Art and Reality, a ghoulish gap

If you don't go out much, and you don't have cable, your movie reviews can be a tad late. And so we get to "The Nightmare Before Christmas".  The interesting thing is the assumptions behind the plot.  People from Halloweenland find out about Christmasland and their attempts to bring the charm of Christmas to the hallows of Halloweenland reveal a total divergence between two world views.  The ghouls, dressed up in Santa outfilts, are still ghastly. The genius of Tim Burton is that you can understand how the mistakes happen, and the confusions seem inevitable.  

The setup of the movie the Nightmare Before Christmas is lively because it recalls the nonfictional gap between the world of words and that of quiet collection.

Of course Burton having set up his drama has to resolve it using a director ex machina ploy.
Since he knows how weak the idea of romantic love is as a resolution, he makes it an ironic ending with love between two characters of Halloweenland.

Irony though, is a copout.  Burton has no choice since the cognitive gaps he is outlining are real ---and without becoming a mystic, he HAS no viable conclusion.  Art often relies on the mystic underpinnings of reality, to speak on the border of incomprehensibility. But make no mistake, irony is just a copout.  To treat the conclusion ironically is to present the storyteller as having some superior awareness, which awareness is non--existent. Let me quote a leading mystic, Jan Cox---Irony just  means you do not have a big enough picture, irony reflects your ignorance. 

Are there treasures in your attic?

It is time for Antiques Roadshow.
Antiques--are your thoughts, of say an age of, a few minutes.
The Roadshow we are discussing----well, the human world.
The attic--your--upper lobes.
Are there treasures in your attic?
...
Nah.

My Fellow Eukaryotes

The news is that there is definitely a black hole at the center of our
galaxy. Surprised me, since I thought that was the accepted view, but
apparently now it is even more accepted. The instruments used to
substantiate this are so sensitive that I am going to quote the
description:

Unprecedented 16-Year Long Study Tracks Stars Orbiting Milky Way Black Hole
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=27143

"A team of astronomers led by John Johnson of the University of
Hawaii's Institute for Astronomy
has used a new technique to measure the precise size of a planet
around a distant star. They
used a camera so sensitive that it could detect the passage of a moth
in front of a lit window
from a distance of 1,000 miles."

Nothing in that contradicts Bede, whose picture of man's knowledge was
of a bird flitting through a room, in and out, from dark to dark.
That was about 1400 years ago.

So are we, proportion wise, cells? Or is our planet itself a cell?
Just questions. About our world where light depends on dark, a world
where some cellular component can glimpse a larger part of the
machinery...

Bolt from the White

There's a new Disney Pixar film out, about a dog tv star who discovers
that he does not actually have the talents of the super dog he plays
in the movies. The New York Times says this about the plot of "Bolt."
The dog "must learn that what he thinks of as his true identity is an
artifact of make-believe."

That sounds familiar to students of Jan Cox, even before you factor in
that the realization the dog must make is actually happens in an
animated film -- the layers of reality, onion thing.

These tasty crumbs are everywhere on the path.

Studying the sun

Looking back on the history of science you see that any accurate knowledge of the center of our solor system, came very late in the history of  humanity---that is assuming we do now have MUCH reliable information about the sun. Galen came before Newton.  

This came to mind when I considered the very consistent human questions about what men call god, and these questions have only  remained steady or increased throughout  human history---anyone who thinks we do not live in a theological age has not listened out to what is being chatted about.  In the past day the idea of men putting god on trial, has been verbalized, and also I just read that Isaac Bashevis Singer, an adorable thinker,  had said he was "angry with god."

Most all mention of god, in human history,  ignores one salient fact (and I am not including in this list Jan Cox, Gurdjieff,  the anonymous author of "The Cloud of Unknowing," or other mystic scientists)---but the parade of human thinkers we typically include in an intellectual history of humanity---they all ignore a certain detail---they are asking about god before they have answered THIS question---what is man.

You start with what you can access, you start with the possible, the local terrain, the planet you know, this terrestial study must preceed a study of the sun, or galaxy.  You must know what rocks are before you can study thermonuclear equations---  You start questioning what you have a chance of answering, and keep asking, pushing intellectually. This kind of radical empiricism is the path of honesty and hope.

To proceed courageously, persistently, objectively, in a study of WHAT IS MAN, is to be on the path to a summit from which real answers could be glimpsed. 

Hoax? or Natural Condition of the Brain?

There's a story with a dateline of Nov 12 in the New York Times about
these guys that hoaxed the modern media world with a story about
someone not knowing Africa was a continent. The "lesson" given in the
article is that sources must be carefully checked. That's not it
though--that is missing the whole wonderful point.

The story to be gotten from this story is about the human intellect.
The intellect is not "gullible", the nature of human cerebralness is a
group event. Jan Cox talked much about any person being one of 6
million nodes in one mind. There is no true or false here, there is
socialability--a cozy handshake passed around and around. The content
is irrelevant. So that some pranksters pulled one off is not
surprising. The surprising thing is that is does not happen more, and
more flagrantly. Or perhaps it does and we are just not aware.
Really the latter. Because ultimately

All thoughts are alike in the dark.
They are all imaginary, (Excepting of course those thoughts focussed
on rearranging the external world, and illustrating the mind as a tool
maker.)
In a certain front lobe the lights are always off.
This is never even noticed, and when someone talks about finding the
light switch, they always assume they can TALK the switch into the on
position.

So it stays dark. And only a few ever wonder why it is always dark in
this front lobe, this living room of the brain. They wonder if there
is illumination other than that from the t.v. And most, never even
notice the dark.

And that is as it should be.

Okay, try this

You don't need a dualistic philosophy, you don't need another realm,
you don't need an alternate reality, you do not need another
dimension, or a separate universe, ...(all these options only beg the
question for one thing---though this is actually not a point Jan Cox
made when he said there was only one reality, not separate physical
and mental realms, to explain the human experience. At least I do not
recall him pointing this out: adding to the number of realms just gets
you into an unacknowledged regress wherein the intellect must posit a
whole other realm to connect the two realms you articulate in an
effort to comprehend intellectually man's intellectual and man's
physical world, at least if the intellect is being consistent. Ha ha.)

You do not need a separate dimension to explain how, from wood and
catgut, a beautiful sound can emerge.

The less things change, the less things stay the same

The way history changes is something people rarely notice. Many
people think external change will bring inner psychological change.
Marx is one example--a certain type of external event was causal, and
everything else 'epiphenomenal.' This simplistic thinking has
characterized much of the last century and remains the default view of
most people, though their views are not typically coherent.
All this ignores the really unimaginable complexity of humanity.
Human nature itself changes so slowly that even after millenia you
could fairly say human nature is static. These views in themselves
are not exclusively those of Jan Cox; rare academics such as Eric
Voegelin, have filled many volumes documenting such ideas.
The latter used the phrase 'metastatic faith' to denote the mind set
of people who think human nature can change overnight.

Voegelin could not glimpse the complexity of change communicated by
Jan Cox. It is against this background that Jan Cox pointed out those
events that encompass what we call "the fall of the Berlin Wall,'
(though he would never speak in such stuffy academese) were
unprecedented in history. For those in power to just drop the reins,
and say, 'I don't want to do this anymore,' --this is not the way
power is transferred, this is not the way empires end.

And here, a mere 20 some years later---another astounding event. No,
human nature has not changed, the scaffolding of history remains a
mechanical set which will break those who think that "out there' is an
arena of real change.

And yet, how wonderful to witness what is going on -- a black man
holds the highest office in the most powerful nation on the planet. A
sweet wonderment.

Is That a Poodle or a Polecat

We see lots of cute pictures of dogs in costume this time of year. Jan
Cox would have felt it a pity to see the animals harassed this way.
He didn't even like collars on dogs, though he knew it a necessity at
times. His thirst and drive and hope for freedom extended not just to
his students, but to the critters around him. Those of us not so alive
to life's cruelties can hope that the photographer removed the costume
quickly, and this blog is not going where you might guess.

