A vista to avoid if you are committed to the orderly

The recent discussion about why history is now measured exactly as it was in the time of Christian historians, with just the labels altered to sound less religious, has another dimension. In fairness the historians deciding on how to label their dating faced the dauntingness of the unmeasurable and the human intellect does it's best to avoid that vista of the unfathomable. In this instance I am referring to the fact that numbering has to start someplace, and there is NO convenient place in a world accustomed to being able to start numbering with a definite historical event. The grand appeal of 1 AD is that it was nailed into (not a wood crossbeam but) a definable event. Now that this starting place is less obvious, where would the numbering start? It occurs to me that maybe 6000 BCE, which is reported to be about the time human writing started. But of course this is a convention too, and hardly less speculative than the recently popular system. And then we would have the clumsiness of some events being counted backwards from 6000 BCE. You do need an edge, even though the point which I would like to highlight is that there IS no edge to count from, not really.

Which brings up the extent the human intellect will go to to avoid realizing how mythical edges really are. That might be our next question.

What divides BCE and CE?

The conventions for expressing dates are a nice example of binary thought. What is any real difference between 11:59pm and 12:01 am. Yet they are considered a day apart. But what is fun to notice is the terminology that used to indicate the time before and after the supposed birth of the Christian deity. This used to be usage to which all westerners adhered in speaking of dates, regardless of their personal religious views. To do otherwise would be to be incomprehensible to one's readers. At some point in the 20th century the provincialness of this convention became so obvious that the iniitals were changed from B.C. to B.C.E., where the latter stood for Before Common Era. So we apparently are more cosmopolitan historians now. Maybe CE stands for Cosmopolitan Era.

Except----there is still this verbal gulf between indivisible worlds, a chasm signifying nothing except the silliness of which the human intellect is capable. On what significant grounds does history come galloping up to 1 BCE (rear up, perhaps,} and then leap across to 1 CE? At least the Christians had a reason which to them was a convincingly major event by which to order history. What could be the importance now which leads us to divide history into two severed pieces? Well, one thing is the new dating convention points to the tenacity of the human intellect in dividing everything into twos, a bisection which enables human mentation to reason (that is, hit the asphalt) at all. Still, for some, being able to count just to two, barely counts.

Shredding Occam's Razor

This principle of logic is a charming fantasy to which the ordinary binary intellects clings in a manner which precludes the possiblity of insight into reality. The quality of the clinging betrays the desperation which underlies this principle of ordinary logic. If Occam's Razor was recognised as training steps for real understanding it would be unobjectionable.

But the principle of Occam's Razor, dating from medieval times, specifies that the simplest explanation is the right one. What this boils down to, is, simply put, that the view of the ordinary binary intellect is the correct view. And this is not always the case: the ordinary intellect cannot even contemplate the vast (yes billions and billions) number of intersecting events which actually DO create an explanation for any one detail that occurs. And this does not even bring up how to consider the fact that what does not happen is just as important, the near misses, the totally close calls which you are never aware of---all this is actually effective and explanatory---but not manageable by the binary logic which defines the ordinary intellect. The ordinary intellect says something is either this, or that. In actually the correct view includes this, that, and that, and so on, on, on....

Just because the ordinary intellect cannot comprehend it, does not make reality any less real.
As Jehovah, mascarading as reality, once said, I am what I am.

Machinery

War is not the almost constant state of mankind that history presents to us, according to Jan Cox. It certainly can be be productive though to contemplate. Here you have men courageous enough to walk into bullets. What greater courage could there be? And yet there may be one, which however, is not the direct topic here now. Back to war, and soldiers following orders they may or may not realize are bad, ill thought out, serving someone's vanity, wasteful of life. (Yes, I got started on this watching Ken Burns's latest, on The War. ). Yet the soldiers follow orders for the most part, they do as their officers direct.

What occured to me was the reason Humanity grows under these circumstances. If you had soldiers on the battlefield running around without following directions, you would harm the larger organism. This failure to follow orders may be seen as a kind of illness in the body. Certainly the larger point that the society with such a malfunctioning army is less safe is obvious if you pause over it. One basic aspect of an army's usefulness is quick effective response to danger. This better protects the society of which it is a part. This is because the soldiers are cogs in a larger mechanism.

