"We took this action because your Customer Content violated our guidelines and Conditions of Use. We won't reinstate your posting permissions for this account.
For more information, see our Customer Review Guidelines (and Conditions of Use:
I understand you're upset, and I'm sorry we haven't been able to address your concerns to your satisfaction. However, we won't be able to offer any additional insight or action on this matter.
Thanks for your understanding."
However, all is not lost. I have about 90% of the reviews in a Word document (though the reviews often don't identify the title or author), and many are available through the Way Back Machine. In the coming months, I will gradually post the reviews that I can salvage and that are worth posting. After I'm done posting all of them, I will arrange them in categories.
{ 26 comments… read them below or add one }
Rejoice!!!
It’s a great compliment…..worthy of celebration, lose no sleep, congratulations, from here in London UK.
Truly disappointing. I’m extremely glad, though, to hear that you have 90% of your reviews. That makes me really happy to hear. Not only because of their spiritual value, but also because they often make me laugh my ass off as well. Bravo.
I, for one, hope that even in light of Amazon’s complete BS, you keep writing Mr. Gardner
Cheers
Hi Ron,
Amazon’s unilateral action is very disappointing and unfair, but one can not break down. The quality and lucidity of your writings must remain public as a source of guidance and help for spiritual seekers. Here you have an excellent platform to publish both old and new writings and we are sure that readers will be happy to follow you as we have been doing so far. In difficulties we should get the best out of ourselves, Ron.
Sincerely
Federico, thank you for your support.
No Geistian belongs on Amazon anyway….;_))) Amazon is a hell realm…..
thanks for all your posts. bw David.
“The word “Geist” is German, and means Spirit or Ghost. A “Geistian” is a person who lives in the timeless Holy Spirit (or Ghost). Such a person lives in the world, but is not of the world, is not of the zeitgeist, the spirit of the times. A Geistian is, spontaneously, a trans-zeitgeistian, for he always transcends, and is not implicated by, the zeitgeist, the temporal sociocultural milieu.”
The Amazon Creed :
“I Shop Therefore I Am”
This is an absolute travesty. Your reviews were one of the best things about Amazon.com. Certainly better than most of the books.
I am cautiously optimistic “sky computing” will fix this. There is already work on bots that backup all published comments to a decentralized ledger. One can simply install a Chrome extension which displays all comments censored by the owner of the website when web surfing.
Luke, thank you for your comment. Between the Wayback Machine and the reviews I have copies of in a Word document, I’ll be able to recover 90 + % of my reviews, which I’ll gradually post at this site. But if you or anyone else through “sky computing” can get all of my reviews in a single shot, that would be great.
This is a great shame, Ron, and an example of politically correct bureaucracy at its finest. Your reviews were always lucid and well-argued – even if they took no prisoners! But that’s just what is needed with all the spiritual waffle around. I hope you can salvage most of them and put them up here.
Thank you for your support William. I know for sure now that I’ll be able to salvage 90 + % of them.
Another person whose metaphysical reviews I thought highly of also had all of them deleted.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBHuB1_rv74
Truly a travesty.
David, I’m a big Ken Wheeler fan–I watch his YouTube videos on Buddhism and magnetism/electricity/ether. I didn’t know that he also had his reviews deleted.
Dear Mr Garnder,
One thing has struck me as interesting about your site, and you is, you have investigated many spiritual paths, but interestingly, you don’t say much on Taoism. Is Taoism simply not an interest of yours/area you haven’t done much investigation, or do you find it less rich than the other mystical traditions?
I’m just not impressed with the Taoist tradition with regard to spiritual Awakening. And I say the same thing about the Sufi tradition, so you don’t see me reviewing books in that tradition. I did review one Taoist book by Mantak Chia, and I gave it one star. But I still have Chia’s “Awaken Healing Energy through the Tao” on my Recommended reading list.
Don’t bother posting reviews again on Amazon. They’ll be reported and taken down again. You already know why.
Ron, I can’t post reviews. I’m banned by Amazon from doing so.
Ron, Your wisdom is needed at Amazon. The people will perish for lack of information. The censors are bastards. Where is the government/regulatory response? Amazon is a monopoly at this point. Break them up. But aren’t the 17 Intelligence agencies, as well as large swaths of the DOD all housed on the Amazon cloud? And don’t several foreign entities, such as Israel and British intelligence, as well as Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, have access to this same Cloud via its built in back door? We are so fucked.
Thanks for your support, KCT. Unfortunately, there is no there is no recourse for getting my Amazon reviews reinstated.
Mr. Gardner,
Yes, the last reply of April 18, 2019 at 7:00 pm you made to the s. o. b. above is the same internet and cyber troll of Amazon.
IJ.
