Our good friend Gobbo

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What has happened to our good friend Gobbo? If you go to his profile, you’ll find that the last time he logged on to ILP is Aug 10th, 2013. That’s more than a year ago.

I’m not really worried that anything happened to him–he may have just gotten board with this site–but if you look at his join date (Jul. 6th, 2005) and his total posts (11111), that seems like a hell of a lot of ILP activity within the span of 9 years and all of sudden… nothing. Now, I’ve been here since 2006 and it is now 2014 (roughly 8 years), and I only have half the number of posts as Gobbo. I’m not quite the internet forum junkie that some people are (I know James has racked up 17669 post since 2010), but you would think any internet junkie like that wouldn’t just quit cold turkey for a whole year.

Now, I haven’t had much contact with Gobbo, but what little contact I have had with him tells me he might be a bit of a schizophrenic. And I wonder if he planned to quit ILP upon acquiring 11111 posts. I don’t know what 11111 means–maybe it’s binary–31–how old was Gobbo on Aug. 10th, 2013?

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Gib, I understand he was a Canadian, as You are. I know what happened to him, he decided to quit, he announced it. As to why he did, he didn’t say;I talked to his friend, Stuart, who also quit, and he told me, Gobbo told him he thought 11,111 was a good
number to quit at, not sure he stored any numerological significance by it, though. Evidently, he was a psychic, as i am, though, am not aware of
any schizophrenia, though. He may have been schizoaffective or even schyzotypal, but so was Einstein. To find out more of his mental content would have been interesting , though.

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Indeed.

So what kind of psychic are you? What kind was Gobbo?

Stuart, I remember being one of those fellows that suffered a bit of Sartre’s existential angst. I’m surprised to keep running into people like this as often as I do. It isn’t that often but it happens often enough for it to seem like a rare mental condition of some kind, not just a philosophical concept. Probably Sartre suffered from it.

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I have to confess, I’m an idiot.

I linked to Gobbo’s profile, but I didn’t follow up with the link to “search user’s posts” where, if I did, I would find (ta-da!) his last thread in which he explains exactly why he’s leaving and why his post count is exactly 11111. There’s even a post by Stuart, which makes linking to his profile, and therefore his last post, possible as well.

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Gib, I am very sorry, but one of the things about having a tablet is that i can not paraphrase point by point, so i will try to summerize. I have not had a chance to find their stuff, but the archives should have their correspondence, their resignation, and some of their blogs.

 If i have some time, around doing my jobs and chores, i willtry and let You know.  However i may be able to answer some of Your points, off the cuff, sort of speak.  Stuart was a friend of mine too, and felt very bad about loosing touch with him or not even being able to say good by he went out so suddenly, without letting anyone know in advance.  The way things are around here one never knows what friendhips may mean, or whatever. We liked each other for a spell, for about a year to be exact, and i liked his poetry, and as he told me he was getting out of existentialism, he matured philosophycally to that extent.  I do not think he had the stayngpower, tomovercome discussion which verged on the pseudo hostile, although i tried to tell him so. The last thingi read here was that he was in with Lyssa, whom notto many people seem to admire here, as some think she is a satyr clone.  IthinkSatyr is higly intelligent, and was invited to KTS by him, but when i heard some people are restricted to the dingeon there, i declined.  It is in relation to Lyssa and his copatriotism that Stuart had some kind of verbal altercation and shortly went out.  

 With Gobo is was different, he was very much into the esoteric and i felt, readinghis stuff, that he may have been feeling depleted, and just went out, albeit with a notice given of about a week or so if i can

recall. He was into the occult, and i would have really liked him to stay, since i too, as i indicated to You, am veryn heavily involved, and more and morethings in this area are opening up.

I can't really be speific here, but the occult covers tons of ground, my journey began with Khrishnamurti, whom i came across by reading Henry Miller.  To be exact , his novel, 'Big Sur, and the Oranges of Bosch.'  After reading that, i found out about Khrishnamurti's mediatation place in NortherCalifornia, and i was fortunate to attend the last lecture he gave there.  I expereinced numerous psychic phenomena there, and reaffirkmed the worth of pursuing the occult, through various channels, which i let come to my attention, rather than seeking them out.

Ultimately, the science of the occult is best familiarized through thepsychologist Jung, and i was aware of Jung through having been analyzed in my early twenties by a Jungian analyst.  It made an impression on me, and when the occut opened up, things fell into place.  I am a sensitive, and am very opened to these types of phenomenon, but at times, especially in the beginning of my search, became aware of the danger lurking there, where the novice hss to discriminate whom or what he is willing to admit into his sub or full consciousness. Even at this point of my life, I have to be careful, not as much concern for my self, but for others.  

