Restrictive Paradigms and the Independent Scholar

James Nestor's "Breath," Aldous Huxley's "The Art of Seeing," and Brian Muraresku's "The Immortality Key."

Knowledge has always had its gatekeepers, from the earliest days of the written word, when only a handful of elites knew how to read and write, to the Middle Ages, when literacy was a privilege largely reserved for the clergy, and all the way up to the present day. With the advent of the printing press came the unprecedented ability to distribute knowledge on a mass scale, farther than it had ever been distributed before. Books that were once painstakingly hand-written were now able to be produced cheaply, and literacy skyrocketed. There were still socioeconomic barriers to literacy (which have lowered considerably in the last couple of centuries but not dissipated completely), and the people who controlled the printing presses had a tremendous amount of power. Self-publishing is an extremely new phenomenon, and, at least in the case of print publishing, it still has a steep economic barrier to entry.

It can be argued that we live in the best time in known history for intellectual freedom. The birth of the internet was a printing press-level innovation that revolutionized the way that people could communicate. For the first time in history, anyone could be published. No longer did large media companies have exclusive control over what information was available to the public. Anyone could write an article or short story and post it on the internet. Anyone could take a video of themselves and put it out into the world, with the hopes that one day people would see it. This dream came true for a lot of people. In the earliest days of the internet, anyone had a shot at going viral on YouTube, or creating a blog that would generate a lot of followers. Stories of ordinary people getting their big break online were inspiring, and optimists were sure that information was finally democratized.

Of course, every innovation comes with its own set of drawbacks. When the printing press was invented, more people had access to books than ever before, which sparked a literacy boom. Suddenly, more people were reading books than ever, and the ability to print books was being concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. This led to a tipping of the scales, an even more unequal distribution of power. Whoever controlled the printing presses controlled information, and any unsavory voices could be silenced. History has a habit of repeating itself, and an extremely similar pattern of events unfolded after the internet was created. When it was created, the people first on the scene were able to get their message across in ways that they never could before. Ordinary people were suddenly able to have the influence of celebrities and entrepreneurs. However, the market got saturated, and suddenly, no single voice could be easily heard amongst the cacophony of billions. Influence once again became privatized, dependent on platforms and algorithms created by a small few companies with enormous power. Once again, the world was more interconnected than ever before, and those with power were able to extend their influence even more widely.

This is not to say that either of these innovations are bad. Both of them increased the amount of knowledge available, and the amount of people that this knowledge could reach, in ways that were not previously thought possible. The internet has given an incomprehensible amount of people a way to reach a practically unlimited audience around the world. Gone are the days of burning flags or screaming obscenities in public in the hopes of appearing on the news. Now, people can reach an even bigger audience from the comfort of their own smartphones. Of course, they still have to be inflammatory—that’s the only way to be noticed in such a large pool of voices. But, the process of deciding who gets the attention feels a bit more democratized. You can put your message out there, hope it doesn’t get buried by the algorithms, and it is up to the public to listen.

It truly seems like a golden age of media equality. And yes, information is democratized, in the sense that anyone can publish their ideas on the internet. Media gatekeepers are not gone, however. They have merely changed form. While anyone can write anything, the distribution of this information is far from equal. You can post whatever you want on Twitter, but if you say something that the algorithm finds unsavory, the post will be buried, only seen by people who know where to look for it. And, if you stray too far from orthodoxy, you risk being banned. “Deplatformed.” You can have a blog, but it is unlikely to reach anybody when your audience is still concentrated in these social media platforms. And, even if you go the independent route, you are not free from algorithmic influence—it is up to Google to list your work when people are searching for a topic that you write about. Nothing has really changed. Just like always, anyone can speak, but it is up to a small, powerful few to decide whose voices get amplified, and whose get silenced. Independent creators have a greater chance of having their work reach people now than they ever did, but just like in the past, it requires a great deal of luck, and in many cases a great deal of privilege. It was never impossible for an independent artist to get noticed. The village painter would probably be poor, yes, but she could still sell art to people on the street, perhaps build up a clientele, and, if she were lucky, maybe even be noticed by a patron willing to support her art. But, the fame and influence still rested with the few, the Da Vincis and Michelangelos.

