, their subjects—either through top-down edicts, social pressure, or military enforcement—usually followed.

1. Pharaoh Akhenaten (14th Century BC): abolished Egypt's traditional polytheism to enforce the worship of a single sun god, Aten.

2. Ashoka converted India to Buddhism in 250 BC.

3. Constantine converted the Roman Empire to Christianity in 312 AD.

4. Vladimir the Great converted Russia to Orthodox Christianity in 988 AD.

5. Tiridates III converted Armenia to Christianity in the 4th Century.

6. King Ezana of Axum converted Ethiopia from Paganism to Christianity in the 4th Century.

7. Khan Bulan converted Khazaria from Shamanism to Judaism in the 9th Century.

8. King Boris I converted Bulgaria from Slavik Paganism to Christianity in the 9th century.

9. Olaf Tryggvason of Norway and Harald Bluetooth of Denmark converted from Norse paganism to Christianity around the late 10th century.

10. Ghazan Khan converted Persia from Shamanism to Islam in the 13th century.

11. Shah Ismail I converted Iran from Sunni Islam to Shia Islam in the 16th Century.

12. Henry VIII converted England from Catholicism to Anglicanism in 1534.

In the ancient pagan and shamanistic world religious life seems to have been organic and bottom up. But as soon as you have centralized government, religions are top-down. An emperor or king changes religion and has his whole nation do the same. This means people basically just do what they are told. This is true for Egyptian religion, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Judaism. Even many pagan religions were enforced from above with religious rules and edicts such as mandatory participation in animal sacrifices in Greece and Rome. These were government mandated practices. So out modern idea that “the people” come up with their own morality does not conform with reality. They do and think what they are instructed to do and think.

This makes me feel that people will have to have Baba’s teaching ‘taught’ to them by a mandate one day. And rules like being a vegetarian and not torturing being laws. Here is a quote by Baba to this effect about vegetarianism. 

“I have abstained from fish, eggs and meat not for my benefit but to create and impress upon humanity an example which later, when I speak, will become an established law.” (source)

Meher Baba on the Caste System – "as absurd as it is tyrannous"

Meher Baba strongly condemned the caste system, ritualism, and the religious authority of the Brahmin priest class, viewing them as severe barriers to genuine spiritual progress. Because he emphasized the internal awakening of love over external traditions, he actively disrupted caste restrictions within his ashrams and openly criticized institutionalized priesthoods.

His views on the Brahmin priest caste and the broader caste system can be broken down into three major areas:

1. Rejection of the Caste System

Meher Baba explicitly rejected the concept of caste, calling it both absurd and oppressive. When a few of his adult Brahmin followers expressed distress over his instruction for Brahmin boys and lower-caste ("Untouchable") boys to sit together at his school, Baba rebuked them sternly, stating:

"I have put on this body with a view to destroying the whole fabric of the [caste system], and destroy it I will, despite the opposition of the bigoted Brahmins. The caste system is as absurd as it is tyrannous. It has nothing to do with religion in the true sense of the word."  

Source p. 36

To actively break down these barriers, he required his high-caste Hindu disciples (mandali) to do tasks traditionally reserved for lower castes, such as cleaning latrines and drawing water from the same wells as the Mahars, a practice completely forbidden by orthodox traditions at the time.

2. Criticism of the Priesthood and "Hired Prayers"

Baba did not limit his criticisms to Hindu priests; he criticized professional religious figures across all major traditions—including Christian priests, Zoroastrian dasturs, and Muslim mullas. He viewed the priest class as an impediment to societal and spiritual freedom, explaining that mechanical rituals and hired prayers hold no spiritual weight:

• On Mechanical Rituals: He once noted that the world is filled with "useless babbling" performed in the name of prayer. He stated that for ages, priests have been muttering hired prayers for payment without gaining the slightest spiritual advantage, because the practices lack sincerity.
• On Selfishness: He described the rituals and ceremonies enforced by priests as the "dry husk of the corn," arguing that out of selfishness, priests across all religions create and propagate rigid customs that ultimately cripple true religion.
• On Political/Social Influence: In a discussion about societal independence, he went so far as to forcefully emphasize: "The priest class proves to be an impediment in everything. If you gain independence, do this first: arrest all the purohits, dastoors and mullas... deal with them firmly." 

