Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Words, (What else)

One's knowledge of a subject is not revealed by how many words one has read about it.  It is not what you read, it is HOW you read that signifies real awareness.  The excitement a scientist feels on looking a new data, say from an orbiting telescope, is because he is looking beyond the data and experimentally plugging the numbers he sees into various scenarios, or whirling in the back of his mind, possible new scenarios that could account for some anomalies.  The scientist in the fields of the physical sciences, is exceptional in that he works often with what is genuinely new, and so his awareness has the potential for an excitement, the thrill of the fresh, that is absent from any rote learning.  His knowing is real as long as it is at the edge of knowing.  It is in a way this excitement which Jan Cox sought to show others how to achieve with his own writing about the world.  Of course the mystic's knowledge, has a greater potential power than that of the physical scientists, and this is hard for the scientists to grasp since they already have a yellow circuit (intellectual, in a common parlance) excitement, thus the scientists probably will never grasp what they are missing.  Partly this is because of the ignorance of the scientists about the quality typical of the thinking of most men.  It is the mystic alone who pursues knowledge on a variety of frontiers.

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