Why the impulse to dress up dogs in human garb, why do most of us find
it appealing and CUTE? Perhaps this costuming reminds us of the unity
of everything, the essential interconnectedness of all---that pug may
really be a bat--at least the glimpse is there, and it is comforting
to the mind, because the interconnectedness may be more accurate than
the separation the mind hacks out of the external world. Glimpsing
this externally though is sufficient, any more real looking and the
mind would find itself doubting the unexamined tenets that support its
own hegemony.

In support of this perhaps grandiose sounding picture, we have the old
old art which was never intened to amuse, but to present the
gratification of the truth----every early civilization has some
depiction of animal human creatures. For the first "civilized men",
those for whom the mind's shift into a higher gear was perhaps still a
recollection, for those brothers of ours--closer to the scene of
mental creation, that dog and men could be commingled was just a fact.
Anubis carried a sceptre.

So common is this in the art created thousands of years ago that one
has to assume this is some fundamental stage in human evolution.
With the idea of monotheism, One god, man got separated from his
physical surrounding too. But does viewing this as a stage of mental
evolution mean that the earlier stories and pictures of animal/human
combination creatures are outdated?

Possibly the earlier depictions are still accurate but that reality
must be forgotten for human mentation to function as an engine of
external progress. If we have to rearrange the external world to (in
the example that Jan Cox used, to get water to run uphill) to improve
our living conditions and odds of survival---we must assume that
external interconnectedness is of small relevance, so that we can
continue with the mind's ability to rearrange things. The mind must
not have to worry about offending some woodland sprite if it invents
water mills. The mind also must be free to see itself as autonomous,
but that did not happen all at once, and now we are drifting away from
our point.

Yes that pug in a crocodile costume is cute. Cuteness may be a memory
of something real but so distant that the mind is not threatened by
the recollection.
Not threatened as long, as the questioning does not press too far.

Ancesters and Imagination

The scientists have found human footprints in Chauvet Cave which is in
France. The footprints are those of a child, and they are accompanied
by dog paw prints. These prints date from 26,000 years ago. The
additional detail that residue on the cave walls indicates a torch was
being carried by the child, gives a poignant picture of a child
exploring, hunting, and being helped, protected by a dog with even
then, keener senses, and a willingness to challenge anything that
might threaten them.

Okay I think it is obvious that I have added to the picture with
details I made up. Who knows how protective the dog was, who knows
what they were doing in the cave, maybe going to a home they shared,
along a path dark but not unfamiliar.

The distinction between imagination and reality is one mechanical
imagination does not accurately make. Understanding the role of
imagination in human thought is basic to using the teachings of Jan
Cox. There remains though, an edifying vertigo in considering the bare
prints.

Pigeons on asphalt

They peck and poke around, at something we cannot see; they are gray and  moire against the black and auto  abstraction of the shopping lot.  The pigeons are like original thought, that shortcut Jan Cox demonstrated as a route to another kind of awareness.

The quadrupeds and bipeds move on a flat plane missing the pigeons.  But the birds can take their time--faced with sudden death in an asphalt sea, the pigeons move----UP.  They have a direction others busy at the shopping center do not.  A whole other direction so their hazards are different.  Their rewards are life.

After reading someone else's poetry (he knows who he is)

It's like looking for a white cat in the linen closet.
Everybody opens the door, most shut it right away.
For various reasons.
But some hear a purr, and pause.

Juggling with spitballs

A week ago the New York Times had an article about what the LHC was
hoped to demonstrate. (The article is entitled something about the
origins of the universe, by Brian Greene). One of the paragraphs was
about the Higgs particle. Greene's discussion said that the discovery
of the Higgs particle would be evidence about a field that acted as
molasses, and as particles went through it, their resistance explained
the phenomenon of mass. Okay, I need to read it again, since it was
the first explanation that made any sense to me of the so-called god
particle.

But it is not premature to point out something---the scientists are
trying to explain "mass." I find this interesting since mass is
something self evident to all. Not that it does not need to be
explained, but (assuming that the E in E=MC small 2 is thought, ) what
needs to be explained is, pressingly, not mass, but thought, energy.

Yes I am taking some liberties---mass is thinginess, energy is
thought. It is just a game after all.

The sound of maps

The seeming impossibility of disccussing that which cannot be fairly put in words came back to me when I read about escape means for prisoners during World War II.  There was a tiny office in the Briitsh war department devoted to helping prisoners, who escaped from German prisons, make it safely back to England.

A small part of their efforts to aid those behind enemy lines was providing maps to them.  I actually have only a vague idea of how they got the maps into the hands of the escapees, but what I did grasp was the hazards of maps if you are on the run.  Say you are hiding in the woods and the enemy soldiers are looking for you. You must both be silent and have a sense of the direction of  home,  Any rustling of paper could provide the searchers with your whereabouts.

The solution was maps on silk.  Elegant solution in more ways than one. No folding, no rustling, no danger that  is created by your attempt to avoid danger. 

Apparently some 4000 soldiers escaped the enemy by this and similar tricks.  That is a lot more folks than the number of people who escape the mechanicity of group thought (that is the only thought which can be shared.)  And yet a similar approach could assist the latter.
Picture the activity in your mind as directed towards getting home, AND so quiet that the inner guards, those unproductive concerns, don't know your intent.  Quiet need not mean inactivity.

The Glory of China, August, 2008

China is a mutt. The picture of her face that appeared after she
pulled a box containing an abandoned human infant to her puppy den
shows a dog that Jan Cox described to his students once as the type to
which dogs will always revert when to left to breed without human
intervention. You see them all over the world, short haired brown
hound types. The look in her eyes in the photograph seems to be
asking, and why am I surrounded by these strangers?

China will never understand that she is a celebrity. But she
understands the cry of a helpless mammal. There is something
programmed into women so that they respond to the cry of a child. No
woman fails to register the sob of child in a mall, for instance,
though they may understand they do not need to a act. No woman would
fail to act should a box with an infant be found in a public space.
They would not just walk by it, although they could easily, (speaking
in generalities here) ignore a hungry homeless dog. This
behavior--the response to a an infant in need-- is utterly mechanical.

At one time the model of the selfless mother seemed to me useful in
understanding human ego.
That ego could be dissolved to help another, struck me as useful in
understanding how a person might progress towards greater
understanding. I never mentioned this thought to Jan but he never
spoke of motherhood as useful in spiritual endeavors.

This, I now think, is because motherhood and its hormonal
preparations and predilections is
utterly mechanical. This mechanicity, that maternal behavior is
deeply controlled genetically, obviously is important to the very
preseveration of human life: we would have died out quickly if every
mother had to acquire external knowledge of mothering how to.

The instances of abandoned infants in no way invalidate the above
picture. These abandoning women are just the ravelled edge of an
immensely successful machine, the machine of human life. This machine
is simply efficient, and accomplishes the same end that the
numerical dimension of insect larvae do. The survival enhancement of
huge numbers of larvae are replaced in human genetics by the urge and
know-how of motherhood being genetically programmed. Same purpose,
same success.

The example of China though, points out that this maternal instinct,
to respond to the cry of an infant, is mammalian, and not just human.
The warmth one feels toward the story of China's rescue of an infant
of a different species, seems programmed also. But the temptation to
label that situation in which people pass by hungry homeless dogs as
"ironic", in view of the analysis of these notes, that there is a
mammalian instinct for females to provide for, to protect, the small
and helpless of other mammals, even other mammalian species, should be
resisted. As the philosopher and mystic Jan Cox said (words to this
effect): 'Irony is just a label to cover one's ignorance."

The Right Tools

One problem with the positivists (those who hold that knowledge must
be independently verifiable, repeatable, and, in effect, of the
external world: the most common attitude among scientists today) is
they think you can isolate man from what he knows, and have results of
lasting value.