Sometimes i think Gobbo felt some presence , unwanted which i may have manidested toward him, (purely unconscious on my part)  But that was a few years ago, when i had no idea of his talent in this regard.  I do certainly hope he may come back sometime, and we possibly could well communicate our differing experiences.

Well, now i have exhausted the questions You posed, to the best of my ability, hoping to have satisfactorily answered them.

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Another thing which i would like to add, is, that unfortunately until i can fix this ipad, or get a new computer i cannot edit, hence my numerous errors.

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Don’t worry about it. I don’t know if you caught it, but in my last post, I said I found both their last posts.

Yeah, I’ve only heard rumors through the ILP grapevine about Lyssa/Satyr and his dark kingdom at KTS. I have no interest in him or his forum (doesn’t mean I won’t in the future). I don’t even remember if I ever spoke to Satyr when he was here. I think I entered into ILP around the same time he was phasing himself out.

Jiddu Krishnamurti–yes, I’m familiar with him. I read his book The Awakening of Intelligence. Very interesting soul. It’s quite fitting that you bring him up because of something I said to Arc in the Kill Yourself thread.

Jiddu Krishnamurti stands out in my mind as the quintessential “flawed” enlightened one.

Is this your answer to my question: what kind of psychic are you? Damn, obe, I was expecting some neat and clearly defined categories. I should have known not to expect something like that from you! :laughing:

It’s kind of silly when you think about it though: I learnt in my intro to psych course in university that when it comes to the paranormal, there are thought to be four kinds of “psychic” abilities: telepaths, claravoyants, precognitives, and telekinetics. ← Which one of those are you, obe? :laughing:

But seriously, you’re answer not only rings more true, but seems more realistic. You can’t really categories the paranormal or psychic abilities, can you?

Oh, I’m satisfied :laughing:

And don’t worry about the ipad thing–it’s easy to figure out what you meant to say.

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Well, actually the differnt types of psychic occurances can be differentiated. However with me it’s a differential ad pro hoc. It is not that they are differentiated, as much as they become appearent as some sort of way to go. Things happen as consequence. Whether what mode they do depend on the type of occurance. It is not they can not be differentiated, rahther, it is as being routed , pushed, or chanelled in a certai direction. The trigger is the quality of the degree of suspense, or energy of the content of consciousness. Added to this is the reaization that thisis no mere autosuggestion, or some kind of delusion, but an absolute faith in the presence, of which the inquiery is put foreward to. If this is not present, then the whole thing folds up like an accordion. The pre requisites are total honesty, rfeceptiveness, and a totla comittment of kindness, unsued to any useage of it for anything other than benign and altruistic purposes,

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Not sure what an ad pro hoc is, obe, but if you meant to say ad hoc, I can understand you to mean you make up the differentiations as you go along.

Is this absolute faith what makes the paranormal happen?

I don’t think I qualify on any of them. :laughing:

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It should have been ‘hoc ergo propter hoc’ been ages for my outdated Latin, since the Second Euceminical Council, Latin sort of pined away.

Too bad, Gib, none of it is You, but surprise, this ‘ability’ is more widespread then previously realized. The most common form is when you are at home, and are thinking of someone, and the phone rings,
and it is the person thought about. This is so common, as to make it almost an assumptive natural consequence. Nothing fallacious about it, perfectly understood. Right? NO! No one understands it, and likewise the de ja Vous type of occurance. It happens. That is all it can be said about it.

At first, i too. did not allow myself to entertain the thought, or singularly accept the occult as even a remote proposition, but by and by, did by degrees made myself open to it, andnow look at it, as a source of energy toward the improvisation of the self

as more than merely co-incidental.

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Gib, i hope You do not get me wrong, and go dwon the same path as all the claims invalidated by the likes; of Randi. Thistype of skulldoggery has never captured my interest. Only the types of phenomenon, which,like unfounded, yet appropriate metaphysical claims induce. Plato, Nietzche, and all the successive idealist philosophers have one foot in the mysterius, the occult. God Himself, is an occult phenomena, if looked at it in that way.
I would be an idiot in that sense, /already having addmitted to being one in the Doestoevskian sense/ to proclaim such nonsense. Some so called scientists have already declared philosophycal investigation as bordering on that sort of ‘non-sense’
So as in any other endeavor, margins have to be set, as in Catholic Liturgy the priest declares a difference between the seen and the unseen. Jesus Christ Himself, for those who wish to believe, is said to admonish, “Blessed are those who do not see, but yet believe” So the occult, the belief in the mysteries, magical or not, has had a very long tradition, and i am betting on that tradition, notyet ready to throw in the towel to scientism barely a few hundred years old.

