Freud as an example of the average intellectual

Freud is held up as an example of the blows to his ego man has received in western science.  The thinking I assume is that the (so-called) discovery of the unconscious made man's rationality suspect. Freud's contributions have had the reverse effect.  I am not the first person to wonder if something was unconscious how Freud could have specified it at all.  The import of Freud's ideas is that the rational mind can specify and deal with everything in the world----there is nothing that cannot be labeled in words.  Words will cover everything and so actually the rational mind is triumphant in a complete way --a claim which would have puzzled the serious thinkers of an earlier era.  The picture that comes to mind from Freud's writing is of a closet, packed to the ceiling, and so overfull it spills out whenever the closet is opened. Interesting but hardly the unconscious.  Words are the solution to a man of Freud's ambitions.

As it is, the empirical mystics of the modern, men like Georges Gurdjieff and Jan Cox, don't find Freud even worth mentioning. They notice that the silence of the hormones is a relevant arena for the sober quester to turn to.  This attention though, is speechless comprehension which is beyond the purview of the average intellectual.

Hunting Historical Assumptions

The idea that man had endured a series of blows with modern discoveries is so silly as to need another elaboration.  It may be a cliche to mention that Galileo displaced the earth from the center of the universe, that Darwin moved man from a special place in the natural world and that Freud rattled man's confidence in the rational mind. None of these takes on modern  history is accurate and the persistence of this myth is so durable as to need an explanation. That explanation is not one I can imagine yet, but a few more thoughts about the general hypothesis sketched out here is fun.  Galileo's ideas certainly did nothing to shake man's confidence, that confidence in the rational mind has in fact increased in the preceding centuries and this INCREASE is in part because of the scientific discoveries characteristic of modernity.  The medieval period was an era when man experienced himself as a part of a greater whole, and this sense of being a part of something larger is a superior and lost parallel to the confidence of modern man. 

Darwin's indeed exciting new idea was that species themselves could change, and that included man.  The Darwinists though never think through logically the implications of Darwin's thought. If man the species can change, then the human mind itself is quite possibly a subject for evolution, man's very thinking ability, his rationality, may be in the middle of  an evolutionary trek.  This at least is the most consistent view of the human mind which is plausible based on Darwin's ideas.  Yet the variability of human thought is something that is vigorously denied should this prospect even surface in some scientist's scope. And you can see why this thought is scary----the idea that human thought itself is not the measure and measurer of the world around it leaves the mechanical mind of man quaking (should the mind be forced somehow to consider this idea).  Because----the confidence of mechanical thought has to assume the mind is complete. Otherwise any one thought would have to, wonder what a future thought would find inferior about it. Surely I can find a better way to express this.  If the mind is incomplete that throws all its conclusions into confusion because the unknown element, being unknown, prevents that boxed edge from resting in thought, that completeness which is part of the nature of binary thought. The evolutionary nature of human thought, if recognised, mediates against the limitations of binary thought, and the idea that words can ever describe reality.

The infinity of detail that characterizes the present does also the past. So any conclusions claiming to be of an historical nature are like the constellation star pictures. Interesting, sometimes lovely, helping us to keep some things in mind, reflecting in our choice of subject our values, but not what they claim to be.  "Orion" is just an accidental conjunction, the details of which overwhelm and do not even graze a hunter's reality.  This may be what Jan Cox meant when he said "history is dreams."  Any readers of this blog need to keep that in mind, for my purposes in playing with historical assertions have a personal use also. With an infinity of detail anything can be proved, or disproved. Next time we'll get to Freud.

A woods of words

There is a comedian I find very funny. Jan Cox talked about comedians, and how indeed, they do come up with fresh thoughts----that special and wonderful technique for doing "this kind of stuff." There is for comedians a hazardous edge, but that is not why I brought this up. Bill Maher is who I mean now, and what struck me was how if he couldn't see that the problem with people who call themselves religious is that they are not, this inability in Maher's picturing of what is wrong with the world, then we have a fresh reminder of the difficulties of pursuing "this kind of stuff," using again, the phrase of Jan Cox. I do not expect ANY ordinary person to grasp that there IS nothing wrong, but to so utterly fail to notice this tiny thing----those who call themselves religious are, not necessarily so, lights up some of the path those seeking to persevere, are on. On one level, you would think someone who was hateful, who talked about hurting others, you might think, well no matter what those people say, they---are not religious. And yet they say they are, and the world says, yes, those are religious leaders, and so I guess it is not surprising a comedian is off. The path of words...