The attitude that the instrument of knowing must also be studied is
not a new one, (maybe that is what the Greeks meant when they said man
is the measure of all things) but if you focus on the idea of studying
the tool of knowing, say a telescope, as well as what is learned from
the telescope, a certain perspective is gained.

I am suggesting that you must study the instrument of knowing-- as
well as the topic studied by that tool-- to gain the maxiumum and the
most reliable results. Actually the tool is always a critical part of
what is known, and the ignorance of this fact is a peculiar blindspot
of the contemporary world. The reasons for the popularity of
positivism are interesting but not the current topic.

What I would like to point out now is that without including the tool
used with the verbalized topic of learning, you fall into nonsense.
For instance without being aware of the tool used, you could not
distinguish between galaxies and cells. So the distinction between a
telescope and a microscope is part of the knowledge, just a part which
is ignored in the epistemological background---and this I call
evidence of the illogic of positivism.

Also you need to study the mind of the scientist, the knower, to
evaluate human knowledge. Only by going to the borders of knowledge,
can an investigation of so-called mysticism be brought back into the
game. It may be that this is not of great significance--- I am not
certain. The human mind can be studied as a tool though -- this fact
itself is a major tool used by seekers throughout history and in this
regard Jan Cox is only the latest, and maybe most illustrious,
example in the last century.

Gurdjieff's student John G. Bennett

J. G. Bennett wrote his autobiography, and this book details a lot
about Gurdjieff and Ouspensky and their students. I am not
particularly knowledgeable about these gentlemen, but Bennett's book,
"Witness" makes me feel better about the students Jan Cox left. At
least we are not wondering around looking for someone else to guide
us, at least we are not writing autobiographies. We do not seem to be
quoting the prophecies of anyone wearing a turban. We do not, as a
group, take seriously talk that emphasizes an i separate from the rest
of life. We do not sketch metaphysical diagrams while ignoring the
unspeakable. We certainly do not worry about the fate of Humanity.

But the above may be too harsh: I finished the book, after all. it is
possible Bennett was just pretending to be ordinary.

A Golden Turn

After I heard a discussion of the selection of the recordings to go on
the gold record sent along on Voyager I, it struck me as perhaps a
model for the origins of human speech itself.

There was a genuine effort to reflect on what would be understood by
someone or some being more intelligent than human beings---this sort
of task is not the talent of ordinary mentation. Some real effort
went into the selection of music, and various languages, recorded on
the gold record. Beethoven,Rock 'n Roll greetings in a large number of
languages, like Urdu, and others. The real message sent by earth on
Voyager I seems to be variety, though that is not how Carl Sagan's
crew saw their selection process. But the stretching necessary for
the selection task to compose the gold record resulted in --
inclusiveness and variety. The opposite really of the job of ordinary
mentation which is to divide. Some part of man's mind though
understood the job was NOT to define, divide, but to portray a rainbow
of mankind's variety and genius.

Back to the origins of speech though----surely this involved a similar
but incredibly more massive effort to----transcend the ordinary. The
first speech if I am correct in seeing a hint in the gold record
project, may have been guided by an attempt to comprehend something
above one's grasp. No doubt the ordinary would label that god, but
let us not be so inclined to labelling ourselves, because as soon as
you label something thusly, in fact what happens is you forget the
reality of what you were trying to define.

And another direction for the example of the gold record is the
recollection that, for the persevering mystical tracker, the job is
trying to produce a gold record every minute. One way to approach
this is by rotating the ordinary intellect through as much variety as
you can. Jan Cox used the picture of a rotating lighthouse lamp to
convey this, occasionally. The simple inclusion of variety to counter
the intellect's staring fixation on a single thing could be sufficient
to keep ordinary intellect open to the edge of discovery.

Bumper Music

Bumper music is those bland random bits of melody that fill in the
between chatter on the radio--they function to prevent dead air, and
cushion transitions on the air.
Maybe---

Thought is the bumper music for reality...

Touring the Turing Test

As you may recall the Turing Test was devised by the great computer
pioneer, Alan Turing, to elucidate when a computer might become human.
He devised this test in the 1940s, while he was working on breaking
the German codes during the war. The Turing test is this: if a person
communicating with a machine cannot tell if the machine is human or
not, then the machine can be considered sentient.

Actually there is a problem with this test----MOST PEOPLE would fail
the Turing test. A person in communication with a another person, and
trying to determine based on the communication if they were dealing
with a machine or a person could legitimately conclude the person in
question was a machine.

Mystical muskrats

Think of it this way. What if people confused the water with the
earthen dikes which exist to control the course of the water. What if
this analogy is a picture of the thought of people all over the globe. They
could be confusing the dirt with the water and assuming that the means
by which boats traverse water is by floating on the mud. We may
all be clay eaters.

Persons have complained that mystical texts are hard to read. Why
doesn't the author just say what he means? The writer with some
knowledge and the compassion to attempt conveying what he has seen,
has to counter not the ignorance of his listeners, but their knowledge.
His job includes clarifying the difference between clay (words) and
water (what words point to.) Since folks do not even glimpse the
nature of their inner confusion, the words of the mystic seek to
overflood the nature of words themselves -- a task destined perhaps to
ultimate, but not perhaps individual, failure. The splash of wild
water is prophesy and proof.

The flooding the mystic wants to share can change geography.

All of which does not mean that the muskrat making holes in the dam
knows what it is doing. Or that the muskrat does not.

--

Widows Talk

There is an architectural feature called a widows walk and it is a
balcony on an upper story of a coastal house where the mariners' wives
could watch the sea for signs of a returning ship. That the phrase is
"widows" walk got me thinking how much like words this feature is,
because no matter what you say, you are killing something when you
speak, you are losing. Like a woman up there looking out to sea has
already lost---if her husband were home, she would not be up there
scanning the horizon. How different the gull is, swooping over the
waves.

Buford Highway

This is a twist on Ken Kesey's 'you are either on the bus or off the
bus.' (I think that's what he said.) Anyway here in this southern city
we have buses and they almost all now have elaborate advertising
wrapped on them, photoreal stuff in many colors. If you match up the
scenes around the bus with the interior there is an interesting
contrast. You have people traveling to Doraville on a bus painted
with pictures of the Savannah beach. You have people slouched on
cracked plastic seats in a bus advertising BMW convertibles This
hardly counts as paradoxical since the advertising is emphatically NOT
for bus riders.

Yet the scene is a unit, combining truth and falsity, all
philosophical variants pushed together, all opinions folded into one
phrase, all colors in one blaze. The guy zipping past the public
transportation may think, can I manage a new Jaguar this summer, while
the person inside the bus wonders if he is getting any later. A unity
which laughs at any philosophical distance, which knows to specify any
school is to miss the point. A unity which exists to declare
multiplicity.

At the level of the person all are surrounded by ignorance and
(thankfully) ignorant of it. Yet the bus provides a sense of
destination to convertible driver
and bus passenger both, to distract them from the adjacent abyss.
Buses are like words. The bus points beyond itself, hints of things it
cannot deliver on. The bus will not be making any surprising stops.
The bus suggests travel but prevents any meaningful journey. Like
words.

If you accept ANY label whatsoever, you are at a bus stop. But how do
you express that you have to be both on and off the bus AT THE SAME
TIME, to get any discount on gravity?

