American Mysticism

Where the Map Is Folded

2012-01-05T11:14:00.003-05:00

If the mechanical mind of the human species is as artificial as some philosophers such as Jan Cox have suggested, (when he points to the binary logic of that aspect of mental functioning) then one should be able to look anywhere to see evidence of this. Look at the conversation around the term 'empathy' for example. You often hear it defined as "feeling another's pain." Such a definition does not bear examination: if you feel another's pain you either take an aspirin or head to the doctor. Whatever is going on with empathy, it is not feeling another's pain.

What is a better way to define the term? Here is what the dictionary says:

empathy: the intellectual identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another.

This merely moves the target to another black cup, though. What is intellectual, what is identification, what is vicarious, and so on through the sentence and through the dictionary.

You will not find an answer to how you can be another person and yet not be that person.

The term empathy points to something that needs to recombine the arbitrary divisions of the intellect in ways the ordinary mind cannot deal with. Within the maps of Jan Cox is a perfectly good answer, but I am not going to quote him. It is too easy, and that means too mechanical. My purpose is just to point to this phenomenon, and how understanding the word, if persistently pursued, is beyond the ordinary intellect. The ordinary mind is designed to divide, to break apart, the external world. (So that it can be rearranged and further human progress) Something else though, besides that wonderful tool, is needed with understanding empathy.

Happy New Thoughts

2011-12-30T10:45:00.000-05:00

There's an impressive video on youtube with just shots of physical feats of a gravity defying nature. It is worth looking at. Watching these skiers, bikers, skaters, and divers led me to consider the similarities between these feats of physical skill and daring and the kind of cerebral activity Jan Cox knew and tried to share during his lifetime, called among many things, neuralizing. Though it might seem a polar opposite, the goal of those in history like Jan Cox, is really the under the same tent as these dering-dos. Everything after all, is physical. And what Jan wanted his students to see was these gravity-less moments (for such is the start for either kind of physical feat) which involve accelerating through the roof. The differences between physically twirling as you fall into the water and maintaining a precious awareness of certain elements, are of course interesting: one feat is apparent and impressive to every onlooker. The other invisible to all, those who have no clue about cerebral possibilities. One must last seconds, the other has a potential for more.

Parent Contradictions

2011-12-21T11:15:00.001-05:00

The complexity of reality, and the limitations of verbal tools, can perhaps be glimpsed in two things Jan Cox said, on different occasions, to his students: One--that everything everywhere affects you and TWO -- that the news of the world does not affect you. Sounds contradictory huh. One way, perhaps one way of many, to parse this is--

The wider world of events, does not affect you because your concern moment by moment should be on the vigor of your cranial composure.

ALSO though, everything about you ripples in patterns affected by -- roadkill in Australia, -- and everything else going on.

What Other Hand

2011-12-20T18:28:00.000-05:00

We quote David Brooks, as he reports on the winners of "the Sidney Awards, named for the renowned philosopher Sidney Hook, go out to some of the best magazine essays of the year. "

Alan Lightman writes in “The Accidental Universe” in Harper’s that the existence of life is so incredibly improbable that there can be only two realistic explanations: Either there is a God who designed all this, or there exist many, many different universes, a vast majority of which are lifeless. Many physicists are gravitating to the latter theory. Our universe is just one of many. The universal laws of physics aren’t really universal. They are just the arbitrary arrangements that happen to prevail in our own little universe.

This is a wonderful example of binary thought---either you believe in a god who arranged the whole universe, or our universe is not improbable because it's a crap shoot. One or the other is true; that my friends is binary thought. The first is no explanation, but a cop-out, an intellectual crutch for we can't figure it out, but don't want to admit this. The second may be incoherent, -- when you run the numbers putting in an infinite, you often get a garbagey result, or so I have read.

Well, there may well be way more than two alternatives here -- but how about just a third, for now: Self Knowledge. Our ignorance is data we can empirically investigate. We can live on surmises if we are tender with the edges of our knowledge. It takes guts to be objective, and self-knowledge is the giraffe on the porch.

The Divine Right of Kings Had Nothing on the Imperialism of Words

2011-11-18T09:52:00.001-05:00

Science and religion have much more in common than either party realizes, and this blindness hobbles fresh thought. In fundamental aspects science and religion are the same, and I will be pursuing this point soon. But here is an example of what I mean, and how I intend to argue.

When scientists say --- you can't ask what happened before the big bang because time wasn't created until the big bang, that is just like the religious saying something is true because 'it says so in the bible.'

In both we have a failure to resolutely pursue answers under a banner of unexaminable assumptions. Because the emperor has clothes on, is the reason you cannot wonder what the king looks like naked. This basic aspect of human binary thinking, unites science and religion.

This situation reflects a reliance on linguistic sufficiency, my phrase for the assumption that words can cover reality. The smallest bit of empiricism points out how silly that idea is, and yet it is regnant not just in science, not just in formal religion, but in human life, as soon as people, "grow up." What is the smallest bit of empiricism I mention: you could take some seconds to look at a weed, and get that there are no words to adequately describe each segment, each curve, each hue. And that is just to start at the lowest level. Try it.

What Does Mechanical Mean

2011-11-15T11:05:00.001-05:00

What Does Mechanical Mean, in the context of esoteric philosophy? The phrase mechanical man' is used by both Gurdjieff and Jan Cox, 20th century exemplars of the possibilities of knowledge in a potent personal context.

The robotic, irresponsible connotations of the phrase are clear. The implications are interesting: if one is mechanical one is not responsible for one's actions, and no blame can accrue to such an agent. Nor can one speak coherently of mechanical man's self awareness. The glimpses of the lack of such can be a first rung of course. But the word of a mechanical man is worthless, and no blame occurs. He is not responsible for what he says. Only the wise and the lucky will take this to heart. Very often mechanical people, are nice, of course. We -- those who studied with Jan Cox -- were nice once. Not only can no blames be attributed to mechanical action, the phrase can be applied to everyone, most, some, a lot, of the time. Everyone except those few-the statistically insignificant Real Teachers.

And what if it is --- easy

2011-11-05T15:22:00.001-04:00

Do we think it is easy, this waking up bit, do we think it is easy because, everything, everything else, IS easy---the ease of the machinery of which ingests, which utilizes, which ultimately will spit out, 7 billion people, do we think since every single aspect of our lives, is in fact, easy, the studying for tests, the two jobs, the long bus rides, it is easy, or we would not be able to do it, the ease of being a part of a great machinery, what Jan Cox, called, the Magnus Machina, -- so we think, spiritual progress, oh yes, that's interesting, I will check into that, a worthy goal, and we just assume, it is easy. We will in fact, check into that, --- soon.

....

Sticky tricks

2011-11-04T11:37:00.001-04:00

There is a janitor in an apartment complex nearby. His office has no sign on the door. No doubt this is ideal, for his own goals. Similarly a person with a real purpose will try to keep signs off his own thoughts. Trickier, yeah.

Eyesight and Insight

2011-10-27T18:23:00.002-04:00

A lovely bit in the science news, which could be intriguing for those with a concern for understanding themselves in the radical sense directed by Jan Cox during his lifetime. I don't know for sure, but what got me interested was an article about the Copiale text, in the New York Times.

Here we read that a recently decrypted document from the 18th century turned out to be " a detailed description of a ritual from a secret society that apparently had a fascination with eye surgery and ophthalmology."

"Eye," see, jumped right out to one reader--what if the decryption in the text was meant to keep ideas from getting a mechanical agreement rather than the personal insight of one who has earned the knowledge, that is, seen something freshly for himself. That after all is what Jan meant by making fresh maps. You have to do this because even what you originally saw can become stale, and for those who hear about something, without seeing it for themselves, the illusion you understand something when you really do not, is tricky. HOW you see, is one aspect of self knowledge, and I wonder if the researchers involved in decypherment may not have taken a metaphor (symbol) for a literalness.

Also, HOW you see (that is how you know something) could be included in a study of the eyeball, under the "as above so below," maxim, wherein different levels of meaning have a parallel structure. Now these last are not the words of Jan Cox, and that maxim not one he relied on.
My curiosity was not discouraged when a different article mentioned this:

The rituals detailed in the document indicate the secret society had a fascination with eye surgery and ophthalmology, though it seems members of the secret society were not themselves eye doctors.

MY eyetalics in the above text. What if the text were crypted with the purpose of discouraging the causal 'oh I heard that before," -- or whatever the 18th century German equivalent sentiment, was? To point to the literal level of how the eyeball is constructed as least serves the pedagogical purpose of stressing that what you consider simple might actually have a complex level.

Then of course it may have been a secret society that had no idea what secret societies might actually mean by ' secret.' But perhaps that is a more modern phenomenon. The article mentioned "the rights of man," which requires more thought.

Perhaps even if the researchers finish decrypting the whole text, they will have missed the meaning.

The Big Sputter

2011-10-13T10:58:00.001-04:00

First a quote from a scientist we all admire, even, adore: Richard Feynman:

[The Big Bang] is a much more exciting story to many people than the tales which other people used to make up, when wondering about the universe we lived in on the back of a turtle or something like that. They were wonderful stories, but the truth is so much more remarkable. And, so, what's the wonder in physics to me is that it's revealed the truth is so remarkable.

Feynman's quote, coming from one of the finest minds of the 20th century, is a good chance to understand the limitations of so-called scientific thinking.
Those other people were the ancient Greeks, the ones who invented philosophy, and "the tales" that were made up were the attempts of empirical thinkers to understand the world we share. This last point was one made by Jan Cox, a leading 20th century thinker. This picture of a turtle in fact surpasses the big bang theory in it's explanatory power. Such is not typical of the Greek stories, but in fact, since Feynman picked this story, it lets me point to the characteristics of modern thinking.

The Greeks and those of their successors who were also committed to an empirical explanation of the world, put the turtle, that ground loving creature to whom birds were inconceivable, not at the base of the support of the world, but at the bottom of an explanatory structure to signal not just their knowledge but WHAT THEY DID NOT KNOW. Newton at the sea shore. And what was that picture of a globe on top of a turtle explaining: that what we see can be understood, can be investigated--that the physical world was to be puzzled over. That the appearance of the world needed an explanation. And the turtle in the picture, what is the turtle explaining,? That you need to keep asking questions, pushing beyond any answers, to arrive at even a tentative conclusion; the turtle represents what Jan Cox would phrase this way: use a comma, not a period, in your thoughts. The Greeks thought the turtle in a stack of realities would suffice to point to the unknown.

It is this realistic balance between the known and the unknown which has been lost by the physical scientists. Not by thinkers like Roger Penrose, -- but the main herd. They feel they are on the brink of a Theory of Everything, and they forget how many times their TOEs have been stubbed in the past. The modern mind cannot stomach the perspective that the truth is ---- partial. For what came before the Big Bang? What produced the Big Bang, ... okay ... What brought forth the multiverse[s]. The stout and brave empiricist does not pretend his answers are "true" in any imperial sense.

The difference between the future and the past

2011-10-12T17:26:00.001-04:00

Details. Without details you would not get swept into the imagination of the past. This came to mind when I, unscrewing a lid from a coca cola bottle, remembered my mother had liked lemon coke. The pang I felt recalling her was all imagination, she is gone, she doesn't haunt me. What is the point though of occupyng my mind with a fantasy. I am reminded of a Saki story that I will not go into now. The point is the past is composed of details, points that sketch a big picture, like stars in a constellation, and like the constellations, the pattern is all fantasy.

There are no details in the present. Just like there is no dimension to a mathematical point. Most, almost ALL, people fill up their present moment with details, but these details are fumes of the past, without the vibrant knock of the now. Breath in and a new present circles the drain of the past. As soon as you could point to a detail that would count against my outline, you are in the past, proving my thesis.

As Jan Cox said once, regarding Istanbul as a metaphor for mystical attainment, as soon as you look around at Istanbul, you are back in Paris.

Does this mean that a mystical experience is a current dimensionless present which does not swirl down the drain (immediately)?

Not exactly.

What IF

2011-09-11T10:05:00.001-04:00

What if

calls to never forget, mean we all already have

What if

the point of ceremonies is to reassure that we have learned no lessons

What if

The individual seeking some insight must design his own strategies to sabotage

the binary towers of internal trade

What if

the hope is that our habit can be leveraged with other habit

What if

that habit is what holds the planet together in an upward spiral uncapturable by the verbal intellect

What if

freedom must always be --- solitary and slender

Triads and triads and triads

2011-08-25T09:05:00.001-04:00

Invisible to ordinary mechanical thought, is the basic aspect of reality which could be called the triadic stability. Triadic stability is a phrase indicating that for anything to happen, to exist, there are three apparent forces. Jan Cox spent a measurable amount of time pointing towards this reality in his talks. One reason he emphasized this is that just to see this triad structure is to push the limits of mechanical thought. Mechanical thought is that which flows through the thinker, and does not originate with this entity though part of the arrangement is that the thinker must assume he IS the source of these ideas in his head.

An example of this triadic arrangement is the established artist. The triad includes the artist, the buyer of the artist's art, and... Back track a moment. First we have the pro and the con, the negative and positive, the good and the bad, that is --- the creator and the consumer. Both essential, both obvious once you investigate, but are these two forces, flows, (to use Jan's words) sufficient for existence, for anything to happen? At first you think, perhaps, of course. What more do you need basically, except an artist and someone to buy the art? No buyer, the artist dies of starvation, so both are critical, and yet, are these two flows, the creative and the destructive, C and D flows, creator and consumer, a sufficient telling of the story?

