The headline is all you need part 2

Montana lawmakers vote to

 allow salvage of roadkill

The picture of eating roadkill is a good illustration of how humans think. Any verbalized thought is already roadkill. The nutrition is vanishing. By the time you can phrase a thought the thought is in, and about--- the past. The vision of the new is for those who can attend to the edge of the future and the present. This is a discipline which must be rephrased  but is actually an ancient practise. Gurdjieff called it self-observation, Jan Cox called it neuralizing. You call it yucky. It is all there is. Hey, I didn't make the planet, so don't sqawk at me. 

All you need is the headline

Below is a direct copy of a headline in the IrishCentral site. I delinked it because my interest is NOT in the subject, but in the way the binary mind works. Binary means rational, in this context. Everything is either this or that, if you are limited to the rational mind. Jan Cox said once, that scientists can only count to two. He referred here to the binary operations of the mind. But here is just such a good example, that I am using it and assuming people can appreciate we are looking at 'how', not 'what' (she said binarilyly). Anyway how obvious can it be---- that you can be sick and criminal. And yet, the clear force of this speaker's words, are that by labeling something criminal, it is not an illness. Church people are some of the most articulate in the population, so this is a particularly good example of the operations of the ordinary mind. There are alternatives. Dublin Archbishop Diarmuid Martin states sexual abuse of children 'clearly a crime, not an illness

Archbishop Diarmuid Martin has responded to Cardinal Wilfrid Fox Napier of Durban's comments on sexual abuse. The Dublin Archbishop has stated that the abuse of a child is "very clearly a crime."

A history of self reflection

A history of self reflection would be a good subject for a book. Speaking of western Europe it is fair to wonder if there was any self-reflection before the Renaissance.Tribes on the verge of starvation have no use for self-reflection. There was no time to wonder. Nobody expects a Christianity but there it is. The stratified medieval world solved so many problems -- you were born into a niche, and mutually dependent on others in the same or different niches. No space to wonder. The church bracketed all and actually had pretty good answers for those rare troublemakers. But Humanity would keep growing. 

Notice I mentioned self-reflection, not self-knowledge. A history of the latter would be brief, and possibly culminating in the 16th century with Michel de Montaigne. Plus a few dark stars. 

The rest is pretty much a headlong rush, from treatises, to novels, to Nobel Prizes for physics. And self-reflection has shrunk to checking the likes on your facebook posts.  The progress is real and wonderful, but it does not include widespread intelligence. 

So far.