Putting science into a test tube

Following is a quote describing a 17th century experiment by some
alchemists, especially one named Kenelm Digby who died around 1625.
The first thing that jumps out from this quote is how different
science was almost 400 years ago.
The results described we would not regard as credible. Of course it is not surprising that the quote sounds archaic -- the language is
poetic sounding. This can be fun to savor. But see what you think of this description of something the writer is calling "palingenesis." And my comments after the quote. Quote:

Never was a philosophical imagination more beautiful than that exquisite
Palingenesis, as it has been termed from the Greek, or a regeneration;
or rather, the apparitions of animals and plants. ...
Digby, and the whole of that admirable school, discovered in the ashes
of plants their primitive forms, which were again raised up by the
force of heat. Nothing, they say, perishes in nature; all is but a
continuation, or a revival. The semina of resurrection are concealed in
extinct bodies, as in the blood of man; the ashes of roses will again
revive into roses, though smaller and paler than if they had been
planted: unsubstantial and unodoriferous, they are not roses which grew
on rose-trees, but their delicate apparitions; and, like apparitions,
they are seen but for a moment! The process of the Palingenesis,
this picture of immortality, is described. These philosophers having
burnt a flower, by calcination disengaged the salts from its ashes, and
deposited them in a glass phial; a chemical mixture acted on it, till
in the fermentation they assumed a bluish and spectral hue. This dust,
thus excited by heat, shoots upwards into its primitive forms; by
sympathy the parts unite, and while each is returning to its destined
place, we see distinctly the stalk, the leaves, and the flower, arise:
it is the pale spectre of a flower coming slowly forth from its ashes.
The heat passes away, the magical scene declines, till the whole matter
again precipitates itself into the chaos at the bottom. This vegetable
phœnix lies thus concealed in its cold ashes, till the presence of heat
produced this resurrection—as in its absence it returns to its death.

End of quote.

This is empiricism, the spirit of scientific inquiry asking questions, sincerely concerned to get the outcome, though, it seems doubtful these investigators processing some
vegetable matter in a test tube could have seen what they said they
saw, Yet, a spirit of investigation and curiosity and the thrill of knowledge is apparent in the quote. Although they describe something that I doubt they saw, I am calling this empiricism.

And
what of the questions behind this investigation, what were the
experimenters looking for? These "apparitions of animals and plants"
prove the truth that "all is but a continuation."
The subject of their studies was DNA. They were using the only ideas
they possessed to investigate a recurring reality. We assume that our
20th century science is superior, and so no doubt it is, unless we pause and struggle to comprehend a larger picture.

We cannot know, what they did not know, 400 years ago, and THAT is the edge
between what we know and what we are ignorant of. To touch that
boundary is to change it. We cannot confidently assert that we, 400 years later, know more than our forebears, to a relevant extent. We manifestly cannot know what we do not know, So perhaps we are not really in a different situation that those gentlemen 400 years ago. Perhaps both our and the 17th century science, are, compared to the extent of what we do NOT know, tiny sandspits.

The scenery of a dog walk

To say you learned from your mistakes is a sure sign you did not.

To skip the obvious meaning: if you learned something you would not
verbalize it.

A definite meaning of my first sentence is that anyone who says, I
learned from my mistake, obviously did NOT learn from their mistakes
because this statement assumes ignorance is a matter of isolated
pools, little bits that can be captured and swept up, even hoovered
up, by a stately intellect.

What if the intellect is not stately?

What if ignorance is not just a few lost pieces from a jigsaw puzzle.

How would we really KNOW what ignorance is? What if the shore is small, and the ocean of ignorance huge???

Spit Torrent

Here is a recent development in digital rights management. There is a product called MediaDefenders which keeps software from being downloaded for free by peer-to-peer networks by planting a huge number of phony versions of the desirable files on networks--what happens then when someone downloads a copy is that they find they just have mush. The account I read (by Michael Wolff) called this carpet-bombing a peer-to-peer network, like bit-torrent.

Life has a similar trick--someone actually realizes a fact, but when they try to share this information, the listener cannot really grasp what the original seer saw. You read a good bit in mystical literature how "words cannot convey what happened to me." Of course unless you are Ludwig Wittgenstein that does not stop folks from discussing what they believe they saw. The readers (or hearers) of these accounts however, do not themselves then HAVE a mystical experience, themselves. Without something like that however, what is it that the lecturer conveys? Without the recipient of these accounts seeing what the speaker is discussing, we conclude they did not grasp the speakers content. Had they grasped the speakers point, they would have had an experience similar to the one the speaker is pointing to.

A Real Teacher grasps that there is this dilemma and must take this into account. It is perhaps this understanding, rather than any mystical experience , that sets apart certain historical figures of this endeavor. Mystical experiences after all are very common in the general population. (Soon perhaps we can look more closely at this commonness and why it is so little appreciated or accounted for. That is something to talk about in the near future.)

Look at Wittgenstein again--his major insight was if you cannot talk about it, don't try. So along came the positivists---(a philosophical school that says only externally verifiable information is valid,) and they loved Wittgenstein. He, however, would conclude that the positivists just did not understand his ideas.

Now Wittgenstein had a mystical experience (there must be a better way to put this.). And saying that if you cannot talk about something, then you should not do so, is a brutal truth that needed to be stressed. But when Wittgenstein was misunderstood to be saying that the mystical realm did not exist, when what he was really saying was that you could not talk about this level of experience -- what did he do? Or let me ask, what did he not do----he did not take this misunderstanding as data for him to expand his thoughts, he did not wonder why these mystical experiences were fleeting and beyond his control. Either of these plausible responses would have helped Wittgenstein on to a wider understanding. Such was not however Ludwig Wittgenstein's fate. He would wind up regarded as one of the most intelligent philosophers in the western world, and I guarantee that he did know he missed something, but he did not have the verve, the integrity, the energy to pursue the questions.

From the example of Wittgenstein perhaps we can see that intelligence is not what is missing in the difficulties facing a teacher determined to convey something.

So here are a couple of responses to the situation a teacher faces when he has an experience and feels a responsibility to -- somehow share. He can discuss the experience and in doing so lose it for himself and find that others never comprehended what he was saying, or he can formulate a philosophy of language which is highly regarded and utterly misinterpreted.

What other alternatives are there? The example of Jan Cox is one, and no doubt we will be saying more soon about this.

How the mind keeps busy avoiding reality

Below is a quote from the free email newsletter that New Scientist magazine makes available to the interested.The quote illustrates a particular strategy of ordinary human mentation; this strategy must have some value though as yet what value that could be is not clear to me. Perhaps it is the repeat a silly argument if that argument was ever believed in the past ploy. The parting line politicians use that they want to spend more time with their family falls in this camp. Never mind the guy/gal was just indicted for bribes, never mind their kids have already left for college. Never mind that the wife is furious their summer vacation will not be spent in Greece now. For some reason they can trot out the old argument that they have to leave their office to spend more time with their family and their audience does not break out in laughter.

Along these lines is this blurb for an article that does not need to be read for anyone to know the conclusions. Yet an academic magazine is publishing this article. The topic is about the effectiveness of makeup. It is my assertion that everyone knows that make up only makes young people look younger. The blurb ends that we deserve some evidence make up works. Oh sure, and we will learn from our mistakes.(That's what those stock brokers say.) Something else is going on, not what is being said. Yet this kind of blurb is repeated ad hilariousnessness, and it is all part of a dream. Part of a dream. And the proof that this research is silly, is that---if the makeup worked, you would need NO article investigating the claim. Everybody would use the product and look younger. Maybe research about HOW, it works, but not IF makeup works. So here is the blurb.

What lies beneath the makeup?
We spend a fortune on cosmetics that promise to keep our skin youthful, so surely we deserve some evidence that they work, says Richard Welle

Southeast Asia

It seems unlikely that no one else has noticed this but there seems to be some kind of engine of creativity, planetary creativity, apparently located in South East Asia.
The reasons I bring this up---recently the science news that flu viruses originate in southeast
Asia, brought back these things I had noticed before. The incredible biological diversity in for instance Malaysia. The origin of many species in this area (southeast China.) The fact that the oldest religion, Hinduism, is not only in this area, but is still vigorous after all these millenia (I base this judgment of vigor on the fact animal life is still protected in a way it is not in the west, animals protected in temples for instance.) You could make a case that the Chinese civilization is the greatest in terms of art and philosophy, that we have ever had on the planet. Religions that originated in southest Asia --Taosim and Buddhism --are able to continue while not loosing track of basic truths that the West has trouble even grasping---truths regarding change and nothingness). And a major language group appears to have originated in India, that to which English belongs.

