Europeans Covering America

It was not Columbus that is credited with discovering North America, but John Cabot, or Giovanni Caboto, as his mother knew him, since he was Italian. Henry the 7th of England financed Cabot's explorations, and historians are not sure of anything regarding these voyages.  But historians talk of Cabot landing in Newfoundland and claiming Eastern Canada for the English.
This would have been Cabot's second voyage in search of a northerly passage to the Spice Islands. The date of June 24, 1497, is assigned to his landing in North America.  Cabot never returned from his third voyage, begun in 1498, and nothing is known for sure of his fate or that of the crew members. 

But it is not just Cabot's voyages which can be described with various degress of certainty, which certainly means, degrees of uncertainty.  Accounts of Cabot's sailing across the Atlantic are just an example of the kind of dreams that historians regularly compose.  Calling the seas the Atlantic, his ship, The Matthew, his fate, unknown---what can this really mean?  Can you quiz a drop of water til it says, "Atlantic?"  The historians do not recognise that the status of their knowledge is far more compromised than their admitting, "well, judging from his maps, he probably made it to what we now call Newfoundland." 

What do we really know, and even this is a surmising. But the real knowledge that could have been involved, would have been the bump of a wooden keel on a sandy shore, the kind of thing you see, you feel.  This can be called knowledge.  The use of words like English sovereignty, this is not knowledge, this is imagination.  You cannot taste English sovereignty, the way you can salt in the air.  A simple enough distinction, but one the academics don't make.

Jan Cox said "history is dreams." My talking of Cabot here is meant to illustrate what Jan meant with this phrase, "history is dreams."  When I mention history, I am mainly trying to find fresh ways to think for my own benefit.  Not to elucidate some "out there" kind of truth. History is dreams.  But if your mind is motoring along at a mechanical speed, your best bet to speed up, is fresh thought, (and always, though this has not been publicly explained, a certain effort.)  But fresh thoughts----that will at least keep you in the game.

Finding the Trail

My philosophic calm gets lost easily if the subject is lost pets.  Or---people who speak of animals having a homing ability.  It has always seemed to me that folks who speak of pets finding their way home are irresponsible people who blame their pets for their own carelessness, as in "Fluffy will come back when he is ready." That kind of attitude makes me want to slap the speaker.  Most likely their pet is frightened and lost and soon to be gassed, the latter if some so-called good samaritan drops them off at the government sponsored control the animals by killing them place.

 

Well the above paragraph does sound cranky.  Jan Cox spoke of our taking care of stray animals. He did not dwell on it----taking care of some lost pet will not wake you up. Ordinary people often have big hearts.  Some even act on their impulses to be kind to animals.

 

And---the fact is some animals do exhibit an ability to find their way back home.  There is no doubt about this.  This homing ability in animals is rare. The rareness of this ability in animals, (an ability which most people could not duplicate, to find your way over strange terrain, to some place you may or even may not have ever been to before) means you have to assume the animals you encounter are really sadly lost.  How do some few dogs or (I assume) cats, navigate their way successfully, is a question, even as we acknowledge most animals do not exhibit this behavior.  Is it some kind of radar, some latching onto a magnetic line?

 

Similarly people very rarely exhibit an interest in the Real Work,--the Way of Real Knowledge, to which Jan Cox devoted his life. Presumably all people have the ability to hear its reality.  Though most people, too, will never find their way home.

Stronger than Fiction

Is it a question as to why fiction writers often stress they are writing about the truth? Avowedly totally made up, and yet what they are at pains to show and state, is that their writing is about reality. There are a few exceptions but notice that few people read the writers who set out to puncture the limits of the genre of fiction writing. So how come is there this emphasis on being realistic when writing fiction---to the point of even often saying, this is a true story?

One reason might be that ordinary consciousness clings to words, is defined by words, and sometimes senses a hollow sound to these words, this last being a sensation that is discomforting to them. In this possible take on the question I raised above, what we have is a stress on the very word 'truth' to avert a fuller awareness of our peculiar situation as human beings----that being that words exist to hide the fact that reality cannot be expressed in ---- words.

No Stinkin' Badges

Jan Cox picked a phrase someone else had written, the movie dialogue that has become a catch phrase--"We don't need no stinking badges." This rare recycling of something another had written served the purpose of demonstrating a kind of energy, and also shows how even at the ordinary level there is an awareness that verbal labels often totally miss the point.  Not repeating others or yourself is a critical trick to making temporary escapes from the habitual life which alone allows the mass of people on this planet to function together as one unit.  In this case though, "no stinkin' badges' was so apt that it became an inside joke for his students.

Jan's Metaphor of the Fish in the Water

The students of Jan Cox will remember one way Jan used to explain the ignorance of man about himself----a person's self understanding is like a fish who CANNOT perceive that he is a water creature because water is ALL he knows. A variation of this occurred to me: scientists and those who say they seek learning are like people studying the water from an elevation----they do not see the water, the important element, they do not see the water, for the fish.
Funny how man's speech is literally wet, in his mouth. This foam though, like the edge of an ocean wave, is not where the action is.

Perpetual Motion Machinery

The ordinary flow between folks is all about dominance and submission, what Jan Cox called, your pack position. Given this universality among people, it occurred to me to wonder how come my cats exhibit dominant and submissive behavior. Cats are not pack animals, and not really even tame creatures. Yet I do have a cat who is casually dominant over the other kitties. He gets the best chair, eats first etc. The first thing that occurred to me is that seeing domsub behavior in the common house cat suggested this behavior may be a general mammalian trait--therefore very early, very deep. And such may be the case, but I got sidetracked when one at least of the reasons cats exhibit this behavior came to mind. Sex. Male cats have to be aggressive, they have to perpetuate their kittiness over as much of the planet as possible. Female cats though, can afford to wait to be noticed, a mere meow and they have all the attention they need. Perhaps it all comes down to a differential just so that motion never ceases.

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.