What is harder to see is that such a scenario also well describes the mental realm. We like to think we are free thinking beings who evaluate and act based on a well informed consideration of whatever issue is at hand. In fact though, the thoughts in our heads are soldiers some well commanded, some pathetically poorly commanded, but in neither case is the commanding officer anywhere nearby. Certainly not in your head. Did you invent your language? Your use of words, fundamental to the thinking process, is part of a larger process in which your darling self is but an illusion. The words have a purpose, they function as cogs in a larger unit, but the purpose and function are not what we assume. Certainly the transfer of information is the least of the functions of verbal speech, though not the least important if you consider just speech intending to describe the external world.

No conspiracy theory is being suggested here, simply the expansion to a mental view wherein we can acknowledge the possibility that things might not be what we assume.

Examples

James Joyce was one of the more notable rejecters of Catholicism. Right after he died a priest tried to persuade his widow to have a religious burial. Said Nora, "I couldn't do that to him." The relevance of this anecdote in the context of comment on the uncommentariable work of Jan Cox is that you can see how important his position on Catholicism was to James Joyce. Which points up the reality that so-called opposites are just one whole. This example, that of an atheist was actually one example Jan Cox used to illustrate the point that to reject something is to accept that very thing. Could one be a real atheist one would be quite calm about the church and not even think about the church at all. To oppose something is to give that which you oppose, vitality. This applies also within.

Hearing Jan

What will never be captured in words now, is the experience of listening to Jan Cox talk. I at least cannot begin to explain, among other things, the way he could say two different things, literally at the same time in a public (well at least the group) setting. Not two contradictory things, but two separate intellectual points.

He could also direct his comments in this group setting to one person, or --- sometimes he could give the impression he was talking directly to you, while HE was on stage and sharing his speech to a group of people.

And then there was his speech to individuals which was based on his knowledge of that person, his knowing exactly what at a certain moment had the best chance of helping that person look in a certain direction. In a sense this description applies to all his talks to a group of people he allowed to stay based on their purpose and potential. These were the people he did not kick out, deliberately scare away, or gently discourage. (This last I to myself called the velvet boot.) This speech to individuals, though, may be information that was not really relevant to others. A street level example of this last, is his telling me that I should take my car to the dealer to get it fixed. This advice was based on his knowledge of me, and was not at all transferable to others in general.

But more typically his speech to individuals was not about such mundane matters, but focused the same knowledge of the person he was speaking with a regard for their potential at that moment. Speech received in this mode could be something the individual remembered well, though it may actually be only relevant to that individual, at least only relevant to that individual regarding the surrounding details of what he said. Thus he might frame a point to someone who was given to hero worship differently than he would speak to someone who grasped that a certain respect was appropriate when relating to a real teacher, rather than the "horizontal guru" to use an exact quote from Jan Cox.

Such talents that a real man could possess are one way myths about psychic powers begin. I use the word myths to stress that when a man has a certain base of knowing, then the usual descriptions just do not apply. There was nothing psychic per se about some of his talents, it was just that most men do not think themselves, really think, at all, and so were impressed by what was really a minor aspect of the talent of a man who knew the source of his knowledge, and remembered it.

Poorly Packed Pickups Pinned Up Again

Picking poorly packed pickups back up- --because this is a graphic glimpse of a reality which is hard to point at. I mean the lurching quality of progress, any kind of progress, the half falling, stumbling, of Life itself. Look at the load on the truck bed, trussed haphazardly, piled peculiarly,and if you following the same pickup I am, as you study the load , you feel a little nervous. You do not want to meet a ladder unexpectedly. This picture, the poorly packed pickup, though is a reality at the axel of things. In the words of Jan Cox--there is a core of confusion to everything. And it could be that this reality ripples though everything. Certainly there is no reason to be surprised at spotted, jagged margins. The surprise would be a rhythmic, regular progress, because that would mean you certainly were not paying attention at the moment you so categorized it. Let me point out, as he did occasionally, we are not pointing to the regularity of physical functioning itself, like breathing, which should not be messed with.