3. Dealing with Individuals Compassionately

Despite his fierce opposition to the institution of the priesthood and the structure of the caste system, Meher Baba interacted with individual Brahmins with deep patience. He acknowledged that social conditioning runs deep, noting that when dealing with people from different backgrounds—whether a Brahmin or an Untouchable—he adjusted his approach to meet their specific temperaments, slowly helping them rise above their prejudices.

Ultimately, Meher Baba maintained that God does not look at caste or creed, but only at the purity, love, and selflessness within a person's heart.

Statements by Meher Baba about his movie, and interpretation

Meher Baba in Hollywood, 1932

The following are common misunderstandings about the film project Meher Baba began and worked on before abandoning in the 1930s.

Misunderstanding 1: Baba wrote a screenplay for a Hollywood movie on his theme of Reincarnation in the 30s. In reality what people are calling a script or screenplay was only an outline of possible movie scenes worked up by him in an hour while sitting down with screenwriter Mercedes De Acosta at her home in Harmon on the Hudson in New York.

Many other stories and even whole scripts were written as well by others as potential candidates for this movie project. Writers included Hy Kraft, Karl Vollmoeller, and Alexander Markey. None of these scenarios and scripts were ever approved by Baba for production. 

These facts are recorded in the book Early Messages to the West written by the Avatar Meher Baba Trust and published by Sheriar Foundation in 2009.

Misunderstanding 2: The outline by Baba and Acosta was meant by Baba to be taken as a blueprint for a film.

The reality is that Baba was only demonstrating how simple his basic idea was. It described five characters who we follow over several lifetimes as they progress spiritually. Eventually one achieves God-realization and his companions become his disciples. The title and details of the scenario were arbitrary, not to be followed literally. It was the theme he was trying to get across, not the story.

Baba later even said he was actually preparing the ground for a future trend in films, a medium that has evolved significantly since then.

Someday the themes we are discussing now will form the basis of an entirely new trend in motion pictures. (Lord Meher, 1986 print ed. p. 2215)

Misunderstanding 2: The movie Baba was talking about had to be a movie. Sound movies only began in 1929. In 1932, the year Baba began working on the project, the average Hollywood movie was black and white, screened in nearly square format, filmed entirely in a studio, and was about 81 to 90 minutes. By the 1950s movies were color, shot in wide-screen technicolor, and frequently ran over three hours. By the 2000s movies were watched at home on flat screens in home theaters, streamed by platforms like Netflix. Breaking Bad and Firefly were some of the first viral series. The Netflix series became the trend and the idea of binge-watching came to be popular. In the early 2010s broad open-world games like GTA 5 and Red Dead Redemption became sensations with players becoming immersed in games for hundreds of hours. 

The future still remains open as story entertainment continues to evolve.

Misunderstanding 3: Baba had in mind for people to make a movie about him, or that included him. There is zero evidence of this in anything Baba ever said about such  movie(s). Baba clearly was emphasizing the power of the medium of motion pictures -- under which we today would include the forms mentioned above and others to come -- to convey ideas to the masses.

I do not need to tell you who are engaged in the production and distribution of motion pictures what a power you hold in your hands, nor do I doubt that you are fully alive to the responsibilities which the wielding of that power involves. He who stimulates the imagination of the masses can move them in any direction he chooses, and there is no more powerful an instrument for stimulating their imagination than motion pictures. . . Both the press and the radio influence thought, but both lack the power of visible example, which is the greatest stimulant to action, and which the motion picture offers better now than any other medium. (Meher Baba's message to Hollywood, delivered at Pickfair in June 1932)

Gabriel Pascal, 1945

Misunderstanding 4: Baba abandoned the project or it "fell through." 