Ron, Have you noticed that traffic is being choked to your site? That is happening to all sites that the 10,000+ Google thought police “curators” flag for ever changing reasons: “conspiracies,” “unfriendly views on the government,” “anti-vaccine,” et cetera. I have perhaps 300 pages of content at my own site that used to get 500 search engine referrals a day back in 2005, but since July 1 in the past three days I have had zero search engine referrals. It is depressing when you create content for others to view, and the gate keepers do everything they can to prevent it. Regarding the bastards at Amazon, I had 1500 CD cover images posted to their music section. Every image was clearly labled as having been uploaded by (my handle) “9-11 Was An Inside Job.” I was told that because of this association that no more music image uploads could be made by ANY Amazon customer as Amazon summarily deleted my 1500 images and everyone else’s. It was pathetic and not customer friendly as many CDs for sale lacked adequate cover art, which is important to have for one’s digital music collection. I have to confess that unlike Theoria Apophasis’ video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBHuB1_rv74), I have yet to walk my talk in that I continue to shop at Amazon, Whole Foods, Wal-Mart, as well as purchasing Apple computer products. We are entering full-on corporate fascism. Do you have an article at your site that describes our dilemma and the actions you have taken to combat it? I did support Trump, but isn’t he Big Business all the way? I feel the shaft this year as I completed my IRS tax return. It was galling to know that while I am paying 24%, Big Biz pays 3% or less.
KCT, the only solution I see is Trump leading to a right-wing libertarian president (like a Ron/Rand Paul), and a mass awakening to Constitutional Republicanism and the dissolution of the uber-corrupt Deep (Warfare/Welfare) State, the Federal Reserve, and 90 + % of the federal government. But don’t hold your breath waiting for this to happen.
I remember the 1990’s, when it was all new. Cyber thinkers like Robert Anton Wilson, Terence McKenna, Kutzweil, and a few others imagined cyberspace to be a sort of digital cryogenics. I was very young but I remember the enthusiasm in their voices. As an aside, Robert Anton Wilson froze his dead daughter.. So his heart was in two worlds. Science will one day bring back a loved one and cyberspace preserving our soul forever.
Imagine writing your thoughts down somewhere in cyberspace? After you die, your work will still be there. Information doesn’t rot like matter. So we will have digital immortality by the year 2010! This was the idea.
Terence spoke very eloquently about living forever in the hallways of cyberspace. He spoke for hour and very convincingly.
The coming internet was seen at the Borg cube in Star Trek (but a good guy). The point is, in Star Trek the Borg cube is super advanced, and pure, and at the other side of the universe. So the wonder is bigger than humans and not manipulated by people because it is a miracle (sorry if you haven’t seen the episode).
So cyberspace will be an advanced digital wonder, like the Borg cube, and here is the best thing, it will be dangled out there, an advanced digital Heaven forever, untouched by human malice.
The idea that a human can pull the plug on the living in the cyberspace, like in the Matrix film where that woman gets pulled and flops down, didn’t cross the minds of those brilliant thinkers of the 1990’s.
Ron, you posted your reviews. Even works of genius can get pulled, just like that!
It is sick. It is a scandal! It is all too human! There isn’t a cybernetic utopia out there, untouched my human stupidity. The Borg Cube is right here!
A quick update. I have had my books and account wiped out. Anyway, I refuse to be a part of this digital feudalism with millions of serfs handing their digital souls to a faceless control grid. Now I can breath air!
Moesy, at Amazon?
Years ago I read the then seemingly naive book, Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob, by Lee Siegel.
I saw it as naive because I was into digital immortality, I.e. the promise of cyberspace, and I say the critics as defending their position.. Now I feel naive!
Near the end Signal asks the pleb does he feel like a god the way he can click the mouse and those in front disappear.
But Siegal’s quip about the pleb feeling like a god by clicking his enemy away stuck in my mind.
What happened to you Ron is the reverse of the the little amatur imagining he is a god, like Siegal thought..
Your reviews were top quality.. The staff in the office at Amazon obviously liked you. But who are these people? And what happens if, say, the staff member who liked you retires, or drops dead, and a fresh faced
24 year old gets his job.. He sees your reviews, and like a god he wipes your life works away!
These guys are uncountable gods behind the closed door. We hand over our talent to these people but who are they? And being able to unplug you, just like that, is a new form of tyranny like nothing else.
At least the old school tyrants needed resources. And the more people they want to get rid off the more expensive.
But the modern digital tyrant can make you disappear with a click of a button!
What matters most to Bezos is the bottom line. Because my (mostly one and two star) reviews were costing Amazon sales and money, they were deleted. It was the same when I was sportsbetting arbitrager. When a sportsbook saw that I was costing, rather than making, them money, I was often booted.