One is tempted to assume the fact that some of this area is so volcanically active, is relevant,though exactly HOW increased volanic activity would be relevant is not clear. (See my mention of mind and matter in the first paragraph. (no reason to conclude creativity means human life is safer though, in such an area.) That a line through the Malayasian archipelago and the area including the Phillipines, seems to divide species, though the details are not right to hand (mind.)also may be relevant.

Against this idea that there is something special and generative about south east Asia,is the fact that civilization itself arose in the fertile crescent, which I cannot include in South east Asia, without extending the boundaries so much they are silly. And Jasper's axis time of history is a different kind of mapping which points to the fact that philosophy and major religions all arose within a narrow time frame. Whatever---though I am not sure we can say where civilization first arose, all we know is what is beneath where we choose to, or can, dig.

So when I say there seems to be something going on in South East Asia, am I referring to something geological?, to something spiritual, some magnetic lines of force, some energy derived from plate tectonics? I am clueless....

Cow Hum

So how come, -- no one marvels that no two pigeons are alike.?.

Constellations

By day attention went to survival, even after people started living together in small herds. But at night, yes one slept, but some had to be awake some of the time, perhaps the assigned guard person as the daily shift from hunter to hunted was effective, but men have always also, looked UP, at the sky. Hard to argue about, yet what other animal did this, looked up, especially when laterally, all was dark, but UP what a spectacle, every clear night. So much more incredible than the city skies we are used to. And so---out of reach, so mesmerizing, but not anything that had an immediate use. You could just gaze upward at the sky. Not for a purpose that was obvious, or could be handled. Just looking, with the body still. Probably soon men started to note changes. Every thing they knew had some relevance, a plant to avoid, or study for clues, or consume. Surely the spectacle above also had some relevance, some survival value, but what. The sky appeared unchanging in comparison with the daylight jungle, and yet, did a sense of change among the permanent, the falling star, become apparent? And yet the permanent also persisted among the changing. And to what end, in a world where all related to hunter or hunted, did this sky persist.

Perhaps there was an event, from the sky, some totally amazing, that may have left an impact crater we have or haven't found. Perhaps not, perhaps just the incredible glittering night, inviting study to an end that was not obvious, that had to be concentrated on, studied out. The patterns men described in the sky now seem arbitrary but these patterns we call constellations, we have not forgotten. Why have we not forgotten these old patterns? The ancient gods and cosmology is everywhere faded like a pressed flower, and yet all us know the names of the patterns traced out millenia ago.

One reason we have not forgotten -- is it is possible that the night sky, the patterns men talked about, are evidence of the ignition of, the invention of, human abstract thought.

Would this event, whenever, however it happened, the dawn of human thought, of mentation, would not this event be in the category of the Big Bang. And in looking up at the sky, and seeing, as we now understand, the light of past events,
could it not be that we also are seeing the beginning of human thought?

April Schools Day

On April Fools Day I find myself thinking of some news stories, is that a joke? What if everyday we could pinch our internal news and hold it to a light, and scan it for it's integrity.... Would our thoughts melt away, would we think who is doing the scanning,now? And where does all this news come from... Would we think?

The Dream of History

The dream of history may be described as self-knowledge. Jan Cox referred to the academic discipline of history as illusory. The motive behind studying history, as with so many things, is probably self-knowledge. There is a kind of search for self knowledge which actually involves hiding from real awareness. Some intellectual pursuits give the satisfaction of scratching an itch while avoiding the shock and joy of real understanding which requires among other things a certain kind of courage. As long as the procession of sentences can continue, one is protected from the self knowledge that real objectivity involves, while garnering the faint glow of intellectual creativity and curiosity.

An example of history as preserving illusions came to my attention this morning in the email summary of a scots newspaper. I quote from the Daily Scotsman,and in the quote below merely ask that you notice the assumption that the individual is capable of conscious action and responsible as an agent of action. What is history without this assumption--biology? but here is the quote :

"Fact of the Day Today in 1625 Charles I came to the throne of England and Scotland. His reign would be turbulent and his clashes with the English Parliament, plus his handling of religious issues, led to civil war and his eventual beheading. Read more of Scottish history at heritage.scotsman.com"

"

Thu, 27 Mar 2008

A Trained Seal

A trained seal is a nice picture of human verbal thought. I guess everyone has a graphic accompaniment to that phrase. A seal which is on a ball and managing to keep his balance. If this were not a metaphor one would feel repelled by the connotations of the brutality (which confined animals, in the zoo or circus, suffer necessarily by virtue of their entrapment if nothing else) this image would bring up. But we are talking of something besides seals, we are talking about the human intellect and I like this picture of it. Wobbling here, weaving there, so warbles mechanical mentation when it spills forth from the mouth (or keyboard). The interesting part of human speech is that, just as the seal can stay upright, there is conceivably some sense which others may agree is the import of the words being spoken. All the while what is really happening is at a basic glandular level and any resemblance to actual denotative substance is accidental.

And the ball. What could the ball be in this metaphor? Maybe the secret. Oh yes there really is a secret. It is just not hidden away. Skip the purloined letter, what about a purloined universe. By not saying more I am not being coy. Anyone can study the words of Jan Cox on his website, jancox.com., and learn far more than by reading my words.

What women know

This whole silly todo about Eliot Spitzer getting caught with his wallet open (silly except that such distractions, keep the secondary world alive) reminds me of the time Jan Cox pointed out offhandedly that lawyers marry beautiful women. I suppose men are artless when they investigate why such behavior occurs ( NPR interviewed such an academic student in the aftermath of the above incident, who has done research on why men visit prostitutes,yes really) but women know darn well how blameless men are, and yet they cluck away. I do not wish to dwell too much about this now, to avoid what Jan called "the suicide of the secondary," ,but there are examples to hand of women who dealt with infidelity in a sensible manner. I refer to Queen Alexandra, who invited her husband's mistress to visit him by his deathbed. My point is this is well within the bounds of ordinary knowledge, at least for women, at least it used to be. Why indeed do men visit prostitutes. Give me a break.

Another picture

Why is there no verb form for being a plate of sheet glass? A sheet of glass is a nice picture of reality. Words are like tape on the glass to make the glass apparent. But of course reality is never a noun, and the reality of moving, flowing glass is not the best picture of what we are pointing to. For the nonce, our sheet of glass is on a truck. Notice it is outside, inside being too hazardous to keep the glass intact, what with pushy nouns and verbs that bang in the mental interiority of modern consciousness . So the relatively unconfined outdoors is the milieu in which to glimpse our plate of glass, whizzing by on a truck. Everyone assumes they know about the truck, when in fact none do.

Words

Words are an airplane circling to land. Most want the airplane to land, creating an end, a period. Unless there is a defect which might affect a safe landing. Then the craft circles to use up the fuel and minimize the chance of an explosion which could destroy the passengers. A revolutionist, to use a term favored by Jan Cox, fuels up for the flight and after the craft is aloft, dives into the ground. The revolutionist wants to destroy the assumption of knowledge which never existed---i.e. the ordinary mind. The explosion sought by the revolutionist ...

A vista to avoid if you are committed to the orderly

The recent discussion about why history is now measured exactly as it was in the time of Christian historians, with just the labels altered to sound less religious, has another dimension. In fairness the historians deciding on how to label their dating faced the dauntingness of the unmeasurable and the human intellect does it's best to avoid that vista of the unfathomable. In this instance I am referring to the fact that numbering has to start someplace, and there is NO convenient place in a world accustomed to being able to start numbering with a definite historical event. The grand appeal of 1 AD is that it was nailed into (not a wood crossbeam but) a definable event. Now that this starting place is less obvious, where would the numbering start? It occurs to me that maybe 6000 BCE, which is reported to be about the time human writing started. But of course this is a convention too, and hardly less speculative than the recently popular system. And then we would have the clumsiness of some events being counted backwards from 6000 BCE. You do need an edge, even though the point which I would like to highlight is that there IS no edge to count from, not really.

