The Danger of Too Much Information
This is a companion piece to last week's blog, The Myth of 432Hz Tuning.
Today, we are inundated with more information than we can possibly handle. With the advent of the World Wide Web, we now have an almost unlimited resource of information at our fingertips. And this resource keeps growing exponentially. We are literally buried in information. The problem is, a lot of that information is wrong/false/erroneous/made up and even just outright lies.
It used to be we got most of our information from books. We would either go to a book store, or a library, and get the books we needed to learn about what we were interested in. The great thing about books in the past is, they had to come from publishers who did their best to make sure everything was correct and factual. Publishers had a reputation to keep, so they could not afford to willfully release anything that could be seen as misleading or false. If you couldn't believe one book from a publisher, then could you believe any of their other books?
Another part of this is that writers did a lot of research. The cited other books. They interviewed people. And they did their best to make sure what they were writing about was correct. Writers had reputations too.
Now we have the internet/web, and it's full of blogs, websites, “news sites,” opinion sites, and so much more. We also have e-books and inexpensive self publishing. The result is that anyone can write something and “publish” it somewhere. A big problem with this is that most of these people are not what you would call professional and/or trained writers. Often, they do little or no research on what they are writing about, so in fact they are merely expressing their own opinions as facts, or republishing/citing someone else's own opinions as facts. And the internet has a way of spreading these things to many people who keep repeating them, so much so that pretty soon they are accepted as facts, just because they have been passed around and seen so many times—“I saw it online from a lot of different sources, so it must be true!”
The recent “432Hz is nature's tuning,” and the Edgar Cayce purported quote, “Sound is the medicine of the future,” are just 2 examples of opinions and misinformation that spread like wildfire through the internet and were accepted as true, mainly because they were seen so many times that “they must be true!” But when both were subjected to scrutiny, and a bit of research, they were found to be not so true.
All of this has also lead to readers becoming sloppy readers and just accepting anything because if it's out there, it must be true. And most internet writers rarely post a bibliography or notes about the sources they used. The great thing about a bibliography and sources is that you can take the time to look them up, research them, and find out if they come from a reliable source and can be backed up as being true/factual. Without sources, you have no idea where the writer got their information.
So readers have a responsibility to do some fact checking, to dig into claims made by writers in order to find out if they are truths backed by facts/research, or just opinions masquerading as facts.
This blog is a good example. It's my blog, so it is made up of my opinions and ideas. It all comes from 40+ years of accumulated knowledge. I try to cite sources and give links when I can, but a lot of the information I write here are things I've picked up along the path, things that have no definite source that I can point to. And we all pick up information on our journey, but it's up to us to sift through it, to decode the messages, keep the truth, and discard the rest. Not an easy task or responsibility.
We also need to be willing to learn, change, and grow. This flood of easily obtainable knowledge is not slowing down. In fact, it's growing at a fantastic rate. So we need to be willing to change ourselves as new information dictates. Like the afore mentioned Edgar Cayce quote. I have used that in past writings and promo materials. I investigated it and found what I thought was a legitimate source linking the quote directly to Cayce. Turns out I was wrong. The end result is that I've stopped using it in any manner.
If you work with Gongs or Singing Bowls, or in any sort of healing modality, like Reiki/massage/reflexology/etc, this is especially important. There are so many so called experts out there today. You need to check out that the information you come upon is true, before you pass it on. One way is to find a teacher. Find someone who can be checked out as having authentic knowledge. There are too many self knowledge experts, who after reading a few books, and publishing a few things on the internet, proclaim themselves to be masters. Check them out, ask them questions about their training, their lineage, and then check out those things to make sure they are citing legitimate sources.
And trust your gut: if something doesn't feel right to you, then it probably isn't right.
~ MB
Today, we are inundated with more information than we can possibly handle. With the advent of the World Wide Web, we now have an almost unlimited resource of information at our fingertips. And this resource keeps growing exponentially. We are literally buried in information. The problem is, a lot of that information is wrong/false/erroneous/made up and even just outright lies.
It used to be we got most of our information from books. We would either go to a book store, or a library, and get the books we needed to learn about what we were interested in. The great thing about books in the past is, they had to come from publishers who did their best to make sure everything was correct and factual. Publishers had a reputation to keep, so they could not afford to willfully release anything that could be seen as misleading or false. If you couldn't believe one book from a publisher, then could you believe any of their other books?
Another part of this is that writers did a lot of research. The cited other books. They interviewed people. And they did their best to make sure what they were writing about was correct. Writers had reputations too.
Now we have the internet/web, and it's full of blogs, websites, “news sites,” opinion sites, and so much more. We also have e-books and inexpensive self publishing. The result is that anyone can write something and “publish” it somewhere. A big problem with this is that most of these people are not what you would call professional and/or trained writers. Often, they do little or no research on what they are writing about, so in fact they are merely expressing their own opinions as facts, or republishing/citing someone else's own opinions as facts. And the internet has a way of spreading these things to many people who keep repeating them, so much so that pretty soon they are accepted as facts, just because they have been passed around and seen so many times—“I saw it online from a lot of different sources, so it must be true!”
The recent “432Hz is nature's tuning,” and the Edgar Cayce purported quote, “Sound is the medicine of the future,” are just 2 examples of opinions and misinformation that spread like wildfire through the internet and were accepted as true, mainly because they were seen so many times that “they must be true!” But when both were subjected to scrutiny, and a bit of research, they were found to be not so true.
All of this has also lead to readers becoming sloppy readers and just accepting anything because if it's out there, it must be true. And most internet writers rarely post a bibliography or notes about the sources they used. The great thing about a bibliography and sources is that you can take the time to look them up, research them, and find out if they come from a reliable source and can be backed up as being true/factual. Without sources, you have no idea where the writer got their information.
So readers have a responsibility to do some fact checking, to dig into claims made by writers in order to find out if they are truths backed by facts/research, or just opinions masquerading as facts.
This blog is a good example. It's my blog, so it is made up of my opinions and ideas. It all comes from 40+ years of accumulated knowledge. I try to cite sources and give links when I can, but a lot of the information I write here are things I've picked up along the path, things that have no definite source that I can point to. And we all pick up information on our journey, but it's up to us to sift through it, to decode the messages, keep the truth, and discard the rest. Not an easy task or responsibility.
We also need to be willing to learn, change, and grow. This flood of easily obtainable knowledge is not slowing down. In fact, it's growing at a fantastic rate. So we need to be willing to change ourselves as new information dictates. Like the afore mentioned Edgar Cayce quote. I have used that in past writings and promo materials. I investigated it and found what I thought was a legitimate source linking the quote directly to Cayce. Turns out I was wrong. The end result is that I've stopped using it in any manner.
Be willing to change what you believe to be true when presented with new evidence.
If you work with Gongs or Singing Bowls, or in any sort of healing modality, like Reiki/massage/reflexology/etc, this is especially important. There are so many so called experts out there today. You need to check out that the information you come upon is true, before you pass it on. One way is to find a teacher. Find someone who can be checked out as having authentic knowledge. There are too many self knowledge experts, who after reading a few books, and publishing a few things on the internet, proclaim themselves to be masters. Check them out, ask them questions about their training, their lineage, and then check out those things to make sure they are citing legitimate sources.
And trust your gut: if something doesn't feel right to you, then it probably isn't right.
~ MB
Chop Wood | Carry Water | Play Gongs
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