Funny smells

There is no philosophical problem with mind and matter dualism since there is no mind separate from the material world. The world is all one at a basic level.  What then accounts FOR 'mind.' I have no idea, but am trying to sketch pictures which perhaps could shed light on this amazing matter we find ourselves part of. "Mind" in the phrase of Jan Cox, is a 'parvenu,' a newcomer on the scene who is still insecure, so to speak. He drew this picture to account for certain features of what we loosely call mental awareness, for instance the massive self-justification which occupies so many of people's thoughts. He was not defining anything,  but trying to turn the minds of his students in a certain direction so they could notice things about themselves, as a step towards greater awareness.
Likewise the previous paragraph is a build-up to a picture I had.  What if what we call 'consciousness' is actually most similar to man's olfactory activity.  Smell, after all, when noticed, seems to be everywhere we are, like our thoughts.  And the facts of grammar may support this thesis, because there is an odd thing about the word smell.  To say, "I smell," can be either active or passive as a verb. All the other sensory words are not ambiguous---You say, "I see", or "I hear" and no one wonders if you mean YOU are seen, or heard.  But smell, biologically the earliest stratum of awareness, harbors a distinct confusion at its core. Perhaps this confusion is the parvenu's unwillingness to confront his own origins, and the weight of its attempt to fit in, in a new neighborhood.  Perhaps consciousness reveals it's insecurity by trying to skip it's organic country.

The Imperialism of Words

The imperialism of words is a phrase that occurred to me that points to the control, the trap, that words present for someone desirous of seeing reality unfiltered. By this phrase we point to the way words totally, automatically, unhelpfully, always----assume they contain the whole story.

Comparing "heroes"

Two recent heroes of mechanical life surfaced in Januaries. There is the "Sully" who crash landed his plane and all aboard lived. His expertise in handling a plane when birds took out both engines, his modesty in dealing with the media, and his calm awareness of the role luck played, all have combined to give this guy deserved media coverage. But I cannot help but compare Sully, and Wesley Autrey. Autrey threw himself in front of a subway car to save a sick man who fell on the tracks and by covering the one man between the tracks, the train rolled over both of them safely. Wesley's expertise was action to save another at a level of physical awareness that you don't predict or expect. Wesley's heroism, though he saved one life, and not one hundred and fifty-five, was a bolt out of life, society, education, and all ordinary expectations. Whether he knows it or not, he has no idea what deciding factors determined his actions. Of course neither does Sully really know, but Sully assumes his actions could have been predicted, since he trained for decades as a pilot, and adviser on crisis situations. I guess the glimpse I felt was lurking here, and there may be more, is this: Autrey had no time to decide what to do, no training for heroics, no sense that he was expected to DO anything, and though it seems Sully did have the latter two elements in his favor, what people cannot understand, and I can only point to, is that both these heroes of the mechanical, acted in blindness with energies most people are totally unaware of. And they won---and most will never understand the odds, or unlikeliness of their victories.

One interesting thought about the difference between Sully and Wesley is that Sully may have gotten more public recognition because the public understood HIS competence in a way that they could not the deeds of Autrey. It is like Autrey's heroic deed was so off the meter that people do not really want to contemplate his heroism.


Becoming aware of such nameless energies and pointing others towards the existence of such energies is part of the work of Jan Cox. I say these figures acted mechanically and that is not entirely the case, but they were certainly unaware intellectually of what they were doing.

Rock Art and Hard Heads

We have all I think, glanced twice at an article on rock art. There is a part of the population that believes in extra terrestrials and finds confirmation of their visiting our planet in rock art, and ancient artistic depictions. I am putting this forward as common knowledge and as a basis for a question.  What is the appeal of  talk about extraterrestials?  It fills the airways sometimes, and yet is absurd. To support that position I merely ask: why don't spaceships land on the whitehouse lawn?  No, they appear to guys in pickups on lonely roads. There is no reliable evidence for UFO visits, and yet there is even among scientists discussion of the liklihood of extraterrestials existing. No evidence, and yet massive talk raises for me a question as to the appeal of such. 

On one level extraterrestials answer the question for many of where we came from.  This answer to the origins of life, of humanity, of civilization, is pretty low grade intellectually. To say human progress resulted from the visits of extraterrestials is to ignore the fact this theory merely pushes BACK the real question of origins.  To say extra terrestial visits explain life on this planet is to ignore the next question, how did life arise, progress take place, on the OTHER planet these extra terrestrials came from?? And so on, the infinite regress objection is easy, once it is pointed out, to grasp and I am relying on it.

One thing that occurred to me is that these so-called explanations avoid any theophantic mystery, any discussion of conscience in the terms of Georges Gurdjieff, or of essence in the (early) writing of Jan Cox. 

Perhaps it is precisely because these ideas about origin, come, so to speak, from intellectual vending machines, that their appeal is explained. The explanations of life on earth that invoke extraterrestrial visits is not intellectually challenging, to put it gently. Nothing is demanded from the believer except a certain credulity.  No effort is required intellectually, and this lack of effort is the gulf separating Gurdjieff and Jan Cox from most of twentieth century attempts at explaining ANYthing.  Say man, has a need to understand, regardless of his situation, and this urge is rarely totally eradicated (I think.)  Answering these questions in a non intellectually challenging way may just be comforting to some types. And in this and the last century, explanations addressing ultimate questions must have some scientific shreds attached. So nowadays people see not apparitions of women in blue, but they see spaceships. The more things change, the more things fall into the same rut. Just some thoughts.