A third force is necessary for the art world to exist. The binary mind can only count to two. But pushing the boundaries you can glimpse a third in every situation. Why three, and not more. Well dear ones, 'three' itself is a fiction, there are many more, but----getting the mind to count above two is a necessary step and itself sufficient to challenge the absurd presumptions of the ordinary mind, and three is about all that can be verbally encompassed.

In the case of the artist what is the third flow, what critical element, necessary for the other two forces to interact, what third force, necessary for a stable, even if stable means just for a moment, is relevant when discussing art?

The erelevant force in this example, is labeled, in the modern world, a curator.

This commissioning element, is like the mechanical mind's assumption that it, the personal mind, is the source of its own thoughts, in another triad, essential to the stability of the event we call art.

Outline for a chapter

2011-08-23T12:58:00.000-04:00

Perhaps I should give those natural scientists more slack. For a while it has been apparent that some kinds of forgetting are crucial for progress, perhaps progress on a larger scale than the individual, where the struggle against forgetting is the mark of someone concerned with empirical cosmological and psychological knowledge (the last phrase is the words of Jan Cox). Obviously forgetting is crucially important to the operations of our world or else, it would not be the signal characteristic it is.

To sketch a wee corner of my interests here, Voltaire is supposed to be a philosopher, but his method of argument is to poke fun at the ideas of religious figures. Yesterday I pointed out that scientists need a devil, the fundamentalists, to keep their world steady. Today I found a quote which suggests I have over simplified things.

The quote is : 'What I write here is the account that I believe to be true. For the stories told by the Greeks are many, and in my opinion ridiculous.'

Sounds like Voltaire. But these are the words of Hecataeus, who wrote in the 5th century (born around 530 BC), and he is part of that movement described as the birth of human rationality, and centered on Miletus. In his words we see a forgetting which looks to be a unnoticed but fundamental mechanism of human progress. For those Greeks stories were a way to understand the world, with the tools at their disposal. (Jan made this point once about mythology.) But to Hecataeus, the myths are "ridiculous." This name calling is a kind of forgetting.

So perhaps what I took to be a means of intellectual domination, is actually, a part of that essential forgetting, which can be seen at various scales. If so, those scientists are just doing their job, and really one should have emphasized that more.

Why isn't the movie "Contact" named "Touch."

2011-08-22T16:12:00.002-04:00

A movie review, for your speculative pleasure, of the movie Contact (1997). It came out 14 years ago, and late is what you get when your reviewer doesn't read much fiction and has no interest in getting cable tv. I did find Contact the movie interesting, but I am not sure how much it was changed from Sagan's book (Contact, 1985). My assumption will be little and then if I read the book I might revise. Especially would I like to know if that last scene with religion and science snogging in the back seat of a cab was in the book. Regardless, one thing you see in Contact is how important religion is to science. The gap between the worlds of science and religion, in reality, as someone said of C. P. Snow's picture, a small ditch, is important to science's self understanding, and the movie is evidence of this aspect of modern science. Since any substance to talk of a conflict between science and religion, died a century ago, the question becomes why science insists on beating a dead hamster. My words do not characterize the great ones, of course, like Roger Penrose, but rather the culture of the natural sciences.

So we learn that people are in agony because of the emptiness of the universe. Empty because something that never existed, has gone. For some the truth, no matter what it turns out to be, is invigorating, but in Contact, the story is sketched that humanity aches for the loss of -- an illusion. We are assuming for the sake of this review, such is plausible.

Do scientists ever get out of the lab? They could at least try a little introspection. As Jan Cox said, you have a laboratory right here (and he would gesture to his skull). That might mitigate the intellectual vapidity of the conclusion of Contact. But our purpose now is just to sketch the issues as we see them in the movie Contact. Facing reality is tough, and only helped by the fact we have other people. That's the message of the movie. But the message is incoherent if examined. Why do these other people have to be on other planets. If other people is the answer, you do have masses of them in most malls. What does it matter if there are other people on other planets, if the existence of other people is the only anodyne for the loss of something which never existed. No one really doubts there are other people on this planet, so how does finding people on other planets ease one's pain?

We have, regardless of whether the book is more sensible than the movie, the unexamined suppostions of the world view of the average scientist, in this Hollywood production. I say unexamined because what is apparent in the movie is that science needs a devil. Now religion has been confused about the status of evil for millenia. That science needs a devil is a more interesting aspect of the modern world. And that devil, for science, is religious fundamentalism. And it has apparently never occurred to scientists that if they just ignored the representatives of that view, that maybe fundamentalism would fade away. But to ignore the fundamentalists would mean maybe, scientists seeing what they have in common with the fundamentalists. For these common factors, when compared to the direction of a Real Teacher, make science and religion alike in certain basic features. Science and religion you see, both, have to have this: religion and science both have to have a --story. Only a Real Teacher can imagine being just on the brink of a story, and being able to balance there. To be continued....

The article title is just an example

2011-08-15T11:51:00.001-04:00

Wearable Electronics Demonstrate Promise of Brain-Machine Interfaces

Released: 8/12/2011 1:10 PM EDT
Source: University of California, San Diego

Newswise — Research conducted by a new member of the bioengineering faculty at the University of California, San Diego has demonstrated that a thin flexible, skin-like device, mounted with tiny electronic components, is capable of acquiring electrical signals from the brain and skeletal muscles and potentially transmitting the information wirelessly to an external computer.

This quote has an unintended amusing aspect, and that aspect might reflect on unexamined assumptions of the natural sciences. I say this because you HAVE a brain machine interface whenever you pick up a hammer, hit something with a hammer, or invent a new kind of hammer. That is brain machine interfacing. Still we all understand the use in the article excerpt above, of the phrase "brain machine interface." We understand the writer means to convey the goal of a bodyless brain machine interface.

We understand possibly because we share this unexamined dream of the mind as separate from the body, that so-called mind body dualism, even though there is no evidence to support it. Yet the scientists dream.

Aren't you curious

2011-08-13T09:50:00.001-04:00

'Orange' not only has no rhymes, it has no synonyms....what gives....

Revolting revolts

2011-08-02T14:44:00.001-04:00

Ever read a history book? Ever felt reassured by those explanations of say, the Russian revolution---the privations and inadequate leadership in the war with Germany....da da. da da. pushed the people to the brink of revolt?

The best explanations are but beads on a string, moments lined up in an order, and then pronounced, "an explanation." Can we step back a minute?

In 1381 (now there is a historic sounding date) peasants revolted in England. We read that later: "Polish...peasants killed over 1000 noblemen and destroyed 474 manors in 1846." And this is just the iceberg of the tip. There are always oppressed classes, there is always stupid leadership. Always. So an explanation would minimally, have to say why, in the midst of oppressed classes, the revolt took place when it did.

When the president of the United States says, (words to this effect,) what is the matter with those bankers? don't they understand I am the only thing standing between them and the pitchforks?, we hear the words of a man who believes in intelligence, who believes in historical explanations. There may be alternative understandings for those with a peculiar intent.

Gurdjieff refers to the conditions leading to political revolt as needing a certain wave of mystical experiences in the population. Jan Cox referred to history being dreams. (I daresay he meant historical 'explanations'.)

My point is not that there is no understanding these phenomena. But that an interesting explanation would need to have a sense of the complexity of human reality, a complexity lacking in the intellectual classes.

Such a complexity cannot be pursued linearly. A progress that countenances real complexity is pursued at the level of both cosmology and psychology, to use the words of Jan Cox. That is, one studies one's inner world and the outer world both, in an ongoing fashion. The question of method is not something one would discuss in a public forum, however.

Garrison Keillors selection of poem for his Writer's Almanac on July 31, 2011

2011-07-31T13:38:00.001-04:00

You don't believe

by William Blake

You don't believe — I won't attempt to make ye.
You are asleep — I won't attempt to wake ye.
Sleep on, sleep on, while in your pleasant dreams
Of reason you may drink of life's clear streams
Reason and Newton, they are quite two things,
For so the swallow and the sparrow sings.
Reason says 'Miracle', Newton says 'Doubt'.
Aye, that's the way to make all Nature out:
Doubt, doubt, and don't believe without experiment.
That is the very thing that Jesus meant
When he said: 'Only believe." Believe and try,
Try, try, and never mind the reason why.

What a clever blog post you wrote

2011-07-30T11:32:00.001-04:00

Funny how giving a compliment to someone, can be merely an assertion of one's dominance over the compliment recipient. The giver of praise is assuming their own ability to evaluate the other person and generalize about a particular situation. The compliment giver gets the last word. Those who studied with Jan Cox, the 20th century philosopher, may recall the importance he gave to not being submissive. In one sense, it was the thrust of his writing.

Reality and Theater

2011-07-30T11:26:00.001-04:00

Once you study the question it is apparent that there are no cats in the canon of great plays. And this leads one to speculate that this situation relates to the fact cats are famously untrainable. They would therefore merely add a chaotic element to a theatrical situation. How much of a stretch is it to imagine that cats are reality, and the theater stage, human consciousness? If this is a useful metaphor, then one understands why mystics, such as Jan Cox, look elsewhere than man's verbal facility for any so-called secrets.

The small Print

2011-07-21T17:10:00.001-04:00

Management is not responsible for thoughts left in parked skulls

Giant questions

2011-07-17T12:01:00.001-04:00

It seems like most mythologies have a story about their origins that involve giants. The Greeks, the Norse, the Irish. That is, there are stories of a conflict between us and --- people that are much larger than oneself or one's neighbors. Giants who have their own goals which may not be those of our own. The fact the archaeological record does not contain evidence of these giants, emphasizes the puzzling aspect and uniformity of these stories. As Jan Cox, who revolutionized the practice of mysticism in the last century, often said, "what gives?"

Without assuming I have anything like an answer, here are some thoughts that came to mind on this topic. What if, the use of the term 'giants, ' is a way of confronting the fact that we, us ordinary humans, are, ourselves, best described, as 'puny.' A way, like looking at something in a reflection, of dealing with something that would be too crippling if directly confronted. And if my thoughts have any value, this line of reasoning suggests this use of mirrors to deal with dilemmas, is really basic in the human psyche.

One result of men thinking their survival depends on outwitting 'giants,' is that men are here grasping fundamentals of reality, whether their foes are giant, or they themselves, small and ineffective physically. To me it is obvious, men are, looking out at a starry sky, small in terms of what they can survey. It sometimes seems that this reality emphasizing perspective has been lost by many today, who see MEN as giants, that is people who are "on the verge of figuring out all of nature's secrets." One can wonder, surely, how realistic this shift is.

Approaching the question of the nature of freedom

2011-07-04T14:00:00.001-04:00

Even though it is independence day in the USA I am probably the only blogger talking about independence from the mechanical mind. But at least my example is rooted in the fight for freedom among abolitionists and black people in the next to last century, freedom from blatantt external oppression, a fight which generally must succeed prior to an inquiry into the real limiting factors to freedom.

John Brown, and his raid on Harper's Ferry in 1859 --- demonstrates a peculiar but universal quality of mechanical thought---the sense one has of the clarity of one's verbal conclusions.

John Brown saw so clearly how much suffering slavery caused, he saw it clearly---so he planned a whole revolt based on the assumption that the downtrodden would rise to his call for revolution. The slaves were miserable and Brown's whole plan was that the slave population of Virginia would rise up once they heard his verbal rallying cry. It was so clear in his mind. You gather your followers so far, you get control of the arms and ammunition in the neighborhood, and then the black people in Virginia will rush to your banner.

Some people see John Brown today as a martyr, some as insane, but my point here is that he is the exemplar of ordinary thought. His air tight conclusions were so vivid and so irrefutable, that he is remembered even now for a hopeless sally against a bastion of the slave owning south. The point is the faith he placed in his calculations.

What he is not is a fool. Today the natural scientists display the same reliance on ordinary binary thought when they divide those without science degrees into the "scientifically literate" and the creationists. To most scientists today to speak of varieties of religious experience, is to speak of the subjective and pointless.

They and John Brown are both good examples of that aspect of ordinary thought which can be partially characterized as a clarity of convictions.

Illusions, Optical lllusions, and Statistics

2011-06-30T11:40:00.000-04:00

Lovely bit found at the news aggregater, Newswise, and linked to here--
Neuroscientists Find Famous Optical Illusion Surprisingly Potent
Newswise — Scientists have come up with new insight into the brain processes that cause the following optical illusion...

There follows in the article a link to a youtube video which clearly demonstrates this effect---after a certain kind of motion your brain continues to see that motion in things which are NOT actually moving. Aristotle noticed this "optical illusion."

Now a scientist at the University of Rochester has pinpointed an area of the brain where this illusion originates. According to the article scientists are carrying on research next to determine if this illusion is beneficial.

What they neglected to look for was an area of the brain where the effect that '"any explanation whatsoever" makes a researcher feel he has found a sufficient explanation', originates.

