I was bopping along, minding everybody else’s business, waiting for the TED empire to be at my feet, ready for the world to pay the attention to TEDx West Hollywood’s transformational program that The New York Times paid in giving my crop circle movie a swell review. It was not going to be because I’d even mentioned the challenge crop circles present to conventional thinking in the TEDx program I was producing, where my thinking was that once TED loved me that would follow and would be a great impetus to a shift of worldview. Then, I’d be able to take time off from this drive I have to wake the world up, and take walks on the beach with the occasional old codger who wouldn’t rather be looking in the eyes of a forty something.
Oy. I went from the brink of TED stardom to having to be stopped to prevent TED from being sucked under.
More than 2000 TEDx events will take place in the year ahead. If your program is allowed to proceed, it will truly damage other TEDx organizers’ ability to recruit scientists and other speakers.
OMG, then it was the world that TED saved from being destroyed by me when they got Livestream to cancel what was going to be watched by thousands of people worldwide – a program I was paying for that was not even any longer theirs.
With such power I’m pivoting, from my dark influence to being the herald for the light. Here’s what Graham Hancock said that I’m cheerleading for!
The whole process of grappling with TED has been extremely painful, time-consuming and energy-draining but this is a small price to pay for the many good things that are going to come out of it. These strange events in which we are all caught up will, I think, prove to be of the greatest significance in the long run — the first serious breach in the dam of rigid materialist thinking that has become such a major block to human progress.
Rupert Sheldrake said it this way:
I think this TED debate has actually helped show that the paradigm is shifting. There’s no longer a kind of automatic agreement by the great majority of people to dogmatic assertions by materialists…This is actually, to me, an illustration of actually seeing a paradigm shift in action. I think this controversy wouldn’t have been a controversy after all if a lot of people hadn’t thought that TED had made the wrong decision. There wouldn’t have been large amounts of thousands of comments on blogs all over the Internet. That wouldn’t have happened if the majority thought TED had made the right decision and it was more-or-less a done deal that materialism is the only acceptable form of science.
Now, I think the fact that so many people feel strongly about it is why there’s been a controversy and I do think we’re actually seeing a shift. Also on these various blogs and discussion forums now and then one of these standard skeptic voices comes up with all the standard arguments that we’ve all heard hundreds of times before but now they’re being shot down by people who are saying, “Okay, where’s your evidence?” and calling them on things which normally they’d get away with…It’s a kind of empowerment of people to challenge this dogmatic materialism.
At a conference I helped enable a year after the TED censorship, Rupert Sheldrake talks about the positive results.
Four minutes of Graham Hancock giving his 2-cents about TED.