Art and scholarship have always been reliant on philanthropy of this kind. The arts and sciences prospered in the Renaissance because rich, powerful people valued these things, and funded them. These people were gatekeepers. They would not be willing to pay for art that they did not like, or science that did not interest them. This is why so many paintings you see in museums are simple portraits of boring-looking people. What wealthy art lover wouldn’t want to commission their own portrait? I’m sure the amount of artistic freedom given to artists and thinkers varied from patron to patron, but for the most part, the products were probably a lot more reflective of their funders than their creators. The Church, one of the arts’ greatest funders, reserved the right to persecute people for advancing unorthodox beliefs. And, of course, if you were too ahead of your time to find anybody to pay to keep you alive, you would be doomed to either creative stuntedness or starvation.

Just like always, anyone can speak, but it is up to a small, powerful few to decide whose voices get amplified, and whose get silenced.

Patrons of the arts still exist today, and while the Church has lost most of its power over intellectual discussion, it can be argued that universities have taken over its function. They, too, are in the business of indoctrinating people, although this indoctrination is not religious (at least in the way that we traditionally conceptualize religion). They, too, believe that what they are teaching is true, and that ideas which directly contradict their teachings are false. There is more room for dissent in modern academia than there was in the medieval church, but this leeway can only go so far, and seems to be shrinking. “Unorthodox” beliefs are punished in academia. Holding a belief which the majority of the academic community disbelieves, or has just never considered before, can be disastrous to one’s career. They may not be lynched, like in the old days, but they’ll certainly be laughed at by their peers, who will regard their ideas with suspicion going forward. Visualize a trailblazing academic, an unapologetic researcher that completely shatters the paradigms of their field, opening peoples’ eyes to a truth that changes their conception of the world. Are you picturing a respected person, showered in praise and success? Or are you picturing a laughing stock, an outcast whose name is reflexively associated with lunacy until a few generations into the future, when similarly minded academics revisit their work and realize its unappreciated genius? The latter is probably closer to the truth, in most circumstances.

It is ironic and unfortunate that in its attempt to preserve truth, academia often obstructs it. One may wish to attribute this phenomenon to some kind of elaborate conspiracy. When faced with unfortunate realities, it is more comfortable to pinpoint the blame on someone or something, to conceptualize the “enemy” as a group of ill-doers, rather than human nature itself. However, while many powerful people have the motivation to preserve the status quo, the majority of academics adhere to it because it is comfortable, and because they believe in it. When faced with a novel idea, people typically view it through the lens of what they think they already know. Take, for example, the pyramids of Giza. Historians currently have no idea how ancient Egyptians, with the technology that we currently assume they had, could have built the pyramids. The level of precision required would be a daunting challenge for engineers today. Yet, most would scoff at the idea that the pyramids were built by someone else, or alternatively, that the Egyptians possessed technology more advanced than we previously thought. Our conception of history is a lot more speculative than we often assume, and, particularly with ancient history, such of what we take as “fact” is really just historians’ best guess. But these ideas have become so rigidly entrenched in custom that when new primary sources are analyzed, our conception of what they mean is often molded to fit the existing dogma, rather than the other way around. Every guess about history is a distant plausibility, and when considering two equally plausible distant plausibilities, the more familiar one seems more “correct.” This can cause knowledge to stagnate.

I listened to a Joe Rogan podcast about Brian Muraresku’s book The Immortality Key.¹ The book discusses the forgotten role that psychedelic drugs played in history. In the book, Muraresku discusses the ancient Greek Mysteries of Eleusis. My admittedly rudimentary knowledge of the Mysteries is as follows: a group of very smart, distinguished people would hold sacred, secretive ritual meetings at the temple of Eleusis. In these meetings, they consumed a sacramental drink called kukeon, and reportedly had many transcendental experiences. The popular belief of historians is that the strange phenomena that were documented were a theatrical performance of some sort, but there is a theory out there that suggests that the kukeon was actually a type of psychedelic beer, and that the mystical experiences that happened in Eleusis resulted from the consumption of this substance, and were meant to be taken literally. The theory was written about extensively in The Road to Eleusis, a book which was met with extreme backlash after its publication in 1978. The primary author of the book², Carl Ruck, wrote an introduction to the book in 1998 in which he discussed the damage that the book caused to his career. The book was out of print for a while, but returned after it amassed a bit of a cult following. But even at the time of its second printing, associating with Ruck was considered career suicide, and mainstream academia has shunned his theories.

