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.

Getting Somewhere

It is a common assumption that words are a source of knowledge. Common assumptions are rarely correct as a resolute study of Jan Cox would reveal. Not a study of a huge number of words he wrote (what else was he going to do?), but an attempt to glean his purpose of undermining words. Those truly concerned with what Jan Cox was pointing to, would be prying apart his words---trying to catch a glint of light between the letters. Like buses----to assume words convey knowledge is to assume the advertising on a bus IS the bus. Buses nowadays often have a vinyl wrap advertisement. Like the one I saw this morning advertising Mercedes Benz vehicles. Inside the bus are tired people. The tired people are the point of the bus, getting people holding multiple jobs about the city---moving energy around. But the neophyte assumes the bus IS a Mercedes Benz. The neophyte assumes the definition of a word in the dictinary is accurate and relevant. The words of Jan Cox are designed to point out to people that the bus is NOT what is advertised ON the bus. Words are to be studied, but not for their ostensible definitions. For some few folks, the words in a dictionary are just an inside joke.