Which brings up the extent the human intellect will go to to avoid realizing how mythical edges really are. That might be our next question.

What divides BCE and CE?

The conventions for expressing dates are a nice example of binary thought. What is any real difference between 11:59pm and 12:01 am. Yet they are considered a day apart. But what is fun to notice is the terminology that used to indicate the time before and after the supposed birth of the Christian deity. This used to be usage to which all westerners adhered in speaking of dates, regardless of their personal religious views. To do otherwise would be to be incomprehensible to one's readers. At some point in the 20th century the provincialness of this convention became so obvious that the iniitals were changed from B.C. to B.C.E., where the latter stood for Before Common Era. So we apparently are more cosmopolitan historians now. Maybe CE stands for Cosmopolitan Era.

Except----there is still this verbal gulf between indivisible worlds, a chasm signifying nothing except the silliness of which the human intellect is capable. On what significant grounds does history come galloping up to 1 BCE (rear up, perhaps,} and then leap across to 1 CE? At least the Christians had a reason which to them was a convincingly major event by which to order history. What could be the importance now which leads us to divide history into two severed pieces? Well, one thing is the new dating convention points to the tenacity of the human intellect in dividing everything into twos, a bisection which enables human mentation to reason (that is, hit the asphalt) at all. Still, for some, being able to count just to two, barely counts.

Shredding Occam's Razor

This principle of logic is a charming fantasy to which the ordinary binary intellects clings in a manner which precludes the possiblity of insight into reality. The quality of the clinging betrays the desperation which underlies this principle of ordinary logic. If Occam's Razor was recognised as training steps for real understanding it would be unobjectionable.

But the principle of Occam's Razor, dating from medieval times, specifies that the simplest explanation is the right one. What this boils down to, is, simply put, that the view of the ordinary binary intellect is the correct view. And this is not always the case: the ordinary intellect cannot even contemplate the vast (yes billions and billions) number of intersecting events which actually DO create an explanation for any one detail that occurs. And this does not even bring up how to consider the fact that what does not happen is just as important, the near misses, the totally close calls which you are never aware of---all this is actually effective and explanatory---but not manageable by the binary logic which defines the ordinary intellect. The ordinary intellect says something is either this, or that. In actually the correct view includes this, that, and that, and so on, on, on....

Just because the ordinary intellect cannot comprehend it, does not make reality any less real.
As Jehovah, mascarading as reality, once said, I am what I am.

Machinery

War is not the almost constant state of mankind that history presents to us, according to Jan Cox. It certainly can be be productive though to contemplate. Here you have men courageous enough to walk into bullets. What greater courage could there be? And yet there may be one, which however, is not the direct topic here now. Back to war, and soldiers following orders they may or may not realize are bad, ill thought out, serving someone's vanity, wasteful of life. (Yes, I got started on this watching Ken Burns's latest, on The War. ). Yet the soldiers follow orders for the most part, they do as their officers direct.

What occured to me was the reason Humanity grows under these circumstances. If you had soldiers on the battlefield running around without following directions, you would harm the larger organism. This failure to follow orders may be seen as a kind of illness in the body. Certainly the larger point that the society with such a malfunctioning army is less safe is obvious if you pause over it. One basic aspect of an army's usefulness is quick effective response to danger. This better protects the society of which it is a part. This is because the soldiers are cogs in a larger mechanism.

What is harder to see is that such a scenario also well describes the mental realm. We like to think we are free thinking beings who evaluate and act based on a well informed consideration of whatever issue is at hand. In fact though, the thoughts in our heads are soldiers some well commanded, some pathetically poorly commanded, but in neither case is the commanding officer anywhere nearby. Certainly not in your head. Did you invent your language? Your use of words, fundamental to the thinking process, is part of a larger process in which your darling self is but an illusion. The words have a purpose, they function as cogs in a larger unit, but the purpose and function are not what we assume. Certainly the transfer of information is the least of the functions of verbal speech, though not the least important if you consider just speech intending to describe the external world.

No conspiracy theory is being suggested here, simply the expansion to a mental view wherein we can acknowledge the possibility that things might not be what we assume.

Examples

James Joyce was one of the more notable rejecters of Catholicism. Right after he died a priest tried to persuade his widow to have a religious burial. Said Nora, "I couldn't do that to him." The relevance of this anecdote in the context of comment on the uncommentariable work of Jan Cox is that you can see how important his position on Catholicism was to James Joyce. Which points up the reality that so-called opposites are just one whole. This example, that of an atheist was actually one example Jan Cox used to illustrate the point that to reject something is to accept that very thing. Could one be a real atheist one would be quite calm about the church and not even think about the church at all. To oppose something is to give that which you oppose, vitality. This applies also within.

Hearing Jan

What will never be captured in words now, is the experience of listening to Jan Cox talk. I at least cannot begin to explain, among other things, the way he could say two different things, literally at the same time in a public (well at least the group) setting. Not two contradictory things, but two separate intellectual points.

He could also direct his comments in this group setting to one person, or --- sometimes he could give the impression he was talking directly to you, while HE was on stage and sharing his speech to a group of people.

And then there was his speech to individuals which was based on his knowledge of that person, his knowing exactly what at a certain moment had the best chance of helping that person look in a certain direction. In a sense this description applies to all his talks to a group of people he allowed to stay based on their purpose and potential. These were the people he did not kick out, deliberately scare away, or gently discourage. (This last I to myself called the velvet boot.) This speech to individuals, though, may be information that was not really relevant to others. A street level example of this last, is his telling me that I should take my car to the dealer to get it fixed. This advice was based on his knowledge of me, and was not at all transferable to others in general.

But more typically his speech to individuals was not about such mundane matters, but focused the same knowledge of the person he was speaking with a regard for their potential at that moment. Speech received in this mode could be something the individual remembered well, though it may actually be only relevant to that individual, at least only relevant to that individual regarding the surrounding details of what he said. Thus he might frame a point to someone who was given to hero worship differently than he would speak to someone who grasped that a certain respect was appropriate when relating to a real teacher, rather than the "horizontal guru" to use an exact quote from Jan Cox.

Such talents that a real man could possess are one way myths about psychic powers begin. I use the word myths to stress that when a man has a certain base of knowing, then the usual descriptions just do not apply. There was nothing psychic per se about some of his talents, it was just that most men do not think themselves, really think, at all, and so were impressed by what was really a minor aspect of the talent of a man who knew the source of his knowledge, and remembered it.

Poorly Packed Pickups Pinned Up Again

Picking poorly packed pickups back up- --because this is a graphic glimpse of a reality which is hard to point at. I mean the lurching quality of progress, any kind of progress, the half falling, stumbling, of Life itself. Look at the load on the truck bed, trussed haphazardly, piled peculiarly,and if you following the same pickup I am, as you study the load , you feel a little nervous. You do not want to meet a ladder unexpectedly. This picture, the poorly packed pickup, though is a reality at the axel of things. In the words of Jan Cox--there is a core of confusion to everything. And it could be that this reality ripples though everything. Certainly there is no reason to be surprised at spotted, jagged margins. The surprise would be a rhythmic, regular progress, because that would mean you certainly were not paying attention at the moment you so categorized it. Let me point out, as he did occasionally, we are not pointing to the regularity of physical functioning itself, like breathing, which should not be messed with.

Ugandan history

Today is apparently the anniversary of Idi Amin's assumption of power in Uganda in 1971. Televised news pictures of Amin and ambassadors to Uganda gave Jan Cox an interesting picture of -- the circuitry of man. He shared with us the discomfiture of some of the ambassadors as they tried to dance on the same stage as Amin, who would break into dance steps alot. I guess that is one reason why people say it is good to be king. In this pictures of men in suits on a stage, Amin would be the all powerful hormones, and the ambassadors and/or ministers -- neurons. This relationship is unchanging.