I do not have enough knowledge on the subject to say with confidence whether Ruck’s ideas have any merit, but academia’s reflexive rejection of them, and the detrimental effects that this rejection had on the rest of Ruck’s career, illustrate the point that a theory can be too “weird” for academics to take seriously. Historians view of the Mysteries is incomplete and largely based on guesswork (hence their name), yet the proposition that historians may be wrong about them was laughable. People don’t like being wrong, and as long as someone’s beliefs line up exactly with the common beliefs of their discipline, they can usually avoid this unpleasantness. Therefore, when faced with an unconventional idea, the most common reaction is to use it to confirm, rather than expand, one’s own worldview. Ideological belief systems protect people from culpability. It is much easier to find safety in numbers, to align yourself with a widely accepted viewpoint. That way, in the off chance that the belief ends up being proven false, the blame is directed elsewhere.

When faced with a novel idea, people typically view it through the lens of what they think they already know.

This is far from the only example of a field of study’s resistance to change. Let’s take the field of ophthalmology. In 1942, after a disease of his eyes left him nearly blind, Aldous Huxley wrote a book called The Art of Seeing, in which he proposed a way to restore peoples’ vision using eye exercises. The main premise of the book is that defects in peoples’ vision are caused by defects, in the way that they use their eyes, which can be cured. Sight was diminished because people fell into maladaptive habits, such as staring, squinting, and tensing their eyes too much. Tension was identified as the main cause of defective vision, and also as the root cause of many of the other harmful vision “habits” that his eye exercises purported to break. Huxley’s assertion was that by diligently practicing exercises designed to relieve this tension, people can restore their sight. One may argue that vision problems are physiological, that the anatomy of the eyes of people with defective vision is actually different than the anatomy of people with normal sight. Huxley’s counter to this was that we can actually change the outward structure of our eyes, and that by practicing “the art of seeing” people can actually restore their deformed eyes to their rightful structure.

One of the exercises identified in this book that I would recommend trying is “palming.” Close your eyes, and cover them with your palms. Do not press your palms into your eyes; the position should be relaxed. Make sure you are comfortable and that your elbows are resting on something, because this may take a while. When our eyes are shielded from all light like this, we typically see kaleidoscopic colors on top of a black backdrop. According to Huxley, these colors are a product of tension. The goal of palming is to relax your eyes until the colors are gone, and you only see black. Huxley's doctor and purported savior of his vision, Dr. W. H. Bates, suggested that his patients do this by “visualizing black.” Huxley noted that this technique produced the opposite effect for many people, much like “trying to relax” may cause us to tense up instead. He proposed an alternate technique: visualize a fond memory to relax your eyes until the colors in your vision disappear.³ Try this exercise if you are skeptical about the effect of relaxation on eyesight, and choose whichever technique works best for you. If you are patient and really wait until you only see black, then when you open your eyes, your vision will be temporarily clearer than normal.

Why, if it is possible to restore sight without glasses, have eye doctors not adopted this method? Glasses are an imperfect crutch, cause peoples’ eyes to become reliant on them, and can even damage vision worse. Wouldn’t it be preferable to restore sight without such an aid? Near the beginning of the book, under the heading “Reasons for Orthodox Disapproval,” Huxley explores this question. The first reason he gave for the dismissal of Dr Bates’ ideas was that, due to their unorthodoxy, there were no specific guidelines for how to use them effectively, causing them to be picked up by a number of quacks and scam artists for the purpose of economic gain. These insincere attempts at using the method were, of course, unsuccessful, which hurt its credibility. The other reason for its rejection, though, is more insidious. Huxley summed it up in three words: “habit, authority and professionalism.”⁴ Eye doctors refused to entertain Bates’ method because they had been able to improve vision to near-perfection with corrective lenses for years, and the highest authorities in ophthalmology had built their reputations on the belief that this was the case. Why would they challenge themselves and change their beliefs, only to disprove their own theories? Then, there are the economic incentives:

“Next there is the matter of vested interest. The manufacture of optical glass is now a considerable industry, and its retail sale, a profitable branch of commerce, to which access can be had only by persons who have undertaken a special technical training. That there should be, among these licensed persons, a strong dislike to any new technique, which threatened to make the use of optical glass unnecessary, is only natural.”⁵

It seems as though some professionals are content to obscure promising new research, if such research would doom their own products to obsolescence. Dr Bates’ method has not been widely accepted by ophthalmologists, and if you attempt to look it up on Google, one of the first things that comes up is a statement that his method has not been proven to be effective. Yet, it worked for Huxley. Might it have “not been proven effective” simply because it hadn’t been studied enough?

