The Glory of China, August, 2008

China is a mutt. The picture of her face that appeared after she
pulled a box containing an abandoned human infant to her puppy den
shows a dog that Jan Cox described to his students once as the type to
which dogs will always revert when to left to breed without human
intervention. You see them all over the world, short haired brown
hound types. The look in her eyes in the photograph seems to be
asking, and why am I surrounded by these strangers?

China will never understand that she is a celebrity. But she
understands the cry of a helpless mammal. There is something
programmed into women so that they respond to the cry of a child. No
woman fails to register the sob of child in a mall, for instance,
though they may understand they do not need to a act. No woman would
fail to act should a box with an infant be found in a public space.
They would not just walk by it, although they could easily, (speaking
in generalities here) ignore a hungry homeless dog. This
behavior--the response to a an infant in need-- is utterly mechanical.

At one time the model of the selfless mother seemed to me useful in
understanding human ego.
That ego could be dissolved to help another, struck me as useful in
understanding how a person might progress towards greater
understanding. I never mentioned this thought to Jan but he never
spoke of motherhood as useful in spiritual endeavors.

This, I now think, is because motherhood and its hormonal
preparations and predilections is
utterly mechanical. This mechanicity, that maternal behavior is
deeply controlled genetically, obviously is important to the very
preseveration of human life: we would have died out quickly if every
mother had to acquire external knowledge of mothering how to.

The instances of abandoned infants in no way invalidate the above
picture. These abandoning women are just the ravelled edge of an
immensely successful machine, the machine of human life. This machine
is simply efficient, and accomplishes the same end that the
numerical dimension of insect larvae do. The survival enhancement of
huge numbers of larvae are replaced in human genetics by the urge and
know-how of motherhood being genetically programmed. Same purpose,
same success.

The example of China though, points out that this maternal instinct,
to respond to the cry of an infant, is mammalian, and not just human.
The warmth one feels toward the story of China's rescue of an infant
of a different species, seems programmed also. But the temptation to
label that situation in which people pass by hungry homeless dogs as
"ironic", in view of the analysis of these notes, that there is a
mammalian instinct for females to provide for, to protect, the small
and helpless of other mammals, even other mammalian species, should be
resisted. As the philosopher and mystic Jan Cox said (words to this
effect): 'Irony is just a label to cover one's ignorance."

The Right Tools

One problem with the positivists (those who hold that knowledge must
be independently verifiable, repeatable, and, in effect, of the
external world: the most common attitude among scientists today) is
they think you can isolate man from what he knows, and have results of
lasting value.

The attitude that the instrument of knowing must also be studied is
not a new one, (maybe that is what the Greeks meant when they said man
is the measure of all things) but if you focus on the idea of studying
the tool of knowing, say a telescope, as well as what is learned from
the telescope, a certain perspective is gained.

I am suggesting that you must study the instrument of knowing-- as
well as the topic studied by that tool-- to gain the maxiumum and the
most reliable results. Actually the tool is always a critical part of
what is known, and the ignorance of this fact is a peculiar blindspot
of the contemporary world. The reasons for the popularity of
positivism are interesting but not the current topic.

What I would like to point out now is that without including the tool
used with the verbalized topic of learning, you fall into nonsense.
For instance without being aware of the tool used, you could not
distinguish between galaxies and cells. So the distinction between a
telescope and a microscope is part of the knowledge, just a part which
is ignored in the epistemological background---and this I call
evidence of the illogic of positivism.

Also you need to study the mind of the scientist, the knower, to
evaluate human knowledge. Only by going to the borders of knowledge,
can an investigation of so-called mysticism be brought back into the
game. It may be that this is not of great significance--- I am not
certain. The human mind can be studied as a tool though -- this fact
itself is a major tool used by seekers throughout history and in this
regard Jan Cox is only the latest, and maybe most illustrious,
example in the last century.

