Zoo Nous

It is not that zoo keepers are cruel, I suspect rather that most of them come from the pet loving population that is such a substantial element of the US population. It is not that they are thoughtless or poorly trained and thus culpable for incidents like the tiger escaping from the SF zoo on December 25. No I was thinking about this, and how someone like Jan Cox felt so deeply the plight of the confined animal. His sense of raw connection to living creatures was something he did not reveal in his public emotional posture, just his actions, and I may at some point discuss more about his concern for animals and how he demonstrated it. But the gulf between the compassion of Jan Cox for anything trapped and ordinary pet lovers makes that gulf comprising the moat around the tigers enclosure mean and mere.

Which is by way of asking how the ordinary can continue to like PBS nature documentaries and train for zoo jobs and have no inkling of what an animal in a zoo goes through. Apparently hardly any whisper of compassion based on the communal nature of all creatures ruffles their actions.

How is this, and what I noticed was the similarity between zoos and ordinary thought. Control is maintained through a strict separation. A separation necessary for the existence of the zoo and safety of visitors, of course. In people this is called binary thought, things cannot get mixed up regardless of the violence this does to reality. This is for the safety of the sanity of the ordinary.

Here in Pinpoint Georgia we are near a big time zoo which has a history of dreadful cruelty. And ongoing and hardly disguised at all is the current cruelty to the huge mammals called whales. They keep dying at the Atlanta Aquarium and it is this excuse and that, and just get another one; the problem that these creatures must have a cage the size of the ocean to live happily cannot rise to the surface of anyone's awareness, at least not anyone on the tourist boards awareness. Reality surpasses conception as it must.

String of galaxies

Someone of whom I have always been very fond recently reminded us in another forum that Jan Cox had us study the maxim "There is nothing out there." Perhaps this person's riff on this was where I got the idea but I have myself always thought that if "there is nothing out there," there CANNOT BE anything in here. And as to where that might leave so-called reality, the picture I got from popularizations of string theory is of lines of galaxies, a so thin wall, between unimaginable voids. A line between what is not out there and what is not in here may be all there is.

Snake Skin and Snake Oil

To what extent could the use of words parallel the way animals roll in the smell of other species? I was going to say the dung,or carcasses, not smell, but the example that most recently came to my attention was squirrels which have been observed to eat shed snake skin and then lick their own fur. The zoologists surmise that this is a protective device, so I guess, that when the squirrels are asleep predators will think they are snakes and leave them alone.

Here is the Reuters article about the UC Davis research:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - It's scary being a little, tasty squirrel, but some species of the rodents have come up with an intimidating camouflage -- snake smells.
California ground squirrels and rock squirrels chew up rattlesnake skin and smear it on their fur to mask their scent, a team at the University of California Davis reported.
"They're turning the tables on the snake," Donald Owings, a professor of psychology who helped lead the research, said in a statement.
Barbara Clucas, a graduate student in animal behavior, watched ground squirrels and rock squirrels chewing up pieces of skin shed by snakes and then licking their fur.
The scent probably helps to mask the squirrel's own scent, especially when the animals are asleep in their burrows, they wrote in the journal Animal Behavior.
(Reporting by Maggie Fox: Editing by Julie Steenhuysen and David Wiessler)

If so, then men using words are warding off some realms (we surmise) they are aware are dangerous but at some level are also aware they are ignorant of. Perhaps words are meant to ward off the very real hazards of ignorance. Of course words have a legitimate function--
to, in the analysis of Jan Cox, break up the external world into rearrangeable pieces (hence what is called human progress). But regarding the unseen worlds---words are simply not designed to provide information or useful analysis. And yet we have philosophy, religion, psychology, et cet era, for thousands of years and no sense that this illusion is wearing out.... How to account for the persistence of the human belief that man's mental machinery can deal with whatever is beyond the obviously physical??? Aside from some cosmic late night commercial for a dice everything machine, how account for the human susceptibility to using his mental apparatus to chop up non physical reality. So my suggestion is this: perhaps part of the reason is that words have a reflected allure, a scent from another realm, that is comforting in view of a sensed void, an intimation of a different reality. Perhaps the illusion of control and insight has a protective function for the species. Hey, it is just a thought.

Point Number Two

The last post mentioned two points in reference to the subject of drugs that Laura Huxley's death brought to mind. Ahem---here is the second point. The drive for freedom underlies the push for the power that so-called 'enlightenment' is. This I base on the one person I know who was successful in a rare and yet much discussed aspect of human existence---the mystical awareness. This power comes certainly though not entirely from understanding and remembering the nature of the obstacles surrounding the path, and the nature of what CAN be accomplished. And remembering, and persevering in the remembrance.

Here's the thing about drugs. Yeah, they work, but they are external. You are dependent on some physcial object so your analysis of what freedom even is is vitiated. They work but the joy of the quest, what Jan Cox once called, "The Way of Real Knowledge", is in achieving the greatest amount of independence possible on this planet. Drugs are the opposite, of this reality. You need something in the external world or you do not have the experience. Meaning you cannot treat the experience as subject to scientific analysis. When I say that drugs work, you have a flat experience compared to what may be possible and you have a total lack of control which is the opposite (so far as any opposite may be said to exist) of Real Awareness.

