Friday, October 15, 2010

Words and worlds

Again the world sees straight in your face evidence of the nature of human beings and refuses to draw the obvious conclusions. The evidence is not just the accounts of the miners in their underground tomb; most natural disasters present stories of heroism, of extraordinary courage and devotion. What we see is people feeling and acting on their unity. The obvious physical separation of  human bodies deflects from the reality than human minds are not separate. The mechanical, rational part of the human mind is not completely separate from the minds of other people.The potential for a separate, evolved human mind exists,(as Jan Cox outlined in his work and books)  but the reality of the contemporary human condition shows itself on a broad scale during disasters. Of course it is safe enough for the endurance of the mechanical growth of humanity to allow these glimpses. For what follows such events; words. Words: guaranteed to make you forget what you saw, what you experienced. The miners made an agreement when they were together, alone. They would share equally in any profits from the accounts of their stories. How wonderful is that, and how sure to ensure they forget the nightmare of unity. 

Sunday, October 10, 2010

The Brevity of Bede

Historians refer to the gloomy dark ages, and cite the scholar and monk, we now call the Venerable Bede, as an example.  Bede died in 735 AD, and among his memorable word pictures is that of a bird flying through a feast hall, the bird enters and exits the light, from the night, back into the night,  and so, is the point, man's life is comparably short. And Peter Quennell cites this as an example of the pessimism of that era. 
And with Quennell we see the extent that reality can be sidelined. To contemplate reality is joyous.  Infinities are infinities-the gulf of dark surrounding man is not diminished because we have electric lights and walls of books; the glut of knowledge we have at our disposal does not alter the proportions of light and the surrounding  unknown. Our basic situation is a feather's weight different from that Bede drew. The brevity that was the soul of Bede, is not historical, that span is the human.

Statute of Imitations

What google search engines can't find, is anything really original.  The words that compose a search string, must be phrases that others have used. By definition, that which someone else has already said.  The whole weight of the internet, the stricture, for instance, at wikipedia that eyewitness testimony is not a  valid citation, favors the hackneyed.  Yet it is not only philosophers like Jan Cox, putting fresh thought at the center of mystical technique, who stressed originality as a critical method.  Artists, writers, scientists, all depend on the energy and glitter of fresh thought. Jan Cox just made originality an accessible means of real effort at the personal level.  The internet is the past. You really cannot leverage any change, without bouncing off the past, at least. But know it for what it is --- and remember the currency of human thought is repetition. The web is yesterday, the web is for the masses. There is no statute of limitations on imitation,  the hackneyed, the trite, --- and this for good reasons ---, and yet for some, real breath, of molecules with a chemical signature unrecognized by ordinary textbooks, is strengthened by an insistence on the freshly .....