Fluffy Cats to Fat Brains

You have seen cranky cats--they can swell to a seemingly larger animal by bristling their fur. This is a similar effect to dogs finding something elevated to mark. The position on the fire hydrant tells the message RECIPIENT the important data--how big the dog is who shares their neighborhood. Think what critical tinformation that is--kind of like the reason you laugh harder at your boss's jokes.The point here is the advantage size offers in a world of constantly changing chemical flux.

Which makes me wonder if the motive for building the pyramids was similarly biological and motivated. What if the drive that ordered the monumental architecture was like a cat expanding in physical size. Of course, one motive does not rule out other explanations--such either/or logic is fundamental to ordinary mentation (I mean since there is explanation A for the motive of building the pyramids, that rules out explanation B being potent) and a hindrance to considering anything beyond the actual rearranging of the external world. The examples of such rearrangement in this paragraph are not the useful scientifically needed reordering that are obviously useful--like windmills. The very obscureness, of the reason for the size and shape of the pyramids stresses the necessity to look elsewhere for an explanation of their building. My suggestion is that monumental buildings are an attempt by men to fluff up themselves. And it should work, imagine an invading army encountering the pyramids for the first time. Not Napoleon, but the very first time, wouldn't the leader of the invading army think, "what have I gotten myself into?"
'
And what if---most of man's thinking, most of human words, words like 'Yale' (to use one of Jan Cox's favorite examples) are similarly the result of a need for mortal man to fluff up himself against a reality of the unknown. Perhaps words which do not refer to the external world have a purpose that is hormonal rather than denotative. Only people are unaware of their motives and the reality of the cognitive import of what they are saying.

A Century Defining Life

Such is how it is possible that future generations will describe Jan Cox's. I of course have no crystal ball but if you realize the regard in which Socrates is held today and that the life of Jan Cox was spent pursuing similar goals, with a success that is not measurable and yet could be called immeasurable, such descriptions do not seem out of line. One cannot compare mystics, but it is neat how the 20th century seems to contain both Gurdjieff in the first half, and Jan Cox in the second. The singular contribution of Jan Cox to philosophy and any planetary knowing was a relentless empiricism in which all gauzy religiosity was stripped away from an objective pursuit of "that which is." Gurdjieff had started on this path. Jan Cox called it the "WORK" ("Way of Real Knowledge") in his early decades of having students, and in a pointing to the haplessness of all verbosity, "This Kind of Stuff," later among many descriptions. New descriptions were critical: the idea was to burn all maps when the nourishment was gone.

He is not better known today because during his life time there was a self regulating aspect to life that prevented attention from being paid to his efforts. Part of this was the fear which most experienced when they perceived at a biological level the accuracy of his knowledge of those around him. When will it be safe for the academics to chat about his writings of Jan Cox? Who knows. But he knew his own worth and he wanted whatever nourishment could be gained from his writings to be accessible to others who might follow after his death, along a comparable path.

This desire does not contradict his repeated reminder that he could not "teach" anyone anything. Part of the mystery is that you can only really learn from your own efforts. I am tempted here to mention a lovely event when Pentland sent spies to check out Jan's activities.
But that is only tangentially relevant and we will get to that later.

Poorly Packed Pickups

Poorly packed pickups--you have seen them, you hate to follow to close, something might fall off and dent your car. I like the sound of the phrase, the alliteration. Jan Cox often used alliteration, and of course it is an old English poetical device. Poorly packed pickups---this picture of the mind, shows exactly the way thoughts pop up in your head: thoughts in this picture might be something that fell off the truckload. If life is a pickup, then the stuff in the truckbed could be an apparently overloaded, genetic bundle, perhaps an individual, and words something that fell onto the asphalt. Falling onto the asphalt in this picture would be a word popping into ordinary consciousness. Academics then would be roadside scavengers of a sort. By academics I mean of course the aspect of ordinary mentation which purports to know what's going on.

hx of religion riff

One thing the mechanical mind cannot deal with at all is that there are (to make an amusing joke with a sharp point) 25000 explanations for any event. And this is really obvious if you can step back at bit. And the best, the very best, the ordinary mind can respond with to this direct fact is, "well that cannot be the case since the mind cannot comprehend that complexity." This quote is from some philosophy of history text published sometime before 1970, the details are not at hand. But most times of course the mechanical mentation of the academics just avoids the issue and pretends that such mind defying complexity is not descriptive. I trust the absurdity of the sentiment in the quote above is apparent. As an illustration of the mechanical nature of human mentation the following is a sketch typical of academe in many respects, and intended merely to point to the complexity of reality versus the mechanicalness of the ordinary human mind. The point here is that there are uncountable explanations for anything ordinary mentation can label.

With that preface I am sketching a historical glance at the development of religion---as true as many such histories, but not of course, the WHOLE truth. (Whatever that melon may mean.)

Looking at the major religions chronologically, you could play around with certain generalizations, like that the polytheists viewed man as a small if significant part of a larger marginally reasonable world. Then Judaism introduced individual responsibility and Christianity added that every person was significant. (God as the father, and he cares for you in your individuality. His eye is on the sparrow, stuff, though that phrase may not be in the bible.). So people go from being (in what is arguably still a good description) cogs in a larger machine to each person having some significance. In fact you could argue that with the advent of monotheism man has lost a critical sense of his realistic place in the cosmos. (Funny that, many gods, one mankind, One god, many mankinds... oh well never mind.) Okay it seems like you could make a case for extreme variants of what some (though not me) would call modern Islam as taking this articulation of humanity to the extreme of making each person god. Get the picture here of the sweep of religions -- man is a small part of the cosmos, man is a really important part of the cosmos, to man has godlike power OVER the cosmos. Let me elaborate on this last point: the suicide bomber has surely moments of clarity before he blows himself up. A kind of alertness which we all strive for and which possibly happens to many people in their last moments, characterizes him. But for the bomber whose actions will be a bummer for anyone around him he controls a cosmos. The entire world for himself and some others==the entire world, in an experiential way, is under his control. Interestingly enough, there is only one thing he can DO with this control, and that is --- destroy. Still a case could be made for some chap in a bulky overcoat being a god.

Cannot resist this aside---Whatever the phrase modern Islam may mean, I trust the Prophet would agree with me that it is not his teachings. Modern Christianity is already dead, you could date this with the execution of Bonhoeffer. (Trust me I could,a dn may elsewhere make this more convincing, that's the way ordinary mentation works---you can literally prove anything.) It is quite possible that Modern Islam (to distinguish it from anything resembling that intended by its founder, and to suggest a parallel with all intellectual movements in this divergence between founder and faithful, between prophet and the pious) is in its last throes, a rather flamboyant dying song.
Soon this inconvenience will be finished with. What we are seeing is the last flares of a major religion. Kind of makes you miss polytheism.

Hey it's just a riff-- we are just playing with ordinary mentation.

What would the opposite of a black hole be?

The opposite of a black hole, what would that be, okay the opposite of a black hole as posited by the current scientific community, would be----
tiny, right? Not this galactic rustling cosmic structure that science envisages. Not even the small ones I believe Stephen Hawking has suggesting are all around. No the tiny black holes I am picturing are so tiny they are, ... mental.
Stepping lightly out of that room of marbles and cats dodging rocking chairs,
these tiny black holes would have event horizons, of course, but THESE event horizons would be

words, encircling, ever present just about to escape (be forgotten) OR get sucked in (verbalized), encroaching every minute, eternal --- run on sentences.

Just as no light escapes the posited black holes in the cosmos, no words can illuminate the actual quietness of the cyclonic center of the mental black holes which could support ordinary mentation.

The Vikings Are Coming!!

