Binary Thought -- part 8,930,281.

"...[W]hy psi phenomena flourish best in [the] darkness [of
statistics] is ...hard to comprehend. If the mind can alter the
statistical outcome of many tosses of heavy dice, why is it powerless
to rotate a tiny arrow, magnetically suspended in a vacuum to
eliminate friction?...The failure of such direct unequivocal tests is
in my opinion one of the great scandals of parapsychology."

These are the words of Martin Gardner, who for almost three decades
wrote the column on mental puzzles for Scientific American. He has
written quite a few books pointing out charlatans and sloppy research
in the psychical research laboratory. In the quote above he is
referring to the fact that there is a statistically significant effect
pointing to some kind of psychical power of mind (so-called) when
tests are done in runs, rather than individual tests of say,
precognition. So if you guess what card will come up next, you get
significant results (better than chance) only if you average the
results from a large number of tries.

Gardner has thankfully pointed out many many cases where people
cheated on these tests. He seems annoyed that there remain these
statistical results that confirm the existence of the so-called
psychic powers, and that cannot be explained away.

It would not be so odd that an individual person cannot demonstrate
psychic powers in the lab, but that large scale test results do, if we
recall the map Jan Cox used, which spoke of a global mind. If the
individual mind is merely part of a larger phenomenon, and not itself
any kind of self actuating engine, as is so fondly believed, then
these results are what one would expect. But the intellectual cannot
relinquish his dream that his rational, binary, mind is an adequate
tool to investigate everything he might encounter. So he gets annoyed.
And yet the cosmos keeps on spinning.

The worth of a bird in the...

Road.  How often do you see birds that have been run over. Not often. They  have another direction available to them, they can and generally do, go up if there is any need.  The words of Jan Cox, and other real thinkers, are kind of like dead birds in the road.  By words I mean spoken, printed, words.  What can you tell of flight from a flattened mass of feathers? Yet the common asphault is the only means of communication to groups of people for someone such as Jan. 

 

The proportion of birds on the road compared to the sky -- how tiny the number on the road, how vast the song and feathers in the sky.  Such, it may be, is the amount a mystic like Jan Cox could say, compared to what he knows.

Numbering Energies

Of the maps Jan Cox created to help us glimpse the panorma we fall into, that of the three flows, was one of the most durable.  "C" was the creative flow of energy, D, the conserving, called sometimes destructive, and E, the irrelevant, that which man could not grasp as relevant with his binary mind.  All three being always present in an event, Jan rarely mentioned that three was an arbitrary number, though using alphabetic letters to signify them, hinted at the other flows. For the first time I am wondering about A and B flows, and remembering from another mystic, the phrase "fundament of the stars."  And how some today would consider that description old fashioned, and irrelevant, as if we already knew, now, this fundament, because we have particle physics, and string theory, as if THESE ideas addressed the question of Job: who has fathomed the fundament of the stars. As if the passage of two and a half millenia could answer such a question.  But such is the unempirical drive of the modern mentality, that binary rigidity which hides one's ignorance, in all but a few questioners.  Perhaps.

Possumility

There is a kind of knowing which notices motion in shadows.  It need not be a grand knowing, but when defined as a knowledge of the partial, it can be...

Cyberia

It is still a question to me the extent to which cyberspace can promote the growth of real understanding. Cyberspace must always be in the past, after all, ALWAYS, -- because it lives in words. And, as Jan Cox said, TKS, This Kind of Stuff, only exists in the present. Words are of and in the past, because of, for one reason, the neurological processing time they involve. By the time a word is said, comprehended, the reality of which we are a part is already different from whatever prompted that particular word. Where is there, in cyberspace, silence. It is all words, there is no silence in cyberspace, and is that silence, or approximation thereto, not a goal? These comments of course do not address the reality of tigers, --- merely the usefulness of cyberian tigers.

Universal Mysticism

East Asia: Tradition and Transformation, was published in 1973, and is the product of leading historians adding up finally to 969 pages.  Recently my total ignorance of the history of most of the planet, was brought back to me.  I was not surprised to find the following statement, however, in my newly acquired book.

[Taoism is]...in large part a philosophy of retreat and withdrawal on the part of thinkers who were appalled by perpetual warfare, instability and death..."  A philosophy of retreat does not describe at all accurately what could be argued as the greatest literature on the planet, the Tao Te Ching, and Book of Changes.  Actually the response of mystical empiricism, to the world, is the only sensible avenue to knowledge.  It is the only knowledge offering objective truths.  The alternative to this path is not any "advance," into the external world, the alternative is to be a bumbling staggering pawn of forces one does not glimpse or control.  To be sure, the mystic is in the same situation except for the knowledge he has of his situation.  He is no less blown about, but he can learn from his situation.  Not so those who are NOT appalled by warfare, instability, and death,( which features hardly isolate one historical period from another.)

And these simple facts eluded some leading historians.  My point is not the writers of the above quote, but for rhetorical purposes let us look at their educational background.  East Asia lists three authors:

John K. Fairbanks, graduated from Harvard University, and taught there also, starting in 1936.
Edwin O. Reischauer, graduate of Harvard, also faculty member there. Author of many books.
Albert M. Craig, also a Harvard graduate and professor there.  Together these guys wrote a lot of books.

The point in this little aside is not these fine scholars, but the binary mechanical mind of man.  (Readers of Jan Cox will appreciate the special status of the natural sciences and no doubt soon I will again review that aspect of man's knowing, which is only superfically a contradiction to the points in this essay.)  Only by hanging oneself on the forked branches of ordinary mentation is it possible to find statements about a man's retreat into philosophy of any useful import.  The mystic philosopher has at least the possibility of finding the knowledge, a vague sense of which haunts man's being. It is the mystic philosopher alone who can seize life by the throat and interrogate it.

A breath of ....?

It occurred to me again, especially after noticing in todays science headlines (plants absorb MORE carbon dioxide when it is hazy, that is, polluted, out) that Jan Cox said the planet will take care of itself.  Right now, for instance with the economic slowdown, one effect is that there are more green spaces, where construction has stopped, more woodsy cleavages left, for a while anyway, where feral cats can hunt rodents, less exhaust in the air as people do not commute to jobs they do not still have----it is like the planet is taking a deep, needed breath.

Of course I do not KNOW this, it is a possibility, and this aspect of my comments points up that it may not be WHAT you think, ----HOW you think may be the saving gasp.