An example, of the kind of aspect neuroscientists are mostly oblivious to, would be -- what if -- What if the so-called Motion Aftereffect illusion is so strong because it supports the mechanical illusion that having thoughts is the same thing as thinking. An illusion quite beneficial to the orderly and progressive development of civilization. One thought after another, like a line of elephants in parade, constantly moves through your mind, at least--that is the impression. Closer scrutiny reveals each thought/ I mean elephant, is actually just a statue, a statue on a conveyor belt. Itself not moving at all. And still everyone on the planet would say, yes my thoughts are alive, they engage. But if they are actually NOT in motion, then some greater Real Motion, might be really moving, beyond the apprehension of man's mechanical intelligence.

Meeh, why should I give them clues, though. Still some might wonder if, there are not people, who are, as we speak, investigating that conveyor belt.

Existential Angst and Anomie --- Resolved

2011-06-27T12:19:00.001-04:00

At least one case of Existential Angst and Anomie has been resolved.

My neighbor's new puppy came home from the park carrying a twig in its mouth.

BOIIINNNNGGGGGGGG

The retriever gene kicked in.

No more -- who am I? No more -- what's it all about? No more -- dark night of the soul.

Just sweet, confident action based on real knowledge.

Hacking verbal reality

2011-06-21T10:43:00.001-04:00

So this morning I open my email and read this headline--Lulzsecurity and Anonymous are joining forces. These are the names of two hacker groups who may or may not have the noble purpose of highlighting weak cyber security in the political areas on the planet known collectively as "the west."

The headline started me thinking about the topic of this post to American Mysticism. Because here you have labels and with these labels you have the feeling you understand -- more. And yet, how could you really understand what is going on with these groups -- because if you really understood you would be able to stop their incursions into corporate and government computer systems. Wouldn't you? Wouldn't understanding mean being able to code "better" than these folks? And yet, we have just by using labels a sense that we know what is going on here. And that is the nature of verbal reality, the words prevent you from grasping --- your own ignorance.

Without knowing what you don't know, what you know, what you think you know --- is dubious.

By the time I was on my second cup, this headline--

"Suspected LulzSec leader arrested." I wonder, does someone thinks aha, we do know something about these hacker groups, or else we would not have caught someone.

Because my choice of news items is as an example, of verbal reality, and how it obscures other reality, and how we do not notice, notice --- where the accent of reality resides.... The hacker story continues, because it is part of the magic show which must go on. The intellectual show continues, it has to, it has to fill up the verbal space so no one notices, how flimsy, how gauzy, the words are, how beside the point, are the words.

Flying on metal

2011-06-15T09:51:00.001-04:00

Maybe reality is an aluminum fence---the hormonal metal has metallic polish over it, a coating of ideas. And sometimes a blue bird flies, not over, but through, the fence.

Words are like fire

2011-06-14T13:04:00.001-04:00

Words are like fire. When they are out of control -- as they are all the time for modern man -- they can only be managed by bare areas with no fuel. These bare areas could be like the mystic's inner quiet, not totally word free -- not totally bare -- , but with the volume turned down, the ground cleared of most obstructing fuel.

Of course before then one must see there even is a problem, their problem; a challenge since there are "no problems" to use the phraseology of Jan Cox. Words are the basis of man's civilization and civilizational progress. Really the second sentence above is misleading to the extent that 'out of control' ignores the larger forces of containment, but this subject is even more difficult to address, and not the current topic.

Like fire, words cannot be allowed to rule, if an individual's goal is to understand the world and his world. The nature of a discipline which allows the containment of fire, of verbal reality, is rare in life, and non-existent if your only information is books or the internet. And this is related to the importance of pressure for real change. This pressure is not conveyable at a distance. For all practical purposes.

This quote from an advertisement on the web

2011-05-26T12:59:00.001-04:00

"Personal Urns (Keepsake Sized)

"Keepsake sized Personal Cremation Urns are the latest in custom personalized cremation urns. They are created from one or two photographs with exceptional attention to details. With advances in facial analysis and the advent of state of the art 3D imaging, these high tech urns can be made to look like anyone. The full sized personal urn can hold all the ashes of an adult. For holding just a portion of the ashes, we recommend the keepsake sized personal urns.

The personal urn does not come with hair. For hair we can digitally add hair if you wish, as you can see with our sample of president Obama. For people with longer hair we can add a wig from your specifications. This cremation urn comes on an elegant solid marble base. A Plaque and nameplate are also available.

Personal cremation urns can be designed to look like anyone. We just need good pictures. We prefer one picture from the front and one from the side. Complexions can be adjusted in the final stages and customers get a chance to proof the results."

A huck would lave it, I read this immediately after the previous post. I quote it at length to show the difference between a person with some degree of awareness, and a normal lively person (the urn imagined below) who is mostly mechanical. MY point, not that of the advertisement of course, but rather a chance to picture, the mechanical person, which I am thinking is nicely pictured by the idea of a copy of their head, full of their ashes. Hope this isn't too gross. Of course my real point is to specify two inner points, of many, on a gradient between dead, and not just alive, but mentally evolved beyond the crowd, what the book readers call an awakened person. (No such thing but that is another story.) To appreciate my point consider the difference between any living person, and a statue of them. The difference might present a chasm to those trying to evolve faster than the normal pace.

Are words are kind of mausoleum of reality

2011-05-26T12:43:00.007-04:00

Got this picture: words are kind of mausoleum of reality after reading this quote--

"Mausoleum, noun. The final and funniest folly of the rich. -Ambrose Bierce, author and editor (1842-1914) "

My extension would fit---words are a kind of death----no one speaks aloud and is awake at that moment, not Jan Cox, not Gurdjieff, to say nothing of the cloud of wannabees who had one forkful of cake and think they are a pastry chef.

Poets and philosophers

2011-05-25T23:32:00.001-04:00

Poets and philosophers have both contributed to the literature of mysticism. One difference between them, is that poets have no glimpse of what sustained patience can accomplish. The little it can, is the difference between being able to stand back, and enjoy the growth that stress can enable, and succumbing to the troughs of the machinery.

So God Is a Forger, huh?????

2011-05-21T12:49:00.000-04:00

Okay, I cannot resist

Here is a contemporary headline---like this week, of May 14, 2011

Is the Bible full of 'forgeries'?

From MSNBC:

A biblical scholar has raised a holy fuss by declaring that more than a third of the books of the New Testament were "forged" — that is, written by scribes other than the apostles to which they've been ascribed. By itself, the suggestion that nearly half of Paul's epistles....

For starters, God didn't write the Bible? Are we charging god with forgery? If he made the world, can't he do what he wants? If he inspired people, aren't they just being tacky by claiming they wrote something themselves anyway?

Alright, enough with the jokes. And so much for that childhood.

Forged huh? You know, what I grew up believing, that god wrote the bible, might be closer to reality. Can someone fake being awake? If the author of those books did a better job than the person they were supposed to be by, what is the harm here, harm in the sense of diminishing a spiritual tradition. At least in the medieval European period, art was not signed, people did not imagine that an individual could claim credit for what was an act of worship. This whole idea of individualism might be a lack of historical imagination. So could we be misunderstanding historical reality by even raising the question whether some books of the bible were forged?

Am I going to have to read this article, to find out if any of these questions are mentioned? Nah.

Of COURSE he was set up

2011-05-18T17:08:00.001-04:00

This talk, speculating about how a banker might have been "set up" is amusing really. The French say, well the Americans, they do not protect the rich like we do." What, we don't? No one will notice this incident with a banker is just a classic case of misdirection on life's part. Look over here, while the real changes are elsewhere. After how many episodes of taking your luck for granted, and then, the gears shift, in larger mechanical churnings beyond a specific pool of people, and the result, must be, what --- explained. The explanation is part of the misdirection. Like World War II, and the shock about the camps. It is not that the histories written to explain the war are wrong, it is that these explanations function to obscure the real significance, -- that any country could have played the role Germany did. Or what Jan Cox pointed out, the news about lottery winners, that news is that you will NOT be a lottery winner, that is the news. So what is the explanation this time? ---that the rich will have their comeuppance, that America is a country where the rich are not spoiled, that justice will prevail. Stories dear reader, explanations, to deflect your attention from what is really going on. Of course he was set up, we all are.

Dogs Don't Get Sarcasm

2011-05-17T13:17:00.001-04:00

Dogs Don't Get Sarcasm. This I noticed when, as the pooch was, as it seemed with a single huge tongue slurp, cleaning out several cat food bowls, I said: don't let me get in your way. No response at all. Rather like, I imagine, gods treat human speech. At least mechanical, that is typical, human speech. Okay, good point, all human speech.

Just Think It

2011-05-17T11:49:00.001-04:00

"Just do it," says Nike, and they really mean, just give us money. But I am finding the phrase useful in that it describes human behavior. It is just done, nothing is planned. But people are programmed not to see this. My use of the word programmed does not imply a "planner,"somewhere, though I am perhaps just avoiding a larger metaphysical topic which must be investigated by any student concerned to grasp the meaning of the words of the 20th century mystic, Jan Cox. People do not perceive the actual mechanical and helpless nature of their actions, and this situation is encouraged by the fact words, ideas, are, to most, and to all of those adults who have never experienced real effort in their lives, but ideas are something people in actuality treat as objects on a mantel. Words are -- for the mechanical reality in which all of us are often immersed, -- just objects on a mental mantel. The actual structural function of words is part of a path few even know about, and fewer walk towards or on. Actions and thoughts are equally the result of helpless mechanical outcomes. Thinking, real thought, is invisible to humanity at large, humanity loose, comparable to the way in which dark matter is extant now in the thoughts of astrophysicists. That is, most people never even dream of it. Though rumors abound.

Alternate Fairy Tale Version

2011-04-29T09:23:00.002-04:00

Are Weddings Obsolete? Weddings are, contrary to common misconceptions, for men. To be blunt,
women, generally speaking, know who the fathers of their children are.
Men, have our word for who the father is. Now is not the place to
explain why our word may not be enough to give men confidence about
the paternity of their offspring. But weddings function to maintain
faith in lineage. We have weddings for the same sentimental reasons
that tomcats kill kittens. A far more ancient motivation than any
individual could muster is at play here. And is it not lovely how life
whirls us around to the point that most people think weddings are for
the bride. Not really though. Now that we have DNA testing, perhaps we
won't need a ceremony, at which (crucially) guests attend, and vows
are repeated, vows about fidellity and so on. I guess the real
question is, is wedding cake obsolete? That idea, surely, is outrageous.

The Royal Wave

2011-04-29T08:40:00.001-04:00

Jan Cox drew our attention to that "royal wave." Stalin, Idi Amin, and
of course royalty all over, have a distinctive hand wave in their
relating to crowds. The wave is both acknowledging and distancing. I
am not quoting Jan here, I don't recall his commentary. But once you
start looking for the royal wave it is interesting and standard. There
is something bloodchilling about it's robotic self-satisfaction. The
royal wave views with satisfaction the herd's need for a leader.
And this morning at Britain's Buckingham Palace balcony, there was one
perfect royal wave---the youngest flower girl. Three years old, a
woman, and she had it perfectly. Surely it will show up in some video.
Kate doesn't quite have it yet, she wiggles her fingers too much.
William's wave also is a bit personal. That child's wave though---she
got it.

Is monarchy Life's experiment with ordinary objectivity

2011-04-28T11:38:00.002-04:00

Simon Schama is one of the leading historians in the world, and one I read with enthusiasm. He is a famous guy. He recently spoke in a televised interview (Charley Rose) about the shallowness of the British monarchy. Schama told a story about a luncheon he attended with "just a few other guests" and the husband of the Queen. Prince Philip at this luncheon looked at Schama and said, "You're a writer?" Schama did not need to elaborate on how such phrasing reflected the speaker's bored disdain and ultimate ignorance, masked as polite sociability.

This instance of British boorishness, which Prince Philip instantiates, is actually a shining example of how a more awakened man, to use the phrase Gurdjieff and Jan Cox, made familiar, would treat his own mechanical, that is, verbal, views.

Feathers of Tomorrow

2011-04-27T12:01:00.012-04:00

No doubt every person on the planet would watch the upcoming monarchy event, the wedding, if they understood one thing. Those hats---represent an inarticulate faith--a belief in the possibility of freedom, of romance, of success in human struggle. And such beliefs are surely true in some universe. The hats, which is what we shall see the most of on the telly, are the tendrils of a cosmos designed by human mentation. You see, weddings are for men. Women know how silly men's ideas are, about causation. But for one day, women pretend to go along. Those hats are the belief that a grain of sand can by itself, compose a beach. And I myself, toss MY hat in the air at least once every thirty years at the cuteness of such concepts.

The Ordinary Is In the Details

2011-04-26T13:18:00.001-04:00

Jan Cox, in one of his wonderful cartoons, drew a chicken. One of his students said, doesn't that chicken need feathers? or maybe the student said, more feathers? Jan said something to the effect--the details are where imagination is.

In Praise of Confetti, part conclusion

2011-04-25T19:43:00.002-04:00

My last post, In Praise of Confetti, was restated in an article in The Telegraph newspaper. Huh, I am supposed to be saying stuff that is new, not something you can read in a major newspaper. Oh well, live and live.