It seems as though some professionals are content to obscure promising new research, if such research would doom their own products to obsolescence.

There are other examples of promising (but not economically viable) medical advancements that have been mostly lost to history. In his brilliant book Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art, James Nestor details the myriad of health benefits that come from simply knowing how to breathe better. This book changed my life. I learned to breathe less, and more slowly. I learned how to correct a repulsive habit of breathing through my mouth. I got into the habit of completely exhaling with each breath. More than anything, though, I learned that through breathing, we have more power over our bodies than I thought possible. Nestor spoke of yogis who, through breathing, learned to speed up or slow down their heart rate, and change their body temperature. He also wrote about free divers who were able to train themselves to hold their breath underwater for minutes at a time. These divers asserted that there was nothing special about their lungs—their discipline was what allowed them to achieve such impressive feats.

It is no coincidence that both books classify what they are examining as an “art.” They both examine bodily functions that we often take for granted, functions that happen automatically without any effort on our part, and show how, through sheer will and discipline, they can be radically transformed and improved. We can actually cause physiological changes in our own bodies, just by changing small maladaptive habits. Nestor discusses how taping one’s mouth shut at night has the potential to cure snoring and sleep apnea⁶, and how a teenager named Katharina Schroth who suffered from scoliosis was able to straighten her spine using a specialized breathing technique.⁷ Most shockingly, Nestor wrote about a man called Carl Stough, who, in 1958, coached a number of hospitalized emphysema patients on the importance of full exhalations after every breath. Stough’s patients were able to expand their diaphragms by exhaling for as long as they possibly could. Some bed-ridden patients walked for the first time in years after this coaching. The changes to the patients’ diaphragms were even visible on X-rays. Stough hadn’t cured their emphysema; the damage to their lungs remained the same. But, they were able to harness the power that their lungs did have, improving their overall functioning dramatically.

Unfortunately, Stough’s discoveries suffered the same fate as Dr. Bates’ in The Art of Seeing. The medical community did nothing with the knowledge that Stough gave them, and his research died with him. Why, when emphysema can be treated with simple breathing exercises, has this fact been ignored in favor of drugs, oxygen tanks, and hospitalization? Is it because these things are all more profitable than mere instructions on how to breathe better, which can be done for free?

I am not suggesting that all professionals reject these types of discoveries out of greed. As Huxley pointed out, it takes a lot of courage to go against the customs of your field, and the results are typically not favorable. Look what happened to Carl Ruck, simply for proposing a historical theory that his peers did not accept. Imagine the outrage if a doctor prescribed breathing techniques instead of drugs to an emphysema patient, and then that patient died. It does not matter if that patient would have died anyway. The damage, not only to that doctor’s career but to his conscience as well, is undeniable.

Unfortunately, since custom is so resistant to change, the adoption of revolutionary ideas must happen slowly. Schroth’s accomplishments were lost for years before being uncovered by James Nestor, just as Ruck’s stayed relatively unknown before Brian Muraresku’s book brought them a little closer to the mainstream. These things take time, and often, are completely invisible unless they are actively sought out.

In the world that we live in, it can seem like any information we need is at our fingertips. This is true in many ways. We can find almost anything on the internet. But, what we look for is just as limited as ever, and just as curated as ever. It is dependent on what our educators, peers, and unfortunately, our tech companies, consider important. We are blind to the vast expanse of knowledge that is available in this world, hidden from view. The very least we can do is, when faced with an unorthodox idea, consider it deeply, not based on habit or comfort but based on reason. The changes that ensue from these little stretches of our imagination may be profound.

1. The podcast featured Brian Muraresku and Graham Hancock, author of Fingerprints of the Gods.

2. Albert Hofmann (the discoverer of LSD-25) and R. Gordon Wasson also penned a few chapters of the book.

3. Aldous Huxley, The Art Of Seeing (1942), Harper & Brothers fourteenth edition.

4. Huxley, The Art of Seeing, p. 29.

5. Id.

6. James Nestor, Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art (2020). Penguin Random House, p. 52.

7. Nestor, Breath, p. 57.