The Difference Between Physics and Philosophy

The Difference Between Physics and Philosophy could be phrased this way:

Philosophy (at it's purest, as in the radical empiricism of Jan Cox) is distinguishable from physics by the fact

philosophy has wheels.

The Significance of Jan Cox

Regarding the historical significance of Jan Cox:

A man finds out what is going on. It happens through out history. What the man has, perhaps, found out is the nature of words. This is not how it would have always been phrased by those who know. You might say, the man has found out what knowing is. A wrinkle here, first noticed, to my knowledge, by Gurdjieff, is that how this is phrased, and how the learning occurs, is an aspect of an historical process. Gurdjieff talked about the physical man, the emotional man, the intellectual man. Since I am a little vague on the exact terms here, let me stress my point is just this: men learned differently in different eras. Jan talked about this: what was sufficient for the physical man is no longer enough to "wake up." Now the physical element of waking up, is subsumed in Jan's phrase: lateral expansion. Necessary, but not sufficient, for awakening. I am speaking now, not from personal knowledge, but from a recollection of the words of one who knew. This puts my input here, in a slightly different category than book learning. There is no word for it, (the quality of information) and I am not going to invent one now.

There are many many spiritual teachers now who have not appreciated this simple point about waking up in different centers. And there are plenty of books written by those who have stumbled into experiences which lead them to make assumptions about their own spiritual states. It is a mental awakening which is necessary for modern man. What is the difference you ask, men still have bodies, they still have emotional centers, shouldn't their experiences count as awakening. Their experiences count as data (so to speak) for a topology of mankind, yes. But the wrinkle in the carpet here, is that these spokesman for spiritual learning, they do not know how they got where they are. And by labeling it falsely, (that is, by using words) they diminish considerably the odds of their own further progress. Jan Cox put this point more vividly. It is on a tape someplace. The task for modern man is more complicated than that of earlier seekers.

Jan Cox understood this. Alone, in the second half of the twentieth century, it was Jan Cox who clearly saw what was needed for a person to progress in the only meaningful way possible for our species.