In Praise of Confetti

2011-04-22T11:31:00.001-04:00

The British monarchy is getting a lot of kicks lately: Simon Schama, the historian, Martin Amis the novelist, and others are taking this season of celebrating egg resources (yes I refer to the wedding of William and Kate here, simply at the functional level of heredity) as a time to highlight the bovine intelligence of royalty. Thereby they merely draw attention to the mechanical intellect's own lack of insight: were human intelligence so important there would be more of it in the cosmos. Because the whole, cannot be comprehended by a linear intellect which assumes the verbal mind can draw sufficient conclusions about the greater whole of which we are apart. Since this is not the function of the mechanical intellect, the success of those verbal points are not even in question. The academics assume those who disagree with their assessment are limited, rather than looking upon the possible limitations of their own mechanical summaries. An interesting lesson to be drawn is that the limitations of mechanical thought never even occur to such Oxford luminaries. Pondering the function of spectacle, and the triumph of the so-called mediocre, pondering objectively, is a possible path to greater insight.

This is not about reliquaries as physical equivalents of verbal reality

2011-04-19T15:49:00.001-04:00

A book review of Holy Bones, Holy Dust, (by Charles Freeman) which examines the medieval fascination with relics, grabbed my thoughts. Though I just read the review, it had some amazing facts, like that:

In 1239, King Louis IX of France bought the Crown of Thorns (as worn by Jesus at the Crucifixion) from Venice for 135,000 livres – more than half the king’s annual budget. Venice had got it, and some other relics of Christ’s Passion such as the Holy Lance and the Holy Sponge, from the ruler of Byzantium as surety for a loan of 13,134 gold pieces. And when Louis had acquired all of these relics, he constructed the Sainte Chapelle in Paris – the most sumptuous building of its kind in Europe – to hold them.

The review mentions that one function of the relics was they encouraged folk to go on pilgrimages to view these wonders for themselves. Which gave me a perspective of the difference in the greater machinery of life, then, compared to now. In the 13th century roads were bad, horses were only for rich people, and I have read (elsewhere) that most people lived their whole lives within the sound of their own village church bells.

Nowaday viruses and people encircle the whole globe in hours. And in this comparison we can see perhaps the greater machinery functioning: in 1300 the need was to make sure people literally moved MORE, an issue arugably of the circulatory system of humanity. The need was for people to literally move physically, more. Voila, pilgrimages, and the rusty machinery is moved slowly but surely around a unsuspected (by most) crankshaft. Well, they would have called the crankshaft god. Another story.

Anyway, today with our slippery ways, the need for the machinery, getting larger, is for the bolts in the machinery, (in places) to be tightened, to allow the greater movement of the whole machinery, but a stable movement, so we have a different perspective. Now the machinery needs tightening in some places, perhaps as a stand for this growth. And what do we have--the internet, and of course this serves many purposes, but one---is to keep those bolts snug, by sitting our seats longer in one place. The opposite of the 13th century. Well not the opposite, but that's also another story. Our chairs before the flickering screen of apparent life, are a way to slow certain aspects of the machinery. All interbalanced of course, this machinery, and my views are just to open up a perspective for thinking of it all.

One thought resultant from this speculation is that the differences between the 13th century and the 21st, are not those commonly assumed. Not religion versus science, but issues of circulation, stability, and the growth of Humanity.

Sycamore pods fill the air

2011-04-09T14:21:00.001-04:00

Sycamore pods fill the air.

The single wing is born by the wind and twirls so that it really looks like a winged insect. Whole vistas can be filled with these ambitious sprigs. The wind moves them in an upward direction and an unseen determination to make the most of this chance can be deduced. This spring phenomenon is proof of the sycamore's desire to fill the planet, and for a quiet moment each spring you can believe in that massive whole leafed effort to turn the world into sycamore.

Same with everything really, you just notice it in spring, this drive for abundance. Only by attempting to exceed a reasonable target, can any target be accomplished at all. So there are breeding cats, cardinals, bees

When Jan Cox said that cause and effect was an illusion, that everything was really just "mushed together," (sorry for the technical language) he might have been glancing at my point here.

Words too, they bounce up and down on the wind, determine to reach some far shore, to cover everything, to take over. Like leaves they give it their all, before descent and dust. Some wonder if words can't have unforeseen consequences, injurious angles. That is only a matter for concern if your perspective is not big enough.

All the historians and scientists need to start a trek to amazing reality

2011-04-04T14:59:00.001-04:00

Normally this blog, designed to enhance and extend the reputation of the 20th century mystic and philosoper Jan Cox, does not quote him in large chunks, feeling, as the author does, such is available elsewhere. And a central technique was not repeating anything you heard, -- anything you heard inside or externally. You had to see for yourself what he called the psychological (internal) and the cosmological (external.) Still----always--his words are superior, and, his silences unimitatable. And so we have this, written before he died. What if it is true?

The feeling that man must be "saved" from something coincided with the appearance
of his thinking...which coincided with the disappearance of something else.
And now -- periodically -- he has the sensation of a loss of such significance that
he indeed feels as though he may be in danger of premature destruction, from which
he needs be saved.

Note: There is available, for all purely "human problems, a direct, uncomplicated cure –
the abandonment of the refusal to see what's going on in the human mind.

Swaying in the wind

2011-03-29T16:52:00.001-04:00

It must be men-on-ladders day. High on a billboard they are adjusting ropes and ladders, while on a platform. And simultaneously around a few corners, a man on a two story ladder, one resting atop a truck, is changing light bulbs in shopping center street lamps. The view from these heights, not like the ones the car drivers glance into, is sure to be different than most people in traffic have. Further, with tree tops below you....

And, like those who patiently pursue an inner discipline, intended to gain the heights of objectivity, there is a genetic element. Not speaking for sure of the guys I saw today, but apparently the window washers of skyscrapers are often indians who may have a squirrel like disdain to considers the narrowness of high perches. Jan Cox said there was an inherited talent, tendency for those attracted to what he sometimes called, This Kind of Thing----this need to be free.

It wasn't snakes that got kicked out of the garden

2011-03-26T11:51:00.001-04:00

It was not snakes that got kicked out of the garden. Yet people act as
if hacking them up will allow the killer back into a certain garden.
Nobody talks about the declining snake population, not even
scientists, yet it is part of the shrinking population of reptiles.
And we desperately need snakes. Without snakes rodents increase in
population, and the two legged types will buy poison to get rid of
what snakes will get rid of without polluting everybody's gardens and
rivers. Leave that wood pile alone. Keep some parts of your yard
unmowed. If you are personally afraid of snakes, keep a walking stick
to poke ahead in your path. Snakes only want to avoid your presence. I
will not mention keeping snakes confined as pets. Nobody that would
read my blogs would do something so contemptible.

And P.S. --just like mysticism is the skeleton of literature, snakes
are the skeleton of man's real awareness.

P.P.S--of course if you live in Belize, ie, already in the garden,
different guidelines might apply.

What is ignorance

2011-03-24T14:41:00.001-04:00

What is ignorance, is a question most would not find interesting, yet
it may be at the heart of a spiritual anthropology.

Most would not find this question interesting because they assume they
know what ignorance is. Here is the typical view of personal
ignorance. All mature persons at some point assume that ignorance is a
measurable commodity.

The idea that ignorance is a measurable commodity, or perhaps,
unquestioned, working assumption that ignorance is a measurable
commodity, explains a lot. From the pathetic, 'I have learned from my
mistakes,' to the spit in the wind, 'our reactors meet all the safety
requirements, ' a picture of operant assumptions about man's ignorance
can be sketched. The boxcar beyond the horizon is big enough to
contain all that we do not know, both as individuals or as a society,
is a metaphor of this working view of ignorance. Or---. If knowledge
is a gumball machine, then ignorance is just one of the gumballs that
is still heaped in the glass dome---that is the view of human
knowledge and ignorance prevalent in society, from university
presidents, to the bottom of the middle class.

Step back though---how could it be that ignorance is something one can
factor in? Does that not assume that we know what we say we do not.
And--Real Ignorance is extant. Real ignorance surrounds,
interpenetrates, and pricks out the horizon, of ---- our thoughts. The
man intent on figuring out wtf is going on, is given in this essay a
big hint, on how to proceed.

If one could examine, and test, one's own ignorance and ideas of it,
one would be on the path to ---someplace interesting.

A stitch in space loses fine

2011-03-22T13:26:00.001-04:00

Scientists rue the crackpots---those with tinfoil clocks. The person who perseveres with the methods of self-observation (to use Gurdjieff's phrase) views the religious, those who pronounce about god, rather than questoining man, rather similarly. Unlike either though, he has no time to rule the obvious.

Selecting shells by the seashore

2011-03-17T13:33:00.001-04:00

Is not the phrase "self decorating species" a fair description of us homo hopefullysapiens? They found shells with holes drilled in them that are 75,000 years old ( Blombos.). Apparently as soon as man thought anything, he thought of changing his appearance --- by wearing jewelry. And this helps us understand that phrase in Genesis, that what those paradise dwelling folks did wrong, was get the knowledge of good and evil. Never could figure that out, why would learning something be a bad thing. But maybe it fits in. Maybe even then some of us knew that good and evil is not a classification of verities. That to use this kind of phrase means that one takes the words seriously, rather than the things words refer to. In other words the final reason for the expulsion is they KEPT discussing reality in binary terms, not that they got some insight. So men got the boot because they could not separate fiction from fiction. Women of course were a separate case---they are still doing the innocent silly things you do if you come from a rib. Do you think if I wear a necklace he won't notice how skinny my hips are? (In those days, that's what they worried about---skinny---hips.)

Snacking on philosophy

2011-03-15T13:10:00.001-04:00

Todays New York Times (March 15, 2011) has an article in the science section about the ambiguities surrounding vegetarian choices. Really I am not sure why this article was published since nothing new is added to the research end. The points made, that plants struggle to survive, that plants warn each other of danger, that plants can detect when their green neighbors are similar genetically to themselves, and so-- therefore, the fact that they are not so apparently similar to ourselves does NOT mean that they can be eaten with the clear conscience that they have no pain reactions, (since their behavior suggests very much that they are reluctant to be harvested.) For the writer of this article the question becomes: how can vegetarians justify eating vegetables on the grounds plants are dissimilar to animals, including ourselves.

No new research here, but---what we do have is a wonderful example of binary thought. That is: two options, and only two, are possible answers to a question, and one answer, is clearly not allowable----man does not know. The examination of ordinary mechanical thought which stresses the binary aspect of man's mentation is critical to the points made by the twentieth century philosopher, Jan Cox. Only someone with an ability to focus their attention on the personal edge of current currents, will comprehend his point that either or choices are merely functional for rearranging the external world. Reality is better described as both/and if one is to continue an objective examination of the what-is.

Seen in this light the question of the New York Times writer, what can we consistently eat if we want to avoid harm to fellow creatures who are sentient and have their own agenda, is a rhetorical flourish with no intellectual gain. The choice between intellectual consistency OR a full stomach, is a false dilemma like all binary choices which attempt a complexity beyond dam building (which after all beavers can do). To really perceive and live in the light of what is--a momentary glance, most of the time,-- is to know the wordless reality of what is appropriate for oneself at a certain moment. Socrates knew this, and some since.

What if life is just a screen saver?

2011-03-12T11:11:00.002-05:00

We look at an idle computer, and our screen saver kicked in. We can pick a screen saver we like, from a finite number of options. There is no need for screen savers with modern computers and still we have them. Isn't that like life---or is it ---life? For most people is a screen saver. For all, except---scientists and engineers, those who rearrange the external world. The latter may get something besides a screen saver---they may see wall paper when they focus on what is going on. Is that all?

One merely makes a conjecture, but what about those whom history remembers as saints, and I include here Jan Cox and Gurdjieff, regardless of their current esteem by historians? Their knowing may resemble strings of binary code, or even trinary code. Something that can be translated, but not for most the components of conscious thought. Just a guess, but---in the words of Jan Cox, "it would explain a lot." Though not electricity.

Occult Objectivity

2011-03-03T12:07:00.001-05:00

Jan Cox said once, that he only ever talked about one thing. And each night he spoke there were fresh maps, because it could be fatal to think to yourself, I heard that before, I know what he's talking about. Because an ordinary person could not. Because Jan was pointing beyond words. His aim was for us to be able to do this ourselves. The "how" of the method is not the current topic. My newest phrase for the method, is, occult objectivity. Occult because the student should never appear strange to the world--the audience should not have their eyes drawn to something that in fact was motivated by the energy behind attention seeking. Objectivity because the method enables seeing the interstices of science, the gaps in theory, the horizon of ignorance. Occult because one must be hidden to oneself. Objectivity because in the reality of the shared edge of inward and outward lies what is.

Tumbling tombs

2011-03-02T12:28:00.001-05:00

Consider the importance of tombs to archeology. The progress of this science is largely dependent on tombs to evaluate and discover preliterate cultures. The discovery of a tomb with treasures is always an opportunity to learn, and any tomb furnishings open the door to knowledge, and many times graves are not just a main source of knowledge, they are the only source.

In literate societies you might assume the task of reconstructing the past to be different. Such is not substantially the case however. When you realize that words themselves, the record of which defines the beginning of human history, are a form of tomb, the possibility for a knowledge ignored by scientists is extant. Reality that is captured in words is AT BEST, only the past, never the present. So in a sense you are still not able to access an eye-witness account. Not keeping this aspect of linguistic reality in mind, hinders any apprehension of a real present, much less, what might have been a past reality.