Actually the W.O.R.K awareness is easier than taking drugs. You don't have to worry about how much something costs, you don't have to worry about a steady supply, you don't have to worry about a bad trip. Remembering to remember is the only chance of not being a vegetable in a mechanized agribusiness transfer of energy. Of course this is not to suggest that success in the Way of Real Knowledge, the W.O.R.K (as Jan said "I call it WORK because it is work," avoids the vegetative end of all things, I could not say that, I would not say that. The idea of doing the W.O.R.K to avoid the common fate of Humanity is --- silly.

And yet the economy outlined above, the radical efficiency of, does not seem to be a persuasive point -- and this itself is something helpful to consider.

How Not to Do It

Two points regarding the death today of Aldous Huxley's wife: "The AP reports that Laura Archera Huxley, the wife to Aldous Huxley has just died at the age of 96. The article notes that she died of cancer, despite being in good shape and a regular exerciser." The first is just the amusing way the AP reported it---- "despite being in good shape..." Nobody lives forever, you are going to die of something. The article further states "that after her husband died of cancer in 1963, that she spent the rest of her own life promoting his legacy and his work." That legacy of course including the popular notion that you can trip your way to enlightenment. No, not the kind of tripping upstairs Jan Cox talked about, the 60's kind of tripping I have forgotten.

I suppose the subject of death could be worked into a comment on the mysticism taught by Jan Cox, I suppose, being as how so many schools work the contemplation of one's mortality into a serious method. Jan Cox did not however, although once he commented that such was a valid approach---contemplating one's own mortality. He said that this method had not worked for him though. (I cannot assume it never worked for him.) He died at 67 "despite being in good shape." Actually his life span was miraculous considering he was genetically programmed to die in his forties. Although regular exercise was something he encouraged, regular exercise was a minimum necessity---nothing that would of itself lead to enlightenment.

Nor can drugs lead to what is commonly called enlightenment. Recreational use was something he never encouraged, only allowing it under certain rare circumstances, and then, as with our beer drinking, with the proviso that you were not helping yourself in the quest, at all, by using drugs. Just don't pretend to yourself. Actually in these kind of comments he was pointing not to the drug and alcohol consumption, so much as trying to get us to notice the activity of our mechanical consciousness. Try and lift a mug while thinking 'this is hurting me.' Try it.

That "being in good shape" is your genetic programming, as is everything else. Exercise does not extend your life: Ms. Huxley dies at 96, Jan Cox at 67, both avid exercisers. Does this mean achieving a mystical awareness is hopeless. Yes. Keep that fact in your mind while thinking also: some have done so.

(And it sounds to me like the AP reporter just didn't want to jog today. )

How Not to do it--- such items won't get you anywhere, but help the quester perhaps in setting an internal background which allows for progress.

Clinical amnesia & ordinary consciousness

Is clinical amnesia just ordinary consciousness writ large. This thought came to me after reading an article in a recent New Yorker.
Oliver Sacks in his amnesia series in the New Yorker (September 24, 2007) describes a musician who cannot remember anything more than a few seconds. This is Clive Wearing, described as "an eminent English musician and musicologist," who became the "worst case of amnesia ever recorded."Even so he can conduct music and play well in an attentive talented manner. The interesting thing that comes to mind regarding the insights of Jan Cox as revealed in his writings is that this musician developed topics of conversation, a few topics, such as the solar system, and using these few topics, he could fit into a conversational setting. The amnesia was not less total, but the subject of the amnesia article had developed what his wife called "stepping stones" in his consciousness, -- these few topics which he repeated many many times. What occurred was that this amnesia and these few topics are not actually different from the condition Jan and others (one of the few instance where he did use a not totally original vocabulary), called 'being asleep,' the state of consciousness for normal people. If my surmise is correct then what the neurologists are flagging as defining characteristics of amnesia, are actually just a more extreme form of the human sleeping condition. The point is not that this poor fellow is not in a bad state, but rather that the description of his symptoms are merely those of ordinary consciousness, taken to a more extreme degree than is commonly seen on this planet of ours.

A glimpse of freedom--starting with a news report

Starting off with a Reuters news report:

DONETSK, Ukraine (Reuters) - A crocodile that escaped from a travelling circus in Ukraine and evaded capture for six months died on Friday after two days back in captivity, officials said.
"The crocodile was lying in the water and suddenly he just floated to the surface," Oleksander Soldatov of Ukraine's Emergencies Ministry said in the eastern city of Donetsk.
"We pulled it out of the water and the body felt all cold. It seems clear he was alive before and just died."
Ministry officials, unsure whether the crocodile was comatose or dead, had earlier called in a vet to examine the reptile. Nicknamed Godzilla or Godzi, it was captured alive this week after escaping from a travelling circus in May.
It had been spotted several times lurking around industrial sites near the city of Mariupol, on the coast of the Sea of Azov. But it repeatedly eluded search teams.
It was finally found basking in a pool at a thermal power station, where the water was warmer than the nearby sea.
The crocodile, which was over a metre (yard) long, was then taken 100 km (60 miles) by car to Donetsk where it was freed into a fire service tank.
The crocodile's owner, quoted by the daily Segodnya, said he could only collect it on Monday because of circus commitments.
Soldatov said Godzilla would be cremated.
"This is an exotic animal. He simply cannot be buried," he said.
(Reporting by Lina Kushch; Writing by Ron Popeski; Editing by Michael Winfrey)"

Jan Cox would have understood the dying of this beast. Jan was this crocodile.
A thirst for freedom defines the life of Jan Cox. But looking at this story makes me wonder if perhaps this thirst, oh so feeble in most people, yet extends beyond the range of mammals on this planet. In most people, over 99%, this craving for freedom is satisfied by (deliberately produced) fiction. Very interesting.