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Still don’t know what that means, obe :slight_smile:, but at least now I can look it up:

If I am to interpret this in light of your context, I’d say you’re saying that you make it up as you go. Correct?

Now, by mistake, I replied to your post 3 posts ago. I already replied to it, but here I am replying to it again. I only recognized the second last sentence as I know I replied to this in a previous post, but by then I had already given my thoughts in blue and I think they’re very fruitful, so I kept them and I thought I’d post them anyway:

I’ve had experiences like this on only the most rare occasion… and not with phones in particular, but other things: I’d be thinking “what if X happened right now,” and suddenly X happens.

I’d give anything to know how to control that, make it happen more often.

Right… this is all Hume and his cause-skepticism. I understand it thoroughly. It’s also a bit of Terrence McKenna. He had this crazy theory that when a novel event occurs–i.e. an event that had only the rarest probabilities of happening, its occurring changed the probabilities–for if something only happened 1 out of 10 times, and then it happened again, the chances would now be 2 out of 11, which is almost double the prior chances. This, he said, is more than just statistics, but a force in nature, an additional law of physics that mainstream scientists have not accounted for. And with this new kind of “dynamic” probability, new laws, and therefore new phenomena, can enter into nature and thereby affect how we perceive and understand her.

In the end, it’s we who impose our interpretations on nature–say to her “you brought about this cause and enforced that effect” or “you run according to such-and-such natural law”–she stands back and says “if you say so”.

You underwent a migration from one reality to another.

Who’s Randi?

I would never dream of asking you to throw in the towel, obe. And thank you for your consolations vis-a-vis those who have one foot in the occult and the other in the “understood” (I wanted to say the “natural” but I think the “understood” captures the real distinction). I’ve always wondered what my imperviousness to the occult implied about my spiritual position in life and my destiny.

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Gib the Latin phrase above refers to the fallacious nature of being able to go from varifyable to unverifyable arguments without batting an eyelash. This is the kernel of the position Randi took toward such people as Uri Geller, who was able to break spoons by ‘melting’ them with his hand. Randi exposed a lot of people like that, he would put them on the Tonight Show, and let them peter out their so called psychic abilities. After that Randi offered one milliin dollars to any psychic, who was able to demonstrate to him his psychic powers. There were several such demonstrations, all of which did not meet Randi’s standards; of true ability. The all turned out to be tricks. The most famous example was the case of Peter Popoff, an evangelist fsith healer, who was caughg with his pants down, when in the midst of healing various people of end stage disabilities like cancer. Randi went into the tele-evanglist’s chruch bringing with him an undisclosed eletrical apparatus, whereby tuning into Poppov’s communicating his wife, who sent him messages as to the sick person’s identity and information whom he was supposed to have picked out randomly out of the studi audience. Needless to say, Popov was subsequently exoised by Randi, and went broke soon afterward.

  What i am aiming at is not these sort of people, illusionists and quackes the likes of Sylvan Br..n. I misspelled the above psychic in order not to defamate anyone.  

 As i see it, Gib, the occult relates to what we yet don't know.  If i were to set up a vertical graph, with only the North-South assymptote, and indicate by lines where we are in total knowledge of how the universe works, I would have that line run up and down maybe a mile.  Then, i would de-mark on that line the sum total of present knowledge, and it would be lucky to be able to mark off an inch or so, if that much .  We put great store on what we have learned by experimenting and verifying hypothesus, but we are simply nowhere near to an undrstanding, since we are part of that quanta of knowledge which we are trying to figure out.  In fact even if knowledge doubles every 10 years or so, my very crude guesswoud be, that it would still take thousands if not millions of years to get near to anything like a nearly inclusive knowledge.  Yhe sad fact is, yes, the technical sciences are forging ahead with full steam, but the social sciences are lagging so far behind, that questions of utilization can not keep up with it, and pretty soon, only .0000001% of the population will be able to understand much less derive and apply such advances.

The occult takes up the sleck, and again Gib, as far as my experience goes, it is only within ‘high energy’ situations, not direcgly derivative to the self, that such things happen. Since i did indicate to You the element of danger, i find myself sometimes shutting down, out of hurting others. But any fear, is self defeating in this respect, and under the best circumstances, a fearless attitude works best.