Gurdjieff's student John G. Bennett

J. G. Bennett wrote his autobiography, and this book details a lot
about Gurdjieff and Ouspensky and their students. I am not
particularly knowledgeable about these gentlemen, but Bennett's book,
"Witness" makes me feel better about the students Jan Cox left. At
least we are not wondering around looking for someone else to guide
us, at least we are not writing autobiographies. We do not seem to be
quoting the prophecies of anyone wearing a turban. We do not, as a
group, take seriously talk that emphasizes an i separate from the rest
of life. We do not sketch metaphysical diagrams while ignoring the
unspeakable. We certainly do not worry about the fate of Humanity.

But the above may be too harsh: I finished the book, after all. it is
possible Bennett was just pretending to be ordinary.

A Golden Turn

After I heard a discussion of the selection of the recordings to go on
the gold record sent along on Voyager I, it struck me as perhaps a
model for the origins of human speech itself.

There was a genuine effort to reflect on what would be understood by
someone or some being more intelligent than human beings---this sort
of task is not the talent of ordinary mentation. Some real effort
went into the selection of music, and various languages, recorded on
the gold record. Beethoven,Rock 'n Roll greetings in a large number of
languages, like Urdu, and others. The real message sent by earth on
Voyager I seems to be variety, though that is not how Carl Sagan's
crew saw their selection process. But the stretching necessary for
the selection task to compose the gold record resulted in --
inclusiveness and variety. The opposite really of the job of ordinary
mentation which is to divide. Some part of man's mind though
understood the job was NOT to define, divide, but to portray a rainbow
of mankind's variety and genius.

Back to the origins of speech though----surely this involved a similar
but incredibly more massive effort to----transcend the ordinary. The
first speech if I am correct in seeing a hint in the gold record
project, may have been guided by an attempt to comprehend something
above one's grasp. No doubt the ordinary would label that god, but
let us not be so inclined to labelling ourselves, because as soon as
you label something thusly, in fact what happens is you forget the
reality of what you were trying to define.

And another direction for the example of the gold record is the
recollection that, for the persevering mystical tracker, the job is
trying to produce a gold record every minute. One way to approach
this is by rotating the ordinary intellect through as much variety as
you can. Jan Cox used the picture of a rotating lighthouse lamp to
convey this, occasionally. The simple inclusion of variety to counter
the intellect's staring fixation on a single thing could be sufficient
to keep ordinary intellect open to the edge of discovery.

Bumper Music

Bumper music is those bland random bits of melody that fill in the
between chatter on the radio--they function to prevent dead air, and
cushion transitions on the air.
Maybe---

Thought is the bumper music for reality...

Touring the Turing Test

As you may recall the Turing Test was devised by the great computer
pioneer, Alan Turing, to elucidate when a computer might become human.
He devised this test in the 1940s, while he was working on breaking
the German codes during the war. The Turing test is this: if a person
communicating with a machine cannot tell if the machine is human or
not, then the machine can be considered sentient.

Actually there is a problem with this test----MOST PEOPLE would fail
the Turing test. A person in communication with a another person, and
trying to determine based on the communication if they were dealing
with a machine or a person could legitimately conclude the person in
question was a machine.

Mystical muskrats

Think of it this way. What if people confused the water with the
earthen dikes which exist to control the course of the water. What if
this analogy is a picture of the thought of people all over the globe. They
could be confusing the dirt with the water and assuming that the means
by which boats traverse water is by floating on the mud. We may
all be clay eaters.

Persons have complained that mystical texts are hard to read. Why
doesn't the author just say what he means? The writer with some
knowledge and the compassion to attempt conveying what he has seen,
has to counter not the ignorance of his listeners, but their knowledge.
His job includes clarifying the difference between clay (words) and
water (what words point to.) Since folks do not even glimpse the
nature of their inner confusion, the words of the mystic seek to
overflood the nature of words themselves -- a task destined perhaps to
ultimate, but not perhaps individual, failure. The splash of wild
water is prophesy and proof.

The flooding the mystic wants to share can change geography.

All of which does not mean that the muskrat making holes in the dam
knows what it is doing. Or that the muskrat does not.

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