The Joy is the ...

There is an authenticating quality to the mystical experience---a
seeing that answers questions. I am not prepared to say that such is
not the main aspect of what Jan Cox referred to sometimes as vertical
expansion. This authenticating though is part of the major hazards of
such events, and I do not mean hazard in a bad sense, but for the
individual himself the experience most often is the beginning and the
end of his personal growth. This is because the circumambient words
are felt to be authenticated by the experience of vertical expansion.
So instead of real wordless knowledge we have people of various
religious, and other, stripes. And humanity as a whole progresses,
but the individual person, not necessarily so much. So the few real
teachers, men like Gurdjieff and Jan Cox, were heard to say that you
had to have a teacher to wake up, to use that common and misleading
phrase. And the path between crankdom and guruism is not one that can
be threaded with cocksure stride.

A State of Stillness in Stone

The Kouros are sculptures from around 530 BC. You have seen pictures of them, standing figures, arms at the side, legs together, with maybe a foot extended. And the face, no radiant smiles, just a tiny calm lip line. I have heard these statues referred to as an early stage of sculpture, before the Greeks had learned to convey the action, say the movement you can see in the Laocoon frenzy, before action in stone was in the repertory of Greek artists. The statues are commonly regarded as a primitive stage of European art.

What if, though, the opposite were the case. What if these statues, the still strange erect figures, were representing the inner life of a man whose awareness has a vertical dimension missing in most people. The Kouros, to my mind, have the stillness of a mystical awareness kept amidst the flurry of everyday life.

Joan of Arc and all that

The dimensions of history. It is my, probably sound, guess that all the major stuff we call history has a mystical element, in the sense of someone's experience sometime. Joan of Arc is just an obvious example. (May 30 is the date of her death, in 1431.) One interesting way this might happen is that people begin massive external building projects, under the energy involved and, most typically, misinterpreted (misinterpreted is an inside joke since ANY interpretation of a so-called mystical experience is a MISinterpretation.). The pyramids jump to mind, the expansion of Islamic culture, the crazy way western Europeans just decided, hey let's cross the mediterranean and attack those nice folks over there. (That thought started with the Crusades in mind.). Not that I have proof in my previous examples, I am speculating here. But it is plausible that we may owe, to someone's misinterpretation, indeed, perhaps an active turning away from a glimpsed reality, the major events in a high school history book. Only of course, if I am right, then so called historical causation is, the way it is currently written, utterly wide of the mark. Or perhaps, in the words of Jan Cox: "History is dreams."

And going back to misinterpretation being an inside joke, --- the reality behind that is why you could call, in the words of Jan Cox, "vertical expansion", a secret, --- meaning a secret you keep from yourself.

Paw This

Words---words are like cats' paws. Not cats paw---but the way a cat can knock something off a counter on purpose. In some cases this results in the cover falling off the butter dish, and the reward is butter, or the reward is...... The reward is perhaps marking the gap between word and experience

Words, (What else)

One's knowledge of a subject is not revealed by how many words one has read about it.  It is not what you read, it is HOW you read that signifies real awareness.  The excitement a scientist feels on looking a new data, say from an orbiting telescope, is because he is looking beyond the data and experimentally plugging the numbers he sees into various scenarios, or whirling in the back of his mind, possible new scenarios that could account for some anomalies.  The scientist in the fields of the physical sciences, is exceptional in that he works often with what is genuinely new, and so his awareness has the potential for an excitement, the thrill of the fresh, that is absent from any rote learning.  His knowing is real as long as it is at the edge of knowing.  It is in a way this excitement which Jan Cox sought to show others how to achieve with his own writing about the world.  Of course the mystic's knowledge, has a greater potential power than that of the physical scientists, and this is hard for the scientists to grasp since they already have a yellow circuit (intellectual, in a common parlance) excitement, thus the scientists probably will never grasp what they are missing.  Partly this is because of the ignorance of the scientists about the quality typical of the thinking of most men.  It is the mystic alone who pursues knowledge on a variety of frontiers.

Getting Somewhere

It is a common assumption that words are a source of knowledge. Common assumptions are rarely correct as a resolute study of Jan Cox would reveal. Not a study of a huge number of words he wrote (what else was he going to do?), but an attempt to glean his purpose of undermining words. Those truly concerned with what Jan Cox was pointing to, would be prying apart his words---trying to catch a glint of light between the letters. Like buses----to assume words convey knowledge is to assume the advertising on a bus IS the bus. Buses nowadays often have a vinyl wrap advertisement. Like the one I saw this morning advertising Mercedes Benz vehicles. Inside the bus are tired people. The tired people are the point of the bus, getting people holding multiple jobs about the city---moving energy around. But the neophyte assumes the bus IS a Mercedes Benz. The neophyte assumes the definition of a word in the dictinary is accurate and relevant. The words of Jan Cox are designed to point out to people that the bus is NOT what is advertised ON the bus. Words are to be studied, but not for their ostensible definitions. For some few folks, the words in a dictionary are just an inside joke.

Joke of the Day

The following sentence is from an article about Larry Squire, a neuroscientist at Veterans Affairs Medical Center in San Diego.

[About Squire:]He is a leading investigator of the organization and structure of mammalian memory and pioneered the brain-based distinction between declarative and procedural memory, or as he later refined it, between declarative and nondeclarative memory systems.

What got me chuckling, and of course, a reporter wrote the article, not Professor Squire, was the word in the above quote: "refined." In the context, and to a non-scientist, the opposite of refined seems to be a better description.  Quite apart from the general giggles descriptions of academic stuff can produce.