Action and thinking of action---those are the exact words of Jan Cox. It is not easy to glimpse the reality of the relation that points to---the interaction of hormones and neurons. Neurons are programmed to say, hey, I'm in charge. That does not mean your brain cells have a clue---it simply means their job is to pipe up and declare, yes I planned that, yes sir, that was my deliberate decision.

The example of Wesley Autrey is just an obvious example of why the conscious deliberation that is feigned AFTER THE FACT is a useful (to ordinary progress) aspect of man's mentation. What would happen in a world where the reality of, "heck, not sure why I did that, it just happened." The law courts for one, would just come to a screeching halt if there was any large scale glimpse of this reality. Politicians could not be blamed for economic problems, (and what would we do then???). Literature and philosophy are all based on the unstated assumption that man is a conscious agent. Without this assumption any idea of personal reform or a search for motives is silly.

Actually though, history is meaningless withOUT the assumption that the body moves and then, the caboose, the mind, chatters. Why DID those Vikings in the first millenium decide to terrorize Europe. Did they set out with a plan, or did, on a large scale, a physcial population, get the urge to DO SOMETHING. Gotta move, gotta dance, gotta strut my stuff. Oh no, that did not come from the brain. Of course once the long ships got in the water, then mind came up with something for a reason.

Could this also be the case for the European crusades? What about the attack on New York City and Washington in 2001. Could it be that the reason there was no competent intelligence for the security agencies to collate before the attack was that the attack did not start as a deliberate action.

...Okay, well, just think that this scenario I am sketching "could" be a possibilty.

Action and Thinking of Action

This story has by now been told often. How
on January 2, 2007, Wesley Autrey was waiting for a train at the 137th Street and Broadway station in Manhattan with his two very young daughters. Around 12:45 p.m., he noticed a man,
Cameron Hollopeter, having a seizure. Afterwards, the guy stumbled from the platform, falling onto the tracks. As Hollopeter lay on the tracks, Autrey saw the lights of an incoming
into a drainage ditchtrain. One of the women held Autrey's daughters back away from the edge of the platform and Autrey jumped down into the track area. After realizing he did not have time to get Hollopeter off the tracks before the oncming train, Wesley Autrey protected Hollopeter by pushing him between the tracks, and throwing himself over Hollopeter. The operator of the train saw them and tried to stop before reaching the two people, but two cars still passed over Autrey and Hollopeter. Autrey was not scratched.

Okay the point for our purposes is that there is no way this guy thought out what he was going to do. Autrey's story illustrates the fallacies of thinking that the brain controls our actions. In the words of Jan Cox, "the brain is the last to know." Picture what must have happened if you doubt this. There is a train, there is no way this guy could think, if I do this, then will my daughters see me die, is it worth my life for this poor fella. No, there was no time for any thought, the body just took over. If I cannot argue persuasively that this scenario is typical of human action, at least try and see how in this case, the brain did not decide to be a hero. This story still freaks me out, but it is not a story of rational activity, and that is why I include it here.

Emulate the Aristocrats

Ever notice how they wave at crowds--- Jan Cox once pointed this out--that wave that aristocrats and autocratic rulers give to the subjects. Any "Hello" magazine will show it, even the kids pick up this royal wave early. See them in their motorcades, raising their hand to recognise the people, and then slightly turning their hand.
Okay---this is the attitude we aim to have towards our----thoughts. They ain't going away (the thoughts, yes the aristocrats did go away, ignore that for now). In one of his final (and I say 'final' knowing that the idea of a boundary here, a frame, is very alien to what Jan was striving to convey to us.) Jan Cox repeated this---you never completely get rid of those thoughts, regardless of what most mystical texts advertise.
Anyway we can ape those aristocrats til we hit the genetic grand prize. Like, know yourself---all those books about and pictures of royalty---most folks do not have this family documentation, but the aristocrats do, only -- they forget it all----they can do this because the library has a lock on it. It is all there, just not cluttering up the moment.
And do not forget your goal. Yes, the aristocrats were overthrown on occasion. And what did they do? Again, a direct quote from Jan Cox. He said once that real aristocrats never gave up getting their kingdoms back. If removed from power they spent their time gathering troops on the border of their lost kingdom.
Also--notice the really rich (the kind who you will not see waving in a parade) they do not want you even knowing their name, an instance being the heirs that until recently controlled the Wall Street Journal. They have their reasons; so too does a different aristocracy, The really really rich (that'd be those who knew Jan Cox) do not speak of themselves, or give interviews. And they may not always even always know their OWN names.
....
And yeah, Jan did NOT put THIS into words but, hey, those royalty, they get to have as many animals as they want. That would however be the only advantage the rich really have.

Brotherhood and Motherhood

Hmm, distracted from my intended topic today (the difference between action and thinking of action as exemplied by the Wesley Autrey heroism) by thoughts growing out of yesterday's topic.
I need to rewrite yesterdays actually, easy to do in blogland, but right now let's notice, regarding the difference between men and women, the significance of the idea of sacrifice in human history.

Jan Cox never mentioned women in this regard and I often wondered, while he was alive, why he did not mention motherhood more, especially since to me motherhood seemed the perfect model for the idea of self sacrifice. After all mothers literally can lay down their lives for their children and this seemed to perhaps be the origin of human heroism. Now it is clearer why my thoughts here were off the mark.

The genetic basis for motherhood in people and other primates is so necessary for the survival of the species that flexibility is not useful at the level of primate mothering.

Whereas, with men, and that brotherhood feeling I mentioned yesterday, a group of men can have such intense interaction that they actually do form a unit, or perhaps remember the herd hunting instincts, and activate that layer of reality. Only this activation, critical also for the survival of the species, happened to a species with innate and undeveloped talents for mentation. Beside being a possible vision of the origin of thought, the closeness of this bond, (see yesterdays entry about men hunting, and the surrounding unknown milieu in which a sense of where your fellow hunter may actually be at that moment, in space, based on calculations that used what later was called spatial logic.) may also illuminate the idea of sacrifice and the development in history of this idea. (Jesus etc.)
After all, if a group is so tight as to become a singular unit, then loosing one member does not kill, the group. The idea of an afterlife too, might come from this group experience. This would probably have preceded the concept (and experience) of individuality. Perhaps.

And perhaps not---this whole analysis is suspiciously binary. Two hands--on one women are locked in a well known arena where success depended on repetitive tasks. On the other men are out in an environment of the unknown, hunting, and depending on help from other men.

But perhaps not. Something will fall out of this analysis.

The Bond Between Men

The mechanical group feeling that men can develop with each other is actually amazing and the strength of this tie is not visible to women often. The first of the year is not a bad time to reflect on how this might have come about--- hunters are more successful hunting in groups, more eyes, more weapons, coordinated tactics. This is how lions hunt. Today they (men not lions though both may be napping at one level together), will be grouping to observe predatory play. It is possible that the origin of thought, (certainly not mechanical the first time a particular thought got thunk,) was in the psychic conditions that enhanced the success of hunting. The closeness of the bond between men, the intensity of the hunt (success or die of course was the game), may have fostered what we would today call psychic events. Some thousand years ago this psychic awareness may have developed into -- words. To communicate a picture of an event, one far away in space, this could be called a psychic event, and may have developed into an ability to share information about events far away in time, also. So useful for hunting, a ball, like cats today, or the origin of ball play, dinner.

Now women were, are, only slowly connected to this. We did not need that intense interest in what our fellows were doing, ("Is so and so close enough to help me if I take on this beast, now?").

Why, because our intensest interest had to be raising, protecting, a child, a young primate, and it was lonely. Not much intellectual problem solving needed in grabbing the young one away from the fire or the centipede. Pretty much how to do this was in our genetic primate code and did NOT get enhanced with group problem solving. What was the need for spatial logic when the arena for action was as far as an infant could crawl, NOT an unknown wild jungle, where the predator could become the prey instantly. The female genetic package worked pretty well by itself. And this was what was needed for the good of the species then. Now??? Still crucial. Who is spreading these silly stories about replacing sex?? Anyway evolution is evolving.