The recognition of the reality of tombs allows a kind of knowledge, if that recognition is persistently pursued. The fresh, unbreathed before, air is in realizing the difference in horizons, in distinctions, like that between, 'there is no life after death', a binary phrase, and, the words of Jan Cox, only superficially similar, "there is no evidence of life after death."

A Smelling Bee

2011-02-22T11:38:00.001-05:00

A Smelling Bee is the level on which the real W.O.R.K. operates. (W.O.R.K., being the acronym used by Jan Cox for Way of Real Knowledge)

Jeopardy quiz show was lots of fun

2011-02-17T15:58:00.001-05:00

The Jeopardy quiz show was lots of fun. I refer especially to the shows featuring IBM's natural language computer. It was fun to watch, not for the answers, but for the players, and by that I mean the host, and the IBM programmers interviewed. The conclusion to the game seems to be that the computer beat the people playing the game. But that is not what happened, and thereby lies entertainment on another level.

The answers Watson the computer, gave, were easy because all the answers in its databanks were "correct." The computer could only chose to answer the question based on picking an answer supplied in some gigaencyclopedic dump. Nothing required an intelligence that observed, that experimented, that could come up with something new. Neither can a human, of course, using their own binary verbal intelligence. But while humans can come up with answers regardless of their own pervasive ignorance of their intellectual wiring, a computer can only, ever, rearrange the pieces on the board, the chalk lines on the grass, and never really deal with the new, that breath of the future that prevents the whole house of cards from collapsing on itself. Jan Cox found the whole idea of artificial intelligence amusing, and I suspect my points above may have been part of the reason.

Is 'Watson" the heart of human intelligence?

2011-02-16T18:42:00.001-05:00

Is "Watson" the heart of human intelligence? This is the description given by an IBM engineer involved in developing this computer. The answer would depend on one's ability to appreciate the nature of human rationality---the human brain has a verbal level which depends on binary thought. A common assumption among academics is that this verbal level is the depth and dimensions of human intelligence. Actually those academics are incorrect, but let's pretend there is some legitimacy to this stance. Watson's success in answering natural language questions is a sham. All the answers have already been stored in the computer. There is no environmental interplay and learning which involves dealing with a chaotic interface to an external world. All the answers Watson discovers are right, because the computer only has RIGHT answers stored in it. A human binary brain, may seem limited compared to have have a million encyclopedias scanned into one's cranial cap, but even at the most limited view of the human brain, the view which actually ignores human experience and history, even this binary rattletrap, learns by interacting with a multivalent flow of energies which is only artificially divided into external and internal. Take the answer given on the Jeopardy show----Toronto. A mistake you say, but Toronto is the right answer to some question, just not the one that was asked. The human players on this revered game show, had to pick the right answer, not from a finite list of correct answers, but a infinite list of almost correct answers, mixed into the imbroglio. Reality at even the binary level is only superficially composed of alphabetical blocks. At any juncture there is an infinity of answers, which the players pick from, a job made easier by mechanical intelligence, but only superficially does this ease get confused with the crisp matrix of yes and no which the Watson engineers only can guess is the nature of reality.

But wait, the patient reader may protest, weren't you going to keep your response within the artificial and unreal limits of binary thought. Are you not pointing beyond the rational mind when you point out the chaotic edges of reality.

No. And I say no, we are still talking about binary thought, because the thinker can only ever stay with the limits of binary thought by imaginatively ignoring the reality that his cranial canvas is something unique to him. Since the binary thought extends from a broader organism called humanity, even the fiction that binary thought is the way a man thinks can only be maintained by allowing his individuality to remain unexamined. The human binary mind, can be compared to the natural language computer, ---both mechanical, both blissfully unaware of their limitations, but the human binary mind, still must, thrive, in a chaotic situation, or else the most mechanical mind, could not breathe. Like slats in a fence perhaps, all measured out and fixed side by side, and nailed against a cross beam at intervals, is that human mind at its most mechanical, but even then, and this is the point, it has to have slits between the slats, a view of a real chaos of the unexpected, to perform its mechanical function. Like a bee, adorablly mechanical, must still search for new flower patches.

And of course, we let up on Watson, just so we could make the argument seem fair. The human mind is not just a binary machine, though such is the main part of the verbal structure. And who will be able to see this point?

Is there a word that describes "it all?"

2011-02-13T13:27:00.003-05:00

Is there a word that describes "it all?" A word like cosmos, but a
word which hints at the mechanics of reality, not just the beauty. You
might suggest verbalizable, but this does not suggest that which is
not verbalizable. The word that occurred to me is "knock-off." Jan Cox
expressed a comparable idea when he pointed out that without real gold,
there would be no market for counterfeits. The thought that the world we talk about is a knock-off suggests a reflective quality of words. At the same time knock-off suggests there is a world which is unmediated by thought.

Paleolithic Sex

2011-02-06T12:59:00.000-05:00

An artistic carving on a reindeer antler has been evaluated by archeologists, and their report will soon be published in the March issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science, The picture accompanying this preview is crucial to appreciating the points made below. So look at it. The scholarly concensus seems to be that this carving is 10,900 years old (radio carbon dating) and that the subject is a woman with spread legs. The symbolic value would seem to be a fertility ritual. Okay, if you have looked at this picture, and read the article accompanying it, you will notice, perhaps, that there could be other interpretations. First off----that is a figure of a woman and man in one body, and a quick guess would be it represents a union of natural and/or spiritual forces. That is not what the article says, but that part seems obvious to me, just from the photograph of the carving.

The meaning of the universal zigzag pattern around the figure is illuminated, by the stick figure, if I am correct. You have the opposition of angles in the zigzag itself, perhaps connoting a recognition of the duality of forces controlling the world.Duality as in light/dark, male/female, hunger/satiation, etc. If (IF) this is an early evidence for man's rational intellect (binary thought, there are only ever two options) it would have been more powerful and creative at it's inception, and therefore more able to deal with complex spiritual realities (as opposed to today's mechanical intellect where binary connotes an inability to deal with novelty.) My thought that the figure represents of union, a transcendence of the dueling dualities, is strengthening by the positioning of the stick figure in relation to the zigzag. Notice the legs of the figure align with the zigzags opposite it, (to make a new pattern) and also there is a rhythmic flow with a different stretch of zigzag and the legs of the figure, so the effect is of a continuous zigzag pattern.

Although modern academe would not appreciate the next point, I am comfortable stating that for the early thinkers of our species (and up until modern times) there was no opposition between facets of living, such a sex versus art versus religion versus science. The moment was whole and holy for those who were going to live a longer life than their neighbors. A focus on reality meant increased survival odds, as opposed to the modern era, where, at least temporarily, the silly and the irrelevant often thrive.

There is a somewhat different version of this post at another blog of mine, at http://strangefactsandnewtrivia.blogspot.com/.It is just the last paragraph that is changed.

Robert Burns on Mirror Neurons

2011-01-25T16:00:00.001-05:00

[from a Burns poem apparently criticizing Alexander Pope's ideas (the proper study of mankind is man)]

....

What pity, in rearing so beauteous a system,
One trifling particular, truth, should have miss'd

him;
For, spite of his fine theoretic positions,
Mankind is a science defies definitions.

....
In the make of that wonderful creature, call'd Man,
No two virtues, whatever relation they claim,
Nor even two different shades of the same,
Though like as was ever twin brother to brother,
Possessing the one shall imply you've the other.
....

Burns here is critiquing Alexander Pope (author of "The Proper Study of Mankind is Man")
I am not sure of the title of the poem this is excerpted from, so here is the citation:
The works of Robert Burns: with Dr. Currie's memoir of the poet, and an essay on his genius and character, Volume 1, 1843
page 101. (free at books.google.com)

A Name for that Hue

2011-01-23T14:21:00.001-05:00

Since the 1850's historians have discussed whether color vision was a capapcity of the human brain which had only recently been developed. The evidence for the idea that our ancestors saw the world in fewer colors than those we see looking out on the world, is literary----the references to colors in texts. Apparently black and white and red may have been the only colors apparent to the historic Greeks, for instance.

So we may have misimagined the world of those we credit with inventing the modern world. Regardless of the soundness of such surmises, the spectrum of change intorduced by the discussion is provocative. About the same time these ideas were tossed out, Darwin's idea that species could evolve was also bruited about. Notice though that in the century plus since, no one has suggested that man's recent (since writing was invented) mental capacity, his ability to reason, has also altered along with this flux glimpsed by the scientists and historians. What if the ratiocinative powers of the human mind is itself mid evolution, what if there are colors of cerebral delights which man has yet to perceive.(experience in an ordinary and communal acceptable manner). What if the lonely philosopher who speaks of mysticism is merely an early evidence of intracranial evolution which will manifest in most people in coming centuries? What if the comments of a philosopher like Jan Cox, that ordinary man can only "count to two." (that is never see more than two choices regardless of the complexity facing that person) is evidence for my scenario. For one thing such a change might throw previous conclusions into doubt, make even a simple sentence subject to fracture on the racks of reality. To absorb the significance of the idea the rational brain itsef is subject to something new under the black hole, is to confront the chance that all your conclusions could be flawed, retgardless of the extent a populace has embraced them. It may even be possible that change could happen mid sentence, and

Making words translucent

2011-01-11T12:57:00.000-05:00

Normally a blog about Jan Cox would not quote from someone not him, and partly because fresh phrasing goes along with fresh thinking. (Though fresh thinking is so much an understatement as to be very misleading). But, today we are quoting a newsletter by Anu Garg, about words, and today's word was:

limn -- verb tr.:
1. To portray in words.
2. To draw or paint, especially in outline.

ETYMOLOGY:
Via French, from Latin luminare (to illuminate), from lumen (light). Ultimately from the Indo-European root leuk- (light), which is also the source of words such as lunar, lunatic, light, lightning, lucid, illuminate, illustrate, translucent, lux, lynx, and lucubrate. Earliest documented use: 1440.

And I quote the above because the word reminded me of Jan Cox: it was a word he used to describe what he was doing on stage, thousands of nights, to enable others to see in the direction he could. A task he shouldered knowing it was inherently contradictory---using words to point beyond words.

Jan said once, that if you don't know the origins of a word you cannot use it correctly. His example that night was 'cakewalk.' If you can wad up lightning, lynx, lunatic and translucent, in one instant, you might also get a glimpse of what he was pointing to.

Two Seas in a Pod part -- whatever

2011-01-10T13:35:00.001-05:00

The juxtaposition of the enterprises of science and modern religion (that part of religion which scientists think is the core of religious thinking---creationism, more about that curious confusion later perhaps) was, in a recent post, meant to highlight the similarity of science and creationism. Creationists cling to a narrative of cause and effect, while scientists build on an unacknowledged faith in free will. The similarity being in their common ignorance of their own realities. Science and ordinary religion are together, like those silhouettes that shift shape when you peer at them. Shape shifting as shadows do, using the oldest metaphor I am aware of, Plato's (Socrates') story of shadows on a cave wall--shadows cast by real objects, only already, 2500 years ago, man was confusing the shape and the substance. Or, in a better known picture by Jan Cox, the map of the picnic table, and the food thereon. Most ants ate the map. Every day now, there is more map to eat.

Facebookless

2011-01-10T13:18:00.001-05:00

Zuckerberg's goal has been described as to change the world, to make it more social. Who can appreciate that this is an unwitting part of the mechanical machinery of life. Who can glimpse that the founder of facebook is talking about MORE words (making our reality more verbal) , that words----obscure, words obscure that which the real thinker strives to see, and given the always brief, (brief and unearned) sight, strives to remember, the verb of wordlessness.

Two Seas in a Pod

2011-01-07T14:09:00.002-05:00

A real thinker, a figure such as Jan Cox in the 20th century, finds scientists and creationists alike, similar to the way the two halves of a walnut in a shell are the same. The religionists for all their talk about god creating things, they still rely on a cause and effect narrative. So-and-so created the earth on a particular day....If there is some guy with a Santa Claus beard, out beyond the universe, winking at particular people, then, what can it mean to treat narrative order as of significance?? Why not create animals before you create the planets? It is because a standard narrative of cause and effect undergirds their thinking, regardless of what they say about the powers of a deity.

About scientists, I should point out first, Jan Cox and his students treated their work as the closest you could come to real facts, in a physical and verbalizable world. His analysis of scientists themselves are included in his talk about intellectuals, and that is not my point now. A real thinker though will empirically and rigorously pursue an analysis of the world without preconceptions. The scientists for instance, cling to a religious structure of the world. If you doubt this, pray point out a molecule of free will. Yet most would faint before letting that illusion go, and all forget the significance of scientific data on the subject of man's free will, just as soon as the flashbulbs stop popping in their minds. The faith of scientists in free will is touching, and very instructive. A real thinker follows the evidence regardless of its cost.

About the similarity of scientists and creationists, in a way it's an easy shot, they are both unsuspecting believers in the power of words. And they put their faith in the possibility of periods. Their hissing at each other is is the mechanical whirring of machines, who have no idea what is really going on.

Some will find strength in their quest to figure out what is really going on, by recalling that such men as those I label now, 'real thinkers' did persevere.

