Is That a Poodle or a Polecat

We see lots of cute pictures of dogs in costume this time of year. Jan
Cox would have felt it a pity to see the animals harassed this way.
He didn't even like collars on dogs, though he knew it a necessity at
times. His thirst and drive and hope for freedom extended not just to
his students, but to the critters around him. Those of us not so alive
to life's cruelties can hope that the photographer removed the costume
quickly, and this blog is not going where you might guess.

Why the impulse to dress up dogs in human garb, why do most of us find
it appealing and CUTE? Perhaps this costuming reminds us of the unity
of everything, the essential interconnectedness of all---that pug may
really be a bat--at least the glimpse is there, and it is comforting
to the mind, because the interconnectedness may be more accurate than
the separation the mind hacks out of the external world. Glimpsing
this externally though is sufficient, any more real looking and the
mind would find itself doubting the unexamined tenets that support its
own hegemony.

In support of this perhaps grandiose sounding picture, we have the old
old art which was never intened to amuse, but to present the
gratification of the truth----every early civilization has some
depiction of animal human creatures. For the first "civilized men",
those for whom the mind's shift into a higher gear was perhaps still a
recollection, for those brothers of ours--closer to the scene of
mental creation, that dog and men could be commingled was just a fact.
Anubis carried a sceptre.

So common is this in the art created thousands of years ago that one
has to assume this is some fundamental stage in human evolution.
With the idea of monotheism, One god, man got separated from his
physical surrounding too. But does viewing this as a stage of mental
evolution mean that the earlier stories and pictures of animal/human
combination creatures are outdated?

Possibly the earlier depictions are still accurate but that reality
must be forgotten for human mentation to function as an engine of
external progress. If we have to rearrange the external world to (in
the example that Jan Cox used, to get water to run uphill) to improve
our living conditions and odds of survival---we must assume that
external interconnectedness is of small relevance, so that we can
continue with the mind's ability to rearrange things. The mind must
not have to worry about offending some woodland sprite if it invents
water mills. The mind also must be free to see itself as autonomous,
but that did not happen all at once, and now we are drifting away from
our point.

Yes that pug in a crocodile costume is cute. Cuteness may be a memory
of something real but so distant that the mind is not threatened by
the recollection.
Not threatened as long, as the questioning does not press too far.

Ancesters and Imagination

The scientists have found human footprints in Chauvet Cave which is in
France. The footprints are those of a child, and they are accompanied
by dog paw prints. These prints date from 26,000 years ago. The
additional detail that residue on the cave walls indicates a torch was
being carried by the child, gives a poignant picture of a child
exploring, hunting, and being helped, protected by a dog with even
then, keener senses, and a willingness to challenge anything that
might threaten them.

Okay I think it is obvious that I have added to the picture with
details I made up. Who knows how protective the dog was, who knows
what they were doing in the cave, maybe going to a home they shared,
along a path dark but not unfamiliar.

The distinction between imagination and reality is one mechanical
imagination does not accurately make. Understanding the role of
imagination in human thought is basic to using the teachings of Jan
Cox. There remains though, an edifying vertigo in considering the bare
prints.

Pigeons on asphalt

They peck and poke around, at something we cannot see; they are gray and  moire against the black and auto  abstraction of the shopping lot.  The pigeons are like original thought, that shortcut Jan Cox demonstrated as a route to another kind of awareness.

The quadrupeds and bipeds move on a flat plane missing the pigeons.  But the birds can take their time--faced with sudden death in an asphalt sea, the pigeons move----UP.  They have a direction others busy at the shopping center do not.  A whole other direction so their hazards are different.  Their rewards are life.

After reading someone else's poetry (he knows who he is)

It's like looking for a white cat in the linen closet.
Everybody opens the door, most shut it right away.
For various reasons.
But some hear a purr, and pause.

Juggling with spitballs

A week ago the New York Times had an article about what the LHC was
hoped to demonstrate. (The article is entitled something about the
origins of the universe, by Brian Greene). One of the paragraphs was
about the Higgs particle. Greene's discussion said that the discovery
of the Higgs particle would be evidence about a field that acted as
molasses, and as particles went through it, their resistance explained
the phenomenon of mass. Okay, I need to read it again, since it was
the first explanation that made any sense to me of the so-called god
particle.

But it is not premature to point out something---the scientists are
trying to explain "mass." I find this interesting since mass is
something self evident to all. Not that it does not need to be
explained, but (assuming that the E in E=MC small 2 is thought, ) what
needs to be explained is, pressingly, not mass, but thought, energy.

Yes I am taking some liberties---mass is thinginess, energy is
thought. It is just a game after all.

The sound of maps

The seeming impossibility of disccussing that which cannot be fairly put in words came back to me when I read about escape means for prisoners during World War II.  There was a tiny office in the Briitsh war department devoted to helping prisoners, who escaped from German prisons, make it safely back to England.

A small part of their efforts to aid those behind enemy lines was providing maps to them.  I actually have only a vague idea of how they got the maps into the hands of the escapees, but what I did grasp was the hazards of maps if you are on the run.  Say you are hiding in the woods and the enemy soldiers are looking for you. You must both be silent and have a sense of the direction of  home,  Any rustling of paper could provide the searchers with your whereabouts.

The solution was maps on silk.  Elegant solution in more ways than one. No folding, no rustling, no danger that  is created by your attempt to avoid danger. 

Apparently some 4000 soldiers escaped the enemy by this and similar tricks.  That is a lot more folks than the number of people who escape the mechanicity of group thought (that is the only thought which can be shared.)  And yet a similar approach could assist the latter.
Picture the activity in your mind as directed towards getting home, AND so quiet that the inner guards, those unproductive concerns, don't know your intent.  Quiet need not mean inactivity.

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."