Friday, June 11, 2010

Kawkawkaw

Words are like bird feet.  And if you picture thousands and thousands of bird feet, you get a glimpse of the boring and mechanical quality of ordinary thought.  Back up though,-- words are like bird feet. The point is that birds fly, that is their glorious advantage. But they have feet and feet allow them to land and peck around, get their nourishment, and to secure themselves in trees at night. Feet connect birds to, in the words of Jan Cox, "the bosom of the mother." (He was talking about plants that cling, to earth, maybe I have stretched things too far with that picture.) Anyway feet are critically an aspect of avian reality, but they are not the motor of the species. And words are like bird feet, but most people assume that man's cerebral dimension is typified by words.  Most people never glimpse that man's ability to perceive reality involve words at the most mundane level. Words are critically important, but not the limit, not the glorious dimension that is a human potential, albeit a potential that cannot be gained, mechanically.

If you don't know what concentration is,

If you don't know what concentration is, how are you going to evaluate any possible fluctuations and analyze any possible significance?
The media of late (well since 2007) has raised the question of the effect of surfing the web on people's ability to concentrate.  However, the lack of an effective definition of concentration, one that focuses on it as an aspect of the human mind, and a potential power of the human mind, means that any investigation suffers from a confusion of terminology. Also the authors of these queries are focusing their speculation on too small a target, and so are doomed to fail.  They are looking at an individual mind, when such does not objectively exist. The rational binary, mechanical mind in the human species, does not exist to investigate questions of inner reality, and functions to rearrange the external world, to quote Jan Cox, loosely, and majorly, this binary mind serves to link the millions of people on the planet into a organism whose significant changes occur on a scale beyond that of an individual species, and at a level characterized by the epiphenomenal nature of verbiage. This is difficult to study since the survival of the organism needs every individual part to consider it's own cellular survival as crucial to the health of the larger organism.  A standard aspect of biological life.  

Have I gotten off the subject of concentration?  People do not know what concentration is, so again, their efforts to analyze the significance of the web, will not yield satisfactory results.  The average person has no clue about the nature of concentration, or the powers it can attain.  

Now spelling, that is a topic which needs to be analyzed in terms of the cyber changes we are participants of. It is not that texting and instant messaging has altered orthography. The interesting and perhaps minor thing is spell checkers. I used to be a marvelous speller. So vain was I of this ability that people did not hesitate to point out the lack of connection between spelling and intelligence.  I never used a computer spell checking program in document creation. Now though, with the built in spell checkers in email programs, I am so used to using it to find typos, that I never question my spelling and just accept whatever group of letters that make that red underlining disappear.  My native abilities in this field are fadding.