Odds and odds

2011-01-01T13:11:00.001-05:00

Some topics I may expand on, or not, this new year:

Why are Kings and Queens known just by their first names. Oh I know everybody (in the western world anyway) did without surnames til sometime around 1200. But that is never the whole story. Jan Cox pointed to the fact, that cause and effect are not even separable. There are always lots of perfectly good explanations for anything. Perhaps we need to shave the ideas of those scientists who refuse to even envisage this latter point.

Did Jane Austen save the world from Naziism. My point here, was, besides being cute, that there does seem to be a qualitative difference between French and English literature. What about German literature, apart from the fact I know nothing about German literature? But the English and French if you compare DIckens and Balzac, as representative of a national identity----have this difference, Dickens wants to sway your heart. Balzac wants to stab you with his pen. His deadly ACCURATE delineations would seem to leave no place for community. Then of course we need to connect Austen and Dickens, learn something more about German literature since it is perhaps too cheap to get the French in by pointing out how quickly they capitulated. My point being of course that these figures are representative. Need some work here.

Poor Jean Toomer. I was just reading that Henry Louis Gates is sorry for him because he (Toomer) passed for white. Toomer was a student of Gurdjieffs. Putting yourself in new situations and "acting" is a way to learn about yourself. Gates is way off here.

Anti-intellectualism. Is it more than the sleeping common condition of humanity? It seems like a particularly modern form of ugliness. Which since the mind has assumed to certain distinct ascendency in modern times, might be a factor.

Words---should do an essay on how they have a persuasiveness that is not noticed. Just by being spoken, words have a compelling quality. They for a brief second have their own validity just by being spoken.

How to explain in abstract scientific terms that you will never explain consciousness in words, because consciousness IS words, and to glimpse consciousness you need to get above it.

Scale and scales

2010-12-21T18:38:00.000-05:00

There is a story from Oriental religion that is widely repeated in the western world: a teacher points at the moon and what his students see is just his fingernail. This story is assumed to be about the gap between words and what the words signify. But a different interpretation would not invalidate the standard meaning. Here is what occurred to me. Perhaps this teacher MEANT his students to see his fingernail AND the moon. Maybe his story was about the gap in size between the sliver of nail at the end of a finger and the size of the crescent in the sky. The gap between what man thinks he knows and what is to be known, or even, between what a man doesn't know, and what there is actually in terms of the unknown.

Winking at Complexity

2010-12-20T16:28:00.000-05:00

This link is to an interesting article by a theoretical biologist, at Scipps Oceanogrphy Institute. He talks about what large changes in various systems have in common. He is attempting to link the financial collapse, the climate change evidence, and other similar events. He talks about synchronization between parts of a system, about a slowness just before the collapse, and the kind of generalization. The guy is on the verge of seeing something real. I would recommend anyone to read this article. Let me just quote a couple of parts here.

...Examples of catastrophic and systemic changes have been gathering in a variety of fields, typically in specialized contexts with little cross-connection. Only recently have we begun to look for generic patterns in the web of linked causes and effects that puts disparate events into a common framework—a framework that operates on a sufficiently high level to include geologic climate shifts, epileptic seizures, market and fishery crashes, ....

The main themes of this framework are twofold: First, they are all complex systems of interconnected and interdependent parts. Second, they are nonlinear, non-equilibrium systems that can undergo rapid and drastic state changes.

... there is emerging agreement that ignoring the seemingly incomprehensible meshing of counterparty obligations and mutual interdependencies (an accountant’s nightmare, more recursive than Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s on first?”) prevented real pricing of risk premiums, which helped to propagate the current crisis.
A parallel situation exists in fisheries, where stocks are traditionally managed one species at a time. Alarm over collapsing fish stocks, however, is helping to create the current push for ecosystem-based ocean management. ... Though the geological record tells us that global temperatures can change very quickly, the models consistently underestimate that possibility. This is related to the next property, the nonlinear, non-equilibrium nature of systems.

Most engineered devices, consisting of mechanical springs, transistors, and the like, are built to be stable. That is, if stressed from rest, or equilibrium, they spring back. Many simple ecological models, physiological models, and even climate and economic models are built by assuming the same principle: a globally stable equilibrium. A related simplification is to see the world as consisting of separate parts that can be studied in a linear way, one piece at a time. These pieces can then be summed independently to make the whole. Researchers have developed a very large tool kit of analytical methods and statistics based on this linear idea, and it has proven invaluable for studying simple engineered devices. But even when many of the complex systems that interest us are not linear, we persist with these tools and models. It is a case of looking under the lamppost because the light is better even though we know the lost keys are in the shadows. Linear systems produce nice stationary statistics—constant risk metrics, for example. Because they assume that a process does not vary through time, one can subsample it to get an idea of what the larger universe of possibilities looks like. This characteristic of linear systems appeals to our normal heuristic thinking.

Nonlinear systems, however, are not so well behaved. They can appear stationary for a long while, then without anything changing, they exhibit jumps in variability—so-called “heteroscedasticity.” For example, if one looks at the range of economic variables over the past decade (daily market movements, GDP changes, etc.), one might guess that variability and the universe of possibilities are very modest. This was the modus operandi of normal risk management. As a consequence, the likelihood of some of the large moves we saw in 2008, which happened over so many consecutive days, should have been less than once in the age of the universe.

Our problem is that the scientific desire to simplify has taken over, something that Einstein warned against when he paraphrased Occam: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” Thinking of natural and economic systems as essentially stable and decomposable into parts is a good initial hypothesis, current observations and measurements do not support that hypothesis—hence our continual surprise. Just as we like the idea of constancy, we are stubborn to change. The 19th century American humorist Josh Billings, perhaps, put it best: “It ain’t what we don’t know that gives us trouble, it’s what we know that just ain’t so.”

So how do we proceed? There are a number of ways to approach this tactically, including new data-intensive techniques that model each system uniquely but look for common characteristics. However, a more strategic approach is to study these systems at their most generic level, to identify universal principles that are independent of the specific details that distinguish each system. This is the domain of complexity theory.

Among these principles is the idea that there might be universal early warning signs for critical transitions, diagnostic signals that appear near unstable tipping points of rapid change. The recent argument for early warning signs is based on the following: 1) that both simple and more realistic, complex nonlinear models show these behaviors, and 2) that there is a growing weight of empirical evidence for these common precursors in varied systems.

A key phenomenon known for decades is so-called “critical slowing” as a threshold approaches. That is, a system’s dynamic response to external perturbations becomes more sluggish near tipping points. ... Another related early signaling behavior is an increase in “spatial resonance”: Pulses occurring in neighboring parts of the web become synchronized. Nearby brain cells fire in unison minutes to hours prior to an epileptic seizure, for example, and global financial markets pulse together. ...

My point in the above excerpts was not to convey the cogency of his arguments, just give a sense of his approach, so click on the hyperlink above and read the whole article.

What you will not find in the article (though he verges on it at moments) is how gravely he UNDERESTIMATES the complexity of what he is trying to analyze. Notice some of those big words, he may be waving them around like a torch in a tribal dance. But for cutting edge science this thinker (George Sugihara, a theoretical biologist is the McQuown Chair in Natural Science at Scripps) has done an outstanding job.

Quoth the craven, evermore

2010-12-08T10:41:00.001-05:00

Numbers are an aspect of reality---what kind, even mathematicians disagree. To a non-math person it seems that they are the backbone, the rigidity of science. All the explanations of science largley neglect the math parts I notice. Anyway, if you want to be precise you go to the right of the decimal, and, maybe, just keep moving.

So is it not odd that these same numbers let us avoid----reality? What brought this to mind was the way numbers of years can fudge an old mystical "method." The method is not one Jan Cox used himself, , though he mentioned it. He merely said, it was not helpful to him. My recollection is of an obvious sense when he spole that it was a perfectly valid method. (By method I mean the doing of the mystical search, not the talking about that pursuit.) The tool then we are discussing is (odd how long it is taking me to come to the point here) is the remembering of your own mortality. That you, the subject, whatever else you know, you know, you will die.

Assuming that is clear, and even writing about it objectively requires some steeliness, numbers can let you avoid this fact. Yes, if you think, well who knows when I will die, and you think one hundred years, who knows I could live that long, some people do, it could happen,

you are escaping, turning from, averting your consciousness from the reality of ---reality.

Obviously I am not recommending this method. And I will recall to everyone, what Jan said, if you are not smiling you did not "get it." He did not find this method helpful. It is nice though to have an example of a method, in case we forget what methods even are. Because to speak of something actively being used by the speaker, is to diminish it's value for the speaker.

The meaning of freedom

2010-12-05T12:01:00.001-05:00

how interesting that in a world of governments, of people with agenda, of mechanical struggle, of electronic monitoring, the main---only--??--place of external freedom should be, the geographical place where it all began, --the place where men domesticated, fire, ---

caves

caves of mexico

caves of asia

caves I don't know about

Notice I said external freedom.

The nature, possibilities, limits, meaning of

freedom

is at the heart of the teaching of Jan Cox.

And if you take the above to have any political slant,

you are reading the wrong blog.

Jan actually did address the world of history---he saw the individual struggle as where one sought knowledge alternatively between the world outside and that within

and he had marvelous things to say on the subject of the external.

Rather than risk wasting some energy in what he said, let me just mention one thing,

that change is,

IS,

but the cycles are beyond that of the life span of the individual.

News that is new.

Is Antarctica at the top or at the bottom?

2010-12-01T14:19:00.001-05:00

When I recall the words of Jan Cox, and his description of what he chose to spend his life doing, "I call it the Work, (Way Of Real Knowledge) because that is what it is--Work, " words can seem like ice. Surface ice, the ice over a continent, a continent of mountains, all underneath a plane of unbidden white.

What there is

2010-11-21T19:13:00.000-05:00

That can be discussed---
The method.
.

Let there be....

2010-11-19T13:21:00.001-05:00

How do you annotate a flash of light?

Such is the chore facing, not this those concerned to convey the burden of the ideas of Jan Cox, but the issue facing anyone who investigates the nature of human reality.

The sun glinting in the trees, the carlights on the bedroom wall, the juncture of the light switch...

These phrases only make sense to someone who has experienced them. What can more words add to the experience itself, except the dubious assumption that our experiences are the same?

Thothing it up

2010-11-18T16:20:00.002-05:00

Thoth was, to be brief and inaccurate, the Egyptian god of mind, and writing. His representation in Egyptian art, though, is not dubious: this deity was presented either as a baboon, (sometimes just the head, on a human body) or an ibis. An Ibis for human thought strikes a precise note, does it not? Spindly legs, for perhaps that part of the human which is in the body, but not definitively. Sharp beak for pinpointing the PowerPoint points. How inspiring that those with a claim to inventing the first political state, should have so appropriately picked a bird to convey the cerebral aspect of human reality.

But what's with this baboon business? From the very vapors of the first marsh ascent, the people who looked around, and, able to catch their breath, finally, thought, we can do something with this, these people thought of "thought" in terms of a baboon. Does this not seem like a step backwards. Of course they did not have the perspective of modern evolution (considered by some superior to polytheism as an explanatory structure). But what about baboons, clarified for the Egyptians, the mental dimensions of their world. The baboon might seem a clunky, rough hewn, model of human doing. rather than a way to explain human thought. This animal is hardly the aerial model of something that might survive death.

But what if, these ancient analyzers were able to appreciate something obvious that is yet entirely obscured by the flow of modern living. The Buddhists have a story about a man pointing to the moon. The problem he had was that those he wanted to look up, peered at the man's finger. Is it possible that the Egyptians picked the baboon to remind people that internal words, monologues. calculations, were just pointers to something outside us, and that words, were only ever of partial, instrurmental, value. The baboon then, is like the word, pointing to a human being, in reality. The word, as in a baboon, compared to a man, must always be a pointer beyond itself to the physical world. The choice of baboon reflects perhaps, an awareness of the inadequacy, and imperial apsect of verbage, and is meant to remind the thinker, the speaker, where the accent of reality goes.

If this approach has any value, it means the Egyptians saw clearly an aspect of human reality which eludes the current era. Ehh. Who knows?

The physical sciences

2010-11-09T12:04:00.001-05:00

Real science is surrounded by popularizers of science, who think soldiering a noble calling. No need to name names. The real thinkers, are like body surfers, thrilled to keep any balance on the unknown infinity. The popularizers and, most of those they keep out, are surfing in back yard pools.

Royalty's right to rule

2010-11-03T12:52:00.001-04:00

What was the purpose of monarchy?

In the greater economy of life

which economy is obscured from all some of the time

and most, all of the time,

in that greater (greatest being too presumptuous a word) economy of all,

with an intricacy and depth that modern physics only rarely even glimpses at the physical level,

what purpose does inherited social position and political power play?

Jan Cox did not specifically mention this. As with most of the posts to this blog, meant to cast more attention on this 20th century spiritual teacher, the rationale is that he demonstrated and bid his students,

think fresh thoughts.

Here is my latest attempt to think creatively:

And so here is a partial answer to the question, what is the purpose of monarchy.

At one time monarchy was an experiment on life's part to

mechanically produce

objectivity.

Royalty, occasionally, perhaps more often that other methods (in the past), produced people

who had nothing to hide, no bias to obscure,

and were supremely confident of their right to lead.

