Entangled thoughts

A neat thing in today's science news: scientists have demonstrated quantum entanglement in the visible world, what is commonly considered the realm of classical physics. Two objects, each a quarter of an inch across, have shown that what happens to one, affects the behavior of the other, though they are not connected. Such events used to be called 'action at a distance' and considered evidence of the observers lack of scientific rigor. Now they are called quantum entanglement. Quantum mechanics has typically been microscopic and invisible to the naked eye: the relation between the microscopic and macroscopic realms fundamental and not clearly understood. So evidence of the quantum mechanical effect, called quantum entanglement, that is macroscopic, is a big deal. Here's a link to the article, describing the research published in Nature:
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/47638/title/Entanglement_in_the_macroworld

Why I mention this in a blog about the purposes of Jan Cox, is that if you read the article you will note it says, the results were consistent and could only be explained by quantum entanglement. Let me quote article in Science News exactly: "So the two [objects] were linked in a way that only quantum mechanics could explain."

Okay, here is the mechanical mind full bore ahead. In fact----nobody understands quantum entanglement at all, even just on the microscopic level. They have just given up doubting it exists. That does not mean scientists understand what quantum entanglement is, so it is a sleight of thought for them to explain something by saying it is quantum entanglement. Giving something a name is not the same as understanding it. But notice this basic fact slips by without notice. Because the focus on the unknown might call into question the nature of the mechanical rational human mind. Because tangled thoughts prevent you from seeing the edge.

Epistemological curls

There's what we call the mind, and some stuff it knows and some stuff it thinks it knows, and mostly it forgets what it does not know.  But how much can you know if you do not have a sense of what you do not know?  Perhaps a growing vine pictures this:  the vine twirls and curls and can reach quite high.  As long as it is not aware that it is around a fence post, the self-knowledge of the vine may include "height" as a predominate feature of vines.

Why Is Afghanistan Unconquerable

Afghanistan is famous as a country the British empire (in its heyday) could not conquer, and in the 20th century the Russian empire, though right next door, could not subdue. To my knowledge no one has pinpointed why this invincibility should be manifested by such a primitive area. It seems plausible to argue that the very primitivity of a large area explains its unconquered state.  There are not many roads for tanks to roll down in huge numbers, or airports, and electric lines. Without a modern  infrastructure freedom for a people who know their land is easier to maintain. 

Similarly in some ways, is a verbal infrastructure key to grasping the knowing of a Real Thinker.
What the very few in all of history have, as mystical figures, is an ability to control the volume of their verbal thoughts.  NOT an ability to turn off the radio, no, that is a misconception of those who merely read books on mysticism. Such clarification is part of the heritage of modern figures of whom Jan Cox alone in the latter half of the 20th century was a representative. The Real Thinker grasps that the verbal infrastructure in his mind is part of a larger structure which does not represent his own personal interests.

The freedom of the Real Thinker is a freedom of wide quiet vistas and subterranean canniness.

Touching stories

Had a friend who stopped to rescue a dog on a busy highway, okay the name was Buford Hwy, but the other details have been ever so slightly changed to protect the ordinary (that'd be me.)  He was hit by a car and sent to a local hospital with a broken, uh, elbow. Jan Cox had me give this person a message when I visited him in the hospital. The message: This better teach you not to be a do-gooder.  That was the gist.  And an expansion of this message, which of course was not what I delivered at the time: the ordinary can be so nice. Being ordinary was not what Jan Cox was about.

Time frames

Don't really know where the word abracadabra came from, but I have to wonder if the word is not the sterile remnant of a once lively trick: say you are trying to convey how circular and unilluminating the mechanical mind must be, on the level of words.

Art can offer a longer time frame than words. Say you are trying to convey the message, in the statue of Romulus and Remus, nursing on a wolf.The children are still totally meshed with the physical world. That is their strength, but they will go on to found a city. The wolf cannot know how different these pups are, ---but the wolf pack that builds a city, an empire, is a quantitative difference which becomes a qualitative difference.
If the stoic knowing in the face of that female wolf could be put into words, the words would quickly become drained of their usefulness. As a sculpture some remnant of the mystery is still extant: how the future can unfold in totally unpredictable ways.

But to progress words have their own value. Jan Cox once described them as fast food. The trick of the word 'abracadabra' is that it may have originated in an attempt to make words look at words. May once have really been a magic word: the first time it was uttered it lit the mechanicalness of verbalizing because it was a word withOUT a meaning. As a word the first time it was used, abracadabra showed the thinness of the ice that mechanical language is. To succeed at showing the hollowness of man's rational speech IS magic. This first, functional, phase, was very brief. As such must be. The glimpse of magic the word provided quickly became the impotent word: magic. With use abracadabra become the opposite of it's original import.

Life (words, that is) is brief. Art--not so much.

Mysticism of a planet

It sometimes occurs to me to change the name of this blog. American mysticism turns out to mean native American to some --those hunters and garnerers who owned the woods because they were home in the woods. Actually my original idea was a bow to Gurdjieff who pointed to the United States as the flatland. I meant to refer to the European phase as Gurdjieffs and then Jan Cox as the American.  But I probably won't change the name.
The idea of the crystal radio came to my attention, an early option anyone could set up if they had a certain crystal and a fine wire. The crystal setup worked best from a high altitude, so children climbed into trees to test their knowledge of physics by making the crystal radio transmit.  The wire tip had to be very fine, the idea was a point contact that worked, allowing radio wave transmission, and the wire had to be fine because it literally had to touch a particular electron.
That kind of fineness is like the attention we struggle to attain and keep-- that is one picture.  The struggle for a precise but next to nonexistent touch, which resulted, when successful,  in words or music. Perhaps if the transmission is successful, there IS a silky background of forest and figure  behind the flatlander words.

This is not a clue

For my own sense of propriety I would like to amend the phrase in the
previous post, where I say, "whatever else I may have learned." It
should read 'unlearned.'