Researchers still refer to the age of wonder and alchemy, and at present Russian institutions are still doing research into parapsychology, and here in the US, Duke University has a strong curriculum in it.

It can be an exciting field given a degree of openness about it, suspending the prejudice which has for most real purposes, disqualified it as a bona fide field of study. I remain open to the challenges, and plan to pursue it, within the constraints which my own limitations place on it. For the above reason, it is with a certain regret to have seen Gobbo leave, but who knows, he may at one point come back.

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Oh, James Randi, yes I’ve heard of him and his million dollar prize. I’ve also heard of Uri Geller and Peter Popoff.

I’m totally on board with this. Knowledge is overrated. I’m inclined to think it’s even incoherent. I mean, to “know” more or less implies infallibility, that you can’t be wrong. It implies that your consciousness has direct and immediate access to (I’d even say a “oneness” with) the known. Even looking directly at something, like a book, involve mediating variables, like the light reflected off the book, the signals propagated by your retina, etc., all of which can insert a certain level of error into what you think you’re seeing and therefore know.

I also don’t believe in magic–that is, in the naive sense of the preempting of the laws of nature with substituting laws; what I mean is, magic is often naively thought to be the breaking of natural laws (levitating an object despite the force of gravity, for example) and in the void left behind, inserting a new set of laws (i.e. the law of waving-magic-wand-causes-levitation). I mean, the violation of the laws of nature would be bad enough–we’d be seeing chaos and unpredictability all the time, but that’s not magic–magic requires its own laws if it is to be useful at all, if practitioners are to be able to predict what act of magic will result in what magical effect. It must substitute its own laws in a void opened by the blocking of natural laws.

But in what sense should we call these substituting laws “magic”? If it’s possible to invoke them in the natural world, shouldn’t we just say they were natural laws all along, and simply required a special set of circumstances in order to manifest? Who are we to carve up nature and tell her: these laws of yours are “natural” and those laws of yours are “magic”? That’s why I like your interpretation of magic qua unknown so much better.

You’re right on both counts–that the social sciences lag behind the natural sciences and that the further science advances the less the common person understands it–in fact, I had a thread once that touched on just this latter concept. As for the former concept, how advanced in the social sciences (or just psychology) do you think the East is?

Not sure what you mean. What is a “high energy” situation? What is it to be “derivative” to the self?

Very interesting.

Yes, it would be nice to engage him more. He didn’t seem like a bad guy at all.

And obe, I’m completely open to all the above, so much so that despite a nearly total lack of paranormal experience in my life, I find myself preferring to believe something is blocking me from experiencing it rather than that it just doesn’t exist.

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By ‘high energy situations’ and ‘derivitives to the self’ i mean one thing, so i can circumvent two replies by showing how relational they are. In another blog we were discussing the relationships of two words, concepts, if you would, 'guilt’and ‘shame’ The argument revolved around the issue, whether the two were mutually exclusive, inclusive, or partially overlapping. And my asnwer is, as with any two things of meaning, —any two or more things are relatable, and mean some thing, even though it is to only some one. The same goes for self reference, or deriitive, and high energy. For me, it is only in a situational energy level of almost unbearable intensit, that i can resolve not to view thoughts as personal, or even totally distinct to my sense of awareness. This is where, in the early phases of trying to read minds, and other types of unusually occuring phenomenon, that i viewed the fallacy ,with the latin i so abruptly tried to demonstrate,(as being of a very long standing) In that regard, it takes extremely high energy states, to get me going, without either emphasizing the ontological or the de-ontological starting point of ‘obtrusive consciousness’. I am still tying tom overcome the effects of too much stuf coming in, and again try not to block everything but what is obviously a very limited awareness at hand. So the duplex is always there, and for anyone to limit consciousness to the degree of either/or types of judgements, the are immediately to be reminded, that that fix, has been sufficiently dwelved into by Kierkegaard. However, some people out there, persist , inspite of a long history of trying to clear their minds of stuff,which seem antithetical towards their viewpoints.
Reference is of very wide scope, even in this forum, and some do not even read some posts nor respond to the, out of some reason. A lot of reasoning has to do with basic likes and dislikes, prejudices, or plainly, political purposes.

  For me, in a 'high energy' situation, all these silly boundaries seem to melt away like heated butter.
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I think I know what you mean. High energy situations are like situations in which you’re tasked to engage in something with intense focus–you “lose” yourself in the moment. You have no time to reflect and be self-aware. Am I right?