Their swords cut clean.

The bravery of past kings is astonishing. Often it seems medieval kings barely passed on their genes when they died in some poorly thought out but incredibly brave military skirmish.

Now after some evolutionary twirls, this purpose is mainly irrelevant, the survival of mankind being less assured by physical leadership, than that of other human realms.

Objectivity was, it is perhaps unnecessary to say to those who have studied the writing of Jan Cox, cannot BE mechanically produced. One assumes this was always true, so life's experiments in this regard are --- instructive.

Certainly though the landscape, and meaning of kingship, external and internal, has shifted, over millennia.

Words We Need

2010-10-25T12:48:00.001-04:00

What is the opposite of the word ventriloquist. Here is a definition of ventriloquist:

"The art or practice of speaking without moving lips so that the voice seems to be coming from somewhere else."

So my thought is, what would be a word for the situation where speech comes from all around a person, but appears to originate with the person with their mouth open.

Hmm, some phrases come to mind, "human history," the rational mind," "the verbal mind", "the ordinary mind," but a word, which means the opposite of ventriloquism...."I" would be a one letter word which might do the job. Still an open case though....

Words and worlds

2010-10-15T13:15:00.001-04:00

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.

The Brevity of Bede

2010-10-10T22:10:00.000-04:00

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

2010-10-10T13:03:00.001-04:00

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 .....

Putting Descartes before the thought

2010-09-14T11:55:00.001-04:00

That Rene Descartes, what a slacker, and inventing a whole mathematical system, does not mitigate his failure of nerve at the really important point.

His famous skepticism,is still a useful tool, but his conclusion, is, like all conclusions, fatal to real progress. Recall that Descartes wondered, how can I determine reliable knowledge, and he decided to doubt everything he could. The story we know is that he found one undeniable thought; "I think, therefore I am."

This was the exact point at which Descartes could have leveraged his consciousness into an area where vision was possible, the glints we all live with, could have been sustained a bit longer, but with his motto, I think therefore I am, he put a skull and crossbones sign, right at the mental geographical point where in fact, any sign should read: "come on in, the water's glorious."

Because you have to keep pushing, and the glimpse that our verbal apparatus is but a mechanical contraption, not even designed to pursue knowledge, but rather just rearrange the external world, is a good step. But it was foreclosed to Descartes, who put himself, right in the way of a clear view. He trusted in words, when he was close to getting beyond them.

The mind, the ordinary mind, in the presentation Jan Cox used once, is a burglar, who, when the householder is roused to investigate a break-in, the burglar then puts his arm around the shoulders of the householder and says, "where, we'll find him, where could he be?"

A resolute skepticism is a useful tool, take a thought, any thought that crosses your attention, say a thought like:" I love you, Tom Kelly." There is a landscape beyond the words, you have to try to look through the sentence train.

I think therefore I am, how reliable is that? No "I", no "think", might have allowed a glimpse of "am,"

But not for Renny. He still gets a halo for the tools of skepticism though. And now that I put this together, what if, Descartes meant that sentence, dada, I am, as a joke. A joke he was sure the right people would get. After all, it is manifestly absurd, to someone advertising they will doubt everything. Really, I think I just got the philosopher's joke. It's on me.

Thoughts on viewing Newton's Royal Society portrait

2010-09-12T13:33:00.001-04:00

Words are just wigs, really. Man made approximations, enhancements, of reality, which do not bear close inspection,

do not bear close inspection unless, your intent is to discover reality, regardless of what you find,

reality,

regardless

of what you find

Can you spell parousia?

2010-09-03T12:48:00.003-04:00

The recent reports that a leading physicist does not believe in god is of interest. Anything you have to believe in is suspect. What the real inquirer needs is intellectual honesty, the energy to pursue investigations resolutely, and as an aspect of that intellectual honesty, a kind of intellectual humility. Such a description will not appeal to many, never has, doesn't need to. But it is the only stance from which one can assess certain aspects of the contemporary literature of science. This link is to an article describing what scientists call "The singularity,"

You may have to have a free account to view this so I think I will excerpt it at my weird facts blog. But basically it describes the idea that at some point in the future human intelligence will have reached its limit, and that then perhaps machines will be smart enough to take over.

This idea is not a strange as it seems, it is the old religious idea of the end of the world, and then paradise. (Called parousia by people who are hoping good spelling counts in god's final evaluation.)

And for a few people the interesting phenomenon is that scientists have no clue where and how this idea is occupying their crania. They are just repeating some of the more dubious fantasies of millenia of religious thinkers. How can you not smile at this? I suppose we could have been tipped off by the odd circumstance that something like this is even in the news, how many centuries after the debate really ended. This current gasping at old gossip may be a clue that something else is beneath these topical events.

Don't Eat the Silverware

2010-08-27T13:26:00.001-04:00

Don't Eat the Silverware, you put it in your mouth and remove the utensil, after you have removed the cake to swallow. Basic stuff, you would think...
Oh wait, this is earth, right. right....You never could distinguish the map and the terrain. Your earthling habit of assuming words, not what the words denote, are the relevant aspects, keep you confused and fighting so life's broader purposes can continue at the proper rhythm.
Just forget I said anything, I was the confused one, -- obviously--I forgot I was visiting earth.

Canny Valleys

2010-08-22T17:35:00.000-04:00

The concept of the "uncanny valley" has come to my attention. The phrase was invented by a Japanese robotics scientist, Masahiro Mori. The definition we find in wikipedia, that bastion of belief that anonymous contributors are reliable, and personal knowledge irrelevant, is :

This area of repulsive response aroused by a robot with appearance and motion between a "barely human" and "fully human" entity is called the uncanny valley.

The phenomenon is meant to explain the revulsion felt by people when contronted by a robot which is very human, but not fully human, looking. Well, you can read the article as well as I can. What interested me was that perhaps we should call this a "canny valley," or perhaps, "uncanny peak." Because this revulsion may derive from the reminder, a robot presents, a reminder that makes a person forcibly glance at, this: his own mechanical, robotic, MIND.

AND, on the third hand, here is binary thought, reduxduxdux

2010-08-20T14:06:00.000-04:00

A lovely example of binary, thought, is today's news. Binary thought-- everything is either this or that. The basic construction of ordinary mentation and the means for humanity to -- redecorate the planet. Applied to the interior world binary thought gives us group think. Utterly necessary for most people. Original thought is simply not viable for large numbers of people. The qualities that predict the ability to hear the value of, a message such as that of Jan Cox, or other teachers, Gurdjieff, are, not known to this writer. Even Jan could not always predict its presence in his listeners. So--our example at this link.
What we have is a narrative at the Skeptical Inquirer website of a person's journey from "new age' ideas to those of the skeptical inquirer. They say "skepticism" in the article. So you have a starting point and destination. New Age to skepticism. That is what they say, but in fact, what you have is the difference between a heroin addict and a methadone addict. Not much difference at all. Because it is based on binary thought, the reality, the vividness, of our world, the between the words, is lost. And lost, because of a total lapse of skeptical thinking. The website we link to is not skeptical at all. The real skeptics were skeptical about their OWN thoughts. None of that here. The 'skeptical inquirers' are not inquiring about anything. They have made up their minds, and stuck their labels according to their unscientific whims, all over their locker of the word world. So you can have new age blather, or dogmatic scientistic repetitive rote ordinary mentation.
Not interested in either, you might like to check out Jan's web site Jan Cox, who said, "if you tell me you're not falling for that, you're telling me you have already fallen for something else." The possibility of original thought is extant.

An example of non binary thought in the last sentence.

2010-08-20T11:37:00.000-04:00

The Fields medal is widely considered the mathematics equivalent of the Nobel prize and is awarded by the International Mathematical Union on the opening day of the International Congress of Mathematicians, which takes place every four years....

The last time the event was held, in 2006, it was somewhat overshadowed by winner Grigori Perelman's refusal to accept his prize for solving the Poincaré conjecture.
ICM 2010 kicked off today in Hyderabad, India, with the Indian president Prathibha Patil awarding the prizes...

Cédric Villani of the Henri Poincaré Institute, Paris, France [was one of the recipients of a Fields Medal]...

Villani's work is also related to physics, in particular the mathematical interpretation of the concept of entropy. He has applied this to solve long-standing problems, such as how fast the motions of gas particles converge to equilibrium....

When asked why mathematics has been so successful at finding applications in the real world, Villani – sporting a burgundy silk cravat and a palm-sized spider brooch – said: "It is a very pleasant mystery. Let's continue to enjoy it and explore."

The Grendel We Cling To, part 2

2010-08-07T14:51:00.001-04:00

The following was written at the same time as The Grendel We Cling To, post of July 2. Below we talk about what could be a modern equivalent of dragons. By this I mean what could function to move the story along. Move the story along means for the mind to keep going, to give the effect of motion when actually all the mind can do is a bunch of still shots, like the effect of motion in a movie. Dragons we talked before about because their abduction, battles with, defeating of, moved along stories of human grief, loss, triumph and made these things understandable, gave them significance. Below I suggest that a modern equivalent is the physical sciences, that in fact by talking about science, we are enabled to obscure, to forget, the real conceptual and physical gaps in our knowledge of the world. Kind of ironic, unless we remember what Jan Cox said, there is no such thing as irony in the world, that the term irony means you do not understand what is going on. There will be some repetition below...

Dragons, in human history, have served to move the story, the people, the world, along, they provide motion, in a world which is now, and has always, been, at the heart, incomprehensible. Dragons are the plot points, that incite and demand human activity, they slay the heroes, the give a purpose to the quest, the dragons draw in big black lines the irreducible dimensions of the human world.

I wonder is there not some modern substitute for monsters? The accent of reality is not on dragons in modern literature, even when they appear in stories.

Does the world make more sense now. Some would say yes. But does the world really make more sense than it did to forest dwellers two thousand years ago?

I merely raise a question which will make no sense to some, and they need read no further. Although I cannot resist pointing out that the blame we cast on corporate despoilers of pensions, of gulfs, may actually be just a way to avert our gaze from the reality of the limitations of the human intellect.

I wonder if there is not some way to deal with the rush of reality in our modern times, while still acknowledging somewhat a world which compared to the human brain conceptual apparatus, makes the latter puny. Possibly it is still true that the known world is so far surrounded by incomprehensibility that we still need some kind of monsters to let us operate in this sea of the unknown, without finding the truth fatal. The words about monsters serve as a kind of shield like Perseus used, to slay a monster which to see directly would be freezing. We still need monsters to move the action along is the theme of this essay. Our assumption is that the human intellect is part of a larger cosmos, but the human intellect is merely a part and not equipped at a mechanical level to deal realistically with questions that involve counting beyond two. And yet reality is far more complicated than the binary functioning human brain can grasp. This assumption I will not defend now, but merely point to the writings of Jan Cox, at the moment, for reasons of space, for readers who find this phraseology intriguing.

I suggest we live In a world where Zeno, where Hume, can poke holes in any scientific argument, (and wind up being ignored for their troubles, since no literate response is possible).

When you examine the external world, it ultimately is not coherent. Now I know most scientists out there are sputtering (if they read this far) well we just have not finished our TOE, (Theory of the Extraneous). You can list scientific mysteries til the ravens come back to Oakland. Modern scientists must deny the obvious or they would be unable to proceed in the piecemeal manner they do. The ocean of the unknown would swamp the brave intellects who do battle at the frontiers of the known, if they did not pretend their task was doable, if the scientists did not compartmentalize in effect, and ignore the surging sea of the unknown, a sea in which we bob and must, to struggle at all, bob unbrowbeaten.

Why the gap between the observed world and quantum physics, when don't the measurements of the universe's expansion make sense, and of course, the good physicist can say, well we are working on it, give us some time. Nice and irrefutable, and ---possibly---newsprint, wallpaper, over the gaping whole we avert our eyes from. What if, these stories about how the research has just not turned over the right stone, yet, what if these stories are just, the dragons of the twenty-first century, a means of moving the story along, because, you sense you cannot stop. What if modern science itself is the monster of the twentieth century.

You cannot stop, say, your mind, from clacking. Something within senses that such a halt could be destructive for something we love a lot, our sense of identity. (Or whatever, I'm just making this up, maybe.) The mind cannot live mechanically on the slippery coast of reality. There must be stories which help us ignore the terrifying aspects of our world. Aspects like, its immensity.

Is it not motion, change, time itself, that poses the biggest theoretical trilemma? Same reality as that faced, pondered, fingered, expounded upon, by those forest dwelling, forebears of most of us. They wrote Beowulf, and used the tools at their disposal to understand their world. The to and fro, cleaving and sundering, mincing and meditating, the everchanging and frozen expanse we find ourselves a part of, that moving, improbable, yet ceaseless, sea.

To take any kind of view, is to distort this world. Yet we must, go out, come in, search for a meaning beyond the hormonal verities; we must sometimes also, speak----and so those bards fixed on the hard part, the worthy quest, what makes it all move, and dragons is as good an answer, as the others I have heard---if you must have answers. For isn't the real, our daily experience of flow of change, that very flash of light, and dark, isn't that our reality, and if you have followed any of this, then see---- that real---- is what cannot be explained. If you go to war, or find a treasure, or win a Nobel, you are interacting in the world, but it is an utterly implausible world, and only the brave can even glimpse that ----fact.

