The Initial Color

It was the Book of Kells that got me studying again the illuminated
manuscripts that we all have seen in pictures. The extravagances, the
bright jewel toned color; the scenes of daily life, daily contemporary
life, to the artists, the monks who labored on the books, are
meticulously crowded into a scroll on a single letter. You could say
art was here in the service of religion as most folks then, even
royalty, couldn't read and learned most from the pictures in these
books,

You could say that, and ignore what you know about the timeless space
the working artist occupies. Same thing applies to this thought:
Perhaps these infinite glimpses crowded into a curlique, are art in
the service of science. For have we not here, a celebration of
objectivity, an objectivity that looks at the human mind, and lays out
the true wonder of such a development, as thinking, in the species.
The letters of thought are there on the page, but in the illuminated
manuscript the words are put into a wider, humbling landscape that
measures the letter with a scientific exactitude. Perhaps, sometimes,
what you cannot say, you can occasionally draw.

Illuminating McCandless

Chris McCandless and his trek into  unknown wilderness, a quest apparently inspired (according to the books and movies on his story) by a need to establish his skills and self-sufficiency, is a story which rings familiar for many people who do not follow his example. They understand they think his motivation. 

The focus on what prompted his journey could be still more precise. He did not put it this way but his mind did not fit his body, there was a continual sense of something at odds, which found some surcease in situations when he was alone. 

Most people feel this disconnect at some time. It is a common experience -- because nobody's mind fits their body. The mind is a common grid which is imposed on people, and part of the imposition is the feeling that it is YOUR mind, when it is not.  Did you make up all the words you use? Of course not, if you had, no one could understand you. You get synced into a previously existing system when you get educated, and although the syncing only works if you believe in your own individuality, in fact the grid you become part of is planet wide and serving purposes which are not necessarily to your personal benefit.

Just like a scratchy shirt label at the back of your neck, from a garment purchased 'off the rack' there is a sense of irritation which is in some people becomes so grave that they persist in looking for peace. This can come from various sources and only very rarely does an individual take the necessary first step for real peace.

That first step is getting a sense of the direction in which the problem lies.  Chris never got that focus; he headed into the unknown physical world, after his graduation from Emory University, and the change of scenery provided some balm, an effect though which he needed to renew. A change of scenery is actually a tried method of keeping the mechanical mind off balance and inspired at the same time. But Mccandless took what is a work trick, as the goal itself. 

McCandless felt that irritation of an ill-fitting mind more strongly than most. But he still was looking in the wrong direction.  He wound up lost and starving in the physical wilderness.  For whatever reasons he did not look inside himself to a possible wilderness there.  He could not question the viability and sources of his own verbal grid.

An trivial footnote to the McCandless story is that for a few years he was a few miles only, from a real work group.  At that time it was called Evoteck Theatre.  Such a brush with possible help is not ironic because most people never find a real path, and if, they do, they do not persevere. The odds were greatly against any hope for McCandless to resolve his unease.  Another writer put it this way: "Many are called, but few chosen..."

Everybody starts lost.  I have no idea why different people go in different directions. I am aware though, that failure or success is not a matter of individual initiative or cleverness. It is not a matter of individual anything.  Most never stumble upon a real way, they just forget the questions.

There remain a very few, few measured in terms of centuries of people, who persevere, and for whom, anything off the rack, is a kind of torture.

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.