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Gobbo is an occultist and the number of posts, 11111, is not coincidentally the number he left off at. He needed a symbolic point to solidify his history here before he took off and/or became a new persona.

But the time that he left is right after he quit with the Naturalworldorder site that he, I and SIATD had put together. He was extremely angry with us, tried to sabotage and hack Beforethelight, and then disappeared into thin air… no, last thing I heard, he started a site about glutenfree food.

In any case the last things he did in these regions that I know of was fight with Pezer, MechanicalMonster SIATD and myself over the ethics of advertising.

Here is that last post I have read of him.

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Gib, yes You are right to an extent. A very high energy situation is like a philosophical puzzle akin to the saying damn if i will butdamn if i don’t. A kind of catch 22, but a catch where there has to be an existential exit. It is a matter of must, and when and not if or maybe. It is not an expediencey, it is an exponentially derived future, the kernels of which must be realized NOW.

Fix, i think Gobbo was in the middle of exploring his own consciousness, and should have stayed. His 11111=5 shows it, if he was indeed there. He could have stayed toward 6,7,8. And maybe further alongthis continuum. I have a notion that he may have been embarrased, for somethingto the degree of incontrovertibility. It’s just a thought based on a feeling. Notmtoo sure, though.

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I didn’t have much in common with him but still somehow considered him a friend. Not sure why, can’t always explain those things. My wife is deeply religious, compared to me anyway, and she tends to mistake coincidences for external cosmic intent; so what’s happening with her, and a lot of people, is they have a subjective experience of the world, and b/c it’s so intense, and also all we get, we sometimes can’t help but globalize our experiences and begin to think they are indicative of some shared external reality. This mistaking the subjective for the objective is sad to me, not in a judgey way, just strikes me as a very lonely choice really given how it’s a doomed thing, and I always assumed it was a kind of narcissism crossed with plain, simple damage in a hard world, where we have all this pressure to live a cool life and be a certain way, and then we of course fail, every one of us. The ensuing damage is what I see with Gobbo, who I liked, or my wife, who to this day I love and support. I’m not above narcissism or damage, God knows, but I can’t ever seem to let that have me fall into this thing where my subjectivity starts to take on cosmic importance in a way that makes me think others around me need to be informed by the connections i’m making, which are ultimately pattern based aesthetics. I know OG at one point believed in all sorts of what the mainstream would term weird stuff, orgone, cloud busters, etc. I’m not above believing in strange compounds and elements, or the idea that governments do terrible things. All these things are matter of fact on some level. So it doesn’t matter if orgone and chem trails are real, b/c they might be metaphor for things in this crazy world that are equally bizarre and horrible and wonderful. OG is a big guy with a big heart and a big soul in a small bread factory of a world with a small life and a small skull space and so he suffers a bit, that’s the all of it. We very much live in a world where sex could be a kind of crucial healing that never comes, and we are being killed in sinister fashion every day by all manner of the System. So it’s the same diff you know. I feel him. 11111 I hope is good luck for him. I know he had some very great ideas and visions, as well as some pretty cool pieces of art in him, and I sensed he struggled to get the stuff out of his soul and onto paper, which is always going to be a damaging proposition no matter who you are, but I think it damaged him more than most. The thing about OG is he wouldn’t agree with most of the stuff I’m saying right now, he’d probably be indignant and dismissive, or do some posturing about some minor publishing success, etc., and that’s ok. But just the same I know he’d have my back in a bar fight, his big ole body and long arms, he’d pick up the guy by his collar and toss him on his ass and say Gamer is annoying, but he’s family.

I guess I like that ILP was a place with people who read the classics, people who parsed the crazy modern stuff, and people who simply believed in Orgone and chem trails. And people who call themselves “a psychic.” We are all of us popped up out of the aether here on this orb and therefore all of us brothers figuring out what to do and think in a place that comes with a lot of pain and not a hell of a lot of instructions, so it’s the people who in the end recognize that who I take sides with, regardless what all else they believe.

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It sounds / Gamer, as if You are a total cynic, as to anything other then what the sensible, rational mind can conjur up via being and living in the world. The contest between the rational and the irrational takes many forms, and some of the rational,precisely calculated solutions turn out to be misguided, or simply erroneous by virtue of their non applicability. So to put all store by the most probable prediction, can be as obtuse, as the retrograde alchemical formula. The philosophers stone is merely an idea, but still, sustainable, by differing words, structurally designated, and objetifiec as a process,a procession toward a brighter future, where no holds should be barred