Let me rephrase my proposal: the world, all the objects in it, if viewed and studied by the mind, do not really fit together. An example is David Hume's point that you cannot prove the validity of inductive logic, inductively. My example is the world as lived flows in a manner which the external sciences cannot explain.

The old stories tell of dragons and monsters: these creatures function as a kind of explanation of movement---people's lives are threatened by nighttime attacks by monsters, people's motives, the reason they go into the woods, is to revenge themselves on a monster, or find the treasure monster's might have. The flowing quality of the medieval world is explained (partially) by monsters.

In our century, a similarly clumsy attempt to explain the vivid life we actually experience is made by scientific explanations. Both attempt the same thing, and both fail. Both can teach us something.

Thoughts on an Independence Day Holiday

2010-07-05T11:06:00.001-04:00

The etymology of the word poem, a thing made. The only making people CAN do, to mirror the world, is to imitate the reality of the world, the creativity --- that is the making of life to which one created can aspire. To make the mechanical, and call that making life, is to miss the reality of the world , the reality of the world that could count as a making.

Which is related to the progress in making robots. Robots, to make them human, when really, what the progress with robots proves, is that people are robots, not that robots can be human.

All of which is related to the idea of independence...Independent of what? Planetary gases? Those of the dreams of the puerile, the dreams of superman. A first step towards independence must be a consideration of what the word could mean. That would be a step in the direction of freedom.

The Grendel We Cling To

2010-07-03T00:21:00.001-04:00

What is going on with those monsters in Anglo-Saxon poetry, the Grendels, the dragons? Beowulf is a good example.

Surely most people wonder this when exposed to the literature or music, of anonymous bards, and very nonomous musicians like Wagner? Don't we all find monsters enthralling, but---- why?

Here might be one reason: the dragons and monsters thrill us because their historic function was crucial for humanity and that function was----they represented the real.

Huh, you ask, dragons don't exist, and there is no way some Anglo Saxon story-teller ever saw a dinosaur. How could dragons function as the reality note in a story?

Monsters demonstrably mark the spot on maps where there is an unknown. The Indians (American) in the 17th century spoke of monsters on the river (Mississppi), monsters who had a huge roar and would not let travelers pass. This might be the way a plains people would describe a waterfall.

Our conceptions are always static, a word is not a word if it cannot be defined, but a definition is a confinement. There is no real motion if your reality was exactly as your words portray it. And yet it –the world --moves. To comprehend this movement is one function of monsters. At best all the human mind can do, at best---is take still snapshots of the rapid rush we are contained in.

Dragons move the story, the people, the world, along, they provide motion, in a world which is now, and has always, been, at the heart, incomprehensible. Dragons are the plot points, that incite and demand human activity, they slay the heroes, they give a purpose to the quest, the dragons draw in big black lines the irreducible dimensions of the human world.

You ask why the young and good are killed. At the level of words it makes no sense. Yet the flow of reality is experienced even if we cannot capture, convey, our world in words. This gap between words and reality, is where monsters come in. They provide the differential over which the water of reality can flow, in a closer approximation to the world we experience, than can words alone.

Yet now, over a thousand years after Beowulf, slew and was slain, we still love dragons, and even sing about their disappearance. Does that mean the epistemological issues raised in this essay are resolved. I wonder is there not some modern substitute for monsters? I wonder and intend to continue this essay soon...

Kawkawkaw

2010-06-11T16:09:00.001-04:00

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,

2010-06-11T16:06:00.001-04:00

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.

No atheists in a black hole

2010-06-05T14:33:00.001-04:00

The species of man apparently is designed to anticipate a deity. Although this does have an evolutionary advantage, saying this in no way explains the phenomenon, finding a point in the brain where such may be localized, in no way limits a cognitive significance to this fact about our species. Such are the views of reductionists and they cannot grasp how describing a closet from the inside does not effect an escape from the closet. But the need for an escape is interesting, and built into the genome. Now we are not going into the greater significance of this, merely pointing out what could be obvious from a rare perspective: that the simpler and hardest working of our species share with those widely considered at the high intelligence end of the spectrum -- they share an unexamined belief in a deity. For the fisherman on a pier in rural Mississippi, and the laptop hunching scientist both believe, without any evidence, in a power superior to their own, a stronger, faster, smarter --- power which -- still -- takes an interest in them. Whether their idea is of a forgiving humanoid deity, or a cranky, humanoid with extra eyeballs, extra-terrestrial, the basic format is identical. Only someone, with a perseverance in objective study of psychology and cosmology (to use the terms of Jan Cox), (who also pointed out that the idea of aliens is the idea of deity) might ask, and what does this tell us about people, about ourselves. Let those clinging to their binary mind, talk of things of which they know nothing.

Artificial mind

2010-06-01T12:34:00.001-04:00

The New York Times today has an article about why the recent scientific feat of planting articial DNA into a living cell. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/01/science/01angi.html?th=&emc=th&pagewanted=print

In it they quote Richard Feynman to the effect that if you don't build something, you don't understand it. Which caught my attention, (in a very attention getting article) because Jan Cox mentioned this is his off hand way. I say Jan's words were offhand because everything he said had another non verbalizable purpose, as he spoke to students he hoped to point in a certain direction. Feynman's use, and most certainly the quote, (the quote both by the article and by the DNA artificer) is different, it is a throw away line, what Gurdjieff called smart aleck intellectualizing. The first time Feynman thought that phrase: If you don't build it, you don't understand it, he had a glimpse. Then he said it again, he wrote it,and he did not have the real glimpse again and everybody reading it, thought yeah that's right, and totally missed the import of the phrase. Now it is said to sound cool, with it -- in the way scientists participate in that kind of verbal energy -- a pat on a paddle of a ping pong ball. Not fresh, not creative, not really seeing anything.

The Times article talks about how we cannot create cells, yet, and how without the already extant cell, the implanting of artificial DNA would not have succeeded. The DNA, with over a million steps, was copied from existing natural DNA. So talk about creating life, so the article says, is not accurate. The article points out that the scientist involved did not design the million plus bases, merely copied them. That scientist pointed out that he was not creating life, but his humility is phony, it is the way you are supposed to act, when you accept congratulations. He knows how to behave in public.

This I point out to sketch the scientific mind. With all the incredible progress made during the last five hundred years, the humility that characterizes the real giants of human progress, such as Isaac Newton, is uncommon even among that niche of the intelligentsia.

As an example, it is my guess that most scientists would say we are closer to understanding the major mysteries of the universe than we were during the European renaissance. It is possible however, that compared to the amount we do not understand, the amount of knowledge of the renaissance scientist, who thought the earth could not move because if it did move, people would fall off, and today's quark jugglers--the difference between what these folks, separated by centuries, really know, is so small as to be, statistically insignificant.

...

2010-05-09T12:51:00.001-04:00

Not all people who are happy, know.

All people who know, are happy

A scholarly look at the word scholar

2010-05-03T13:12:00.001-04:00

Jan Cox said once that you cannot use a word correctly if you do not know its etymology. The example he used was the word "cakewalk." Learning about the Indo-European root of words like scholar, and hectic, gave me a glance of the connection between---scholar and hectic. The root of both 'scholar' and 'hectic' is the same indo-european word : "segh", translated as "to hold."

What I am today calling the monkey mind, which may be a eastern phrase itself, is the verbalizing aspect of the mechanical mind, generally assumed by modern scholars to be the most important function of the mind of man. What this monkey mind does, is hold--hang on to-- words, --- if it did not "hold" words, the monkey mind would glimpse something beyond itself. If the monkey mind did not hold words, the words could become, transparent. So, for self preservation, and other reasons, this grasping of words is necessary and because of its necessity, is also hectic.

The scholar must verbalize, (hold words) and must, doing so, at the very best, ignore other aspects of mind. This multiplicity of functions is one reason the scholar's monkey mind, is also---a hectic mind. The scholars mind must stay full of words, while juggling various functions. Easy to see why scholars need words (as long as you don't immediately associate scholar with knowing something). The hectic comes too from the nature of words; words are pushy, loud, bumptious, with garish ties, --a fair description of words qua words. And this is all before you notice any connotative features. Hectic is a good word for ---words.

This exposition acts like the the functioning of the monkey mind is difficult---that would be a misleading effect. Our monkey mind is the default on the planet, the default for grown ups.

Slumming

2010-04-28T14:47:00.001-04:00

Philosophy can be a hobby, and that is the only excuse for the following. We are looking into how it is that men apply different standards to themselves than they do to gods. If you are allergic to a certain kind of verbal vapidity, read no further.

All this came back to me after reading a recent article discussing A. J. Ayer's so-called mystical experience.

This happened before certain chemical interactions and sites in the brain were the stuff of pocktail ponversation. (He died in 1988.) But now such accounts often get reductionistic comments along the lines of a site in the brain that needs god, or whatever, a certain chemical has the same effects. Such "explanations" are worthless in that the same could be said about any experience, so pointing this out has no cognitive value. Because something might be programmed in the brain has no direct bearing on its ontological status. (Told you I was slumming. Jan Cox found such philosphical chatter amusing at best, useless at most.)

But this is fun, so let's talk about what the 20th century fondly referred to as the "verification principle.")

This was the idea that if you could not verify something empirically your statement about whatever was nonsense. Ayer was a leading expositor of this idea.

(I haven't read enough to know how he explained metaphor.) But using this rationale the positivists threw out metaphysics. Okay with any card carrying mystic. And the threw out the past. Check. External world, need that. good. Hmm, maybe we are logical positivists after all. I. But wait---all this and you retain, not just the external world, (good) but you keep, that monkey in the skull, the chattering, oh let's call the rational mind, what, say, a "freddy." (No personal references here, freddy just has a certain simian similarity.)

How did this happen, how is it that you are not bothered that the vp (verification principle) itself cannot be "verified." You are applying a different standard to god, than to man, is one way to put it. Another way is to analyze the freddy for a certain regal, don't question my authority, aspect of the rational mind.

When you lop off the past, philosophy (metaphysics), theology, and the subjective interior world, and leave just the monkey swinging behind bars, you could be accused of throwing out the ocean with the mermaid.

(For instance---there is nothing subjective about man's internal world----there is no accounting for human communication without assuming some similarity between minds. Because words referring to the external world do not apply internally does not deny the consistency and studyability of the interior side of man.) It is like, having lopped theology off of reality, the chattering mind grabs some of its attributes for itself, like a coup de dieu.

What the VP leaves is an incomprehensible world, with just a monkey clinging to a crown. This leaves unexplained the critical structure of this mechanical mind, the filephilia of our kind of monkey, the motive for viewing reality as a table tennis table and asserting against all the evidence that this flat green table is all there is, as if it could hang suspended in (what?) and not evoke questions. And what about those monkey bars? They in themselves (the reality of being confined in a physical space.) should provoke curiosity. To say nothing of a topology of humanity which includes such goings on in its so-called centers of learning. (Ayer was Wykeham Professor of Logic at the University of Oxford.) Least I submit to an agneurism, let's close with the thought of Thomas of Aquinas, the above

is just straws in the wind. (Too bad he wasted most of his life.)

Placing Product Placement

2010-04-24T16:28:00.001-04:00

The ordinary mind casually and comfortably draws a distinction between art and advertising. For most the distinction is clear, no matter how clever and effective, and inspired, the advertising, -- the design of the advertisement may require a genius -- the fact of the purpose, which must hang out, typically, if the ad is to be effective at all, the fact that advertising is seeking to affect what the viewer does--- all this sights down a rift plane which most view as ultimate--that art and advertising are separate.

And that there is a distinction between art and advertising is not what I would put under examination. What I would point out is that first---what is the point of that aspect of advertising called product placement. Is it not to hide the fact of the advertising, to render the advertising more effective, more likely to result in your doing what the ad purchaser desires? Is it not possible that a whole movie be designed around one scene where the star ---- eats a particular brand of -- say, french fries. Perhaps you could conclude that the less prominent the purpose of the ad is, the more effective the advertisement is.

Of course the attention of the viewer must be retained. Hence the art that must go into product placement.

It is almost as if the advertisers are learning from reality: what is it that maintains attention, hides its purpose, and (statistically speaking) universally succeeds?

The answer is: the ordinary consciousness that characterizes all of us some of the time. The fact of the perspectival bias called 'me' is almost never noticed. But the attention of the observer is, for all practical purposes, constantly maintained. And due to the cleverness of the product placement, the advertising hook is not noticed. The advertising copy is that you are a unique and independent agent. Is it not possible that this belief, of one's autonomy, is just, a pitch? A pitch made most sucessful by product placement within -- human consciousness.

The pitch --is that there is no pitch.

And who is writing the copy, who is placing the ad, and why?

The first thing must be, on a path of understanding, to perceive your prison.This sentiment was best expressed by Jan Cox. If these larger questions cannot be answered, at least verbally, be aware of the part of the advertisement which says you must never admit you do not know something. Who knows whether these larger questions can be verbally answered. There are options you cannot even imagine from the viewpoint of ordinary consciousness.

Just, now, toss around this idea, that your consciousness may be a site for product placement, and what this could mean. And what would it be like if your consciousness could, actually, become -- art.

The Difference Between Physics and Philosophy

2010-04-17T11:45:00.002-04:00

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.