• Frankly, I’m in awe of people who are never wrong. They don’t just believe, you see; they know, issuing forth cocksure pronouncements, parroting as certainty something they acquired from some supremely impeccable source such as social media, writes Barry Rosenberg

I get it. I mean, really, why bother tramping hopefully along the sandy beaches and leaf-strewn bushwalks of the mind seeking understanding and enlightenment when there’s the instantly provable universe of Google, untold apps and AI right there in the palm of your hand?

Since I don’t fit in with such self-assuredness, there are times I confess to feeling unabashedly out of touch. You see, life to me appears as a rock pool, in constant modification, and the world in general as a perpetually changing organism. (Whereas mates reckon such conduct is Rosenberg waffling.)

The human brain, we are told, is comprised of two hemispheres: the left demi-globe is basically for rational/scientific-type thought; the right, creative and artistic expression.

While we’re born pretty much with equal left-right brain usage, we’re trained from day one to take refuge in the portside. Parental doctrines. Rules and regs. Threats.

If it ain’t some invisible heavy duty dude in the sky shaking his divine finger at you, his chubby, big-bearded offsider way up north is keeping score.

So you’d better watch out. Better not cry. And don’t even think about pouting. Coz Beard-o is making a list, and since he’s such a neurotic OCD twat, checking it twice.

As if home training weren’t bad enough, at a formidable age you’re forced into this brain-washing factory called school, which works ever so diligently to solidify left-hemisphere conditioning.

Curiously, I did pretty well here. If they told me X=2, I filed it away until exam time, wherein I regurgitated that X=2, for which I was proclaimed a genius and awarded scholarships to study advanced levels of left-brain crap.

Along the way, I sought solace in the one place I could find it. As a kid alone in my tiny room, I’d listen to radio drama programmes (pre-TV this was), and from story dialogue create my own pictures and vids.

Terrific right-brain muscle-building. (As with succeeding generations who were shown pictures on a screen and told: ‘suspend original thought, dummies; here is what you are to believe!’, imagine the horror when my sister took me to an actual radio broadcast, and the svelte, heroic Lone Ranger turned out to be a fat bald old fart reading from a script.)

Age 30, I joined the hippies. Smoked dope, dropped acid, got involved with meditation and the fascinating workings of the mind.

And though I had no real credentials beyond personal experience, I soon became a university teacher of this fascinating right-side stuff.

How it happened, I charged into the esteemed University of Pennsylvania one fine day and challenged top staff over their lack of mind development study, a new but rapidly traction-gaining curriculum at various hallowed halls of American learning.

To shut me up, the toffs reluctantly put me on the bill, figuring nobody would turn up for such la-di-da pedagogy. Three hundred students piled in on opening day.

By the time I quit Penn a few years later, enrolment for my Alpha Mind Control seminars was limited solely by the number of seats in the largest auditorium on campus. Final class topped out at just shy of a thousand.

When a few years later I landed in New Zealand, ostensibly to write a series of travel articles, within a year I was conducting free Alpha seminars at Auckland Uni, attracting similarly huge numbers of students.

Small towns are always the last to get the news, of course, and my mates here, well, they are who they are.

Generally terrific sorts of every age and social/ethnic/political stripe. But question their own tightly-held dogmas? Venture into the brave new world of imagination, intuition and wonder?

Aw, why even bother when you’re always right (wink-wink) with your hand-held ‘facts’.