Baba stopped actively working on the film in 1934, but continued to discuss its future production with producer Gabriel Pascal as late as the 1950s (The Disciple and His Devil, Valerie Pascal, 1970).

And Baba once said the film had to be made one day.

Below is a chart Baba had made to explain the theme of Creation in the movie. 

It is my personal opinion that the themes Baba described in the 1930s will eventually be expressed as a video game franchise about reincarnation and karma as well as the ultimate purpose of life.

An Analysis of Why Meher Baba's Followers Don't Understand Him

The Western metaphysical paradigm is called reductive materialism. We grow up educated in this paradigm. Let me explain it. 

We are taught that things are fundamentally made of smaller things -- all the way down as they say. Things you see with your eyes and feel with your hands are made of molecules. Molecules are groups of two or more atoms held together by chemical bonds. These in turn are made of atoms. Atoms are made of sub-atomic particles, etc. All of these are things. So things are explained by more things.

So when a Westerner picks up a book like God Speaks, every noun is assumed to name a thing and is pictured as a thing.

Yahweh

Therefore, when Baba mentions "souls" we equate these with astral bodies (ghosts). When he mentions planes we equate these with places. When he mentions sanskaras we equate these with chromosomes. When he mentions "God" we equate this with our idea of Yahweh, a late Bronze Age deity adopted by certain henotheist tribes in the Levant as their national god. When he mentions evolution of consciousness we picture Charles Darwin's natural selection.

With such misunderstanding of what Baba is talking about you could read his book God Speaks ten times and still not know what he taught. I could not have understood Berkeley without my thesis advisor explaining the language, nor Kant without my Kant professor explaining what he meant by intuitions. Reading isn't always enough.

For this reason, I feel that one day the Baba community needs teachers and courses. I'm not the administrative type, so could never help with that. 

Gods, ghosts, places, and chromosomes are things. Animal species are things. Baba is not talking about things in God Speaks. He is trying to introduce the reader to a concept of psychic emergence. 

See my paper The Vocabulary and Meaning of the Psychic Emergent Universe.

Philosophy’s modern image of itself as a bulwark against disruptive inquiry

 

What Locke said in the 18th century in England still holds a lot of sway in philosophy today. 

In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1609) the English philosopher John Locke wrote that the role of philosophy was to serve as the under-laborer to the master-builder that is science. He meant that because science is so great, the only role left for philosophers was to clear the rubbish that kept people from believing in what scientists claim.

What he effectively implied was that philosophy was meant to be a bulwark against innovative philosophical contemplation or critique of the assumptions of science.

The problem with this view is that science has no actual view of reality. The scientists he idealized as “master-builders” could only tease out laws from their observations. They were helpless to see how those laws fit into a larger picture. 

The logical positivists furthered this idea by Locke, and the linguistic philosophers who followed them (led initially by Ludwig Wittgenstein) literally saw the role of philosophy as a kind of therapy for the ‘disorder’ of questioning metaphysical assumptions. See Ernest Gellner's Words and Things: An Examination of, and an Attack on, Linguistic Philosophy (1959).

So my philosopher colleagues were trained to see their role as preventing ideas like EOP (that integrates the achievements of science into a larger vision) from coming to the fore. This will not last, for people will eventually see it.

CIA and Academia

Why RD2 is still the best

Esalen Institute

Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, is often romanticized as a countercultural hub of the human potential movement, but critics and skeptics often "debunk" its mystical claims as expensive, pseudoscientific self-help wrapped in a corporate shell.

Timothy Leary Lying About What Meher Baba Said About Drugs

An excerpt from "Nema Aviona Za Zagreb." For the full film go here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7BhnI81P8w&t=2s

Filmed by Jan de Bont (pictured above). The footage of Meher Baba was shot in Meherazad, India on 20 September 1967. The Timothy Leary footage was shot in the same year at Milbrooke.

Uncaptured Jews in the Islamic Republic of Iran

How ChatGPT depicts me

I asked ChatGPT to create an image of Philosopher Christopher Jonathan Ott, who wrote "The Evolution of Perception" and this is what I got.

Compare to the actual me.