What a Decade

The phrase Jan Cox used, 'there is no truth in words,' is pointing to
the same thing as the formulation 'the opposite is never true.' And
these formulas make no sense to the ordinary, that is, mechanical
mind, which typifies us all most of the time, and most of us all the
time. This example comes to mind, the love and tenderness Jan had for
what another generation would have called the created world. He
referred to plants once, as that category of living thing which clung
to its parent. He would not let an animal he knew about suffer. But he
did not dwell on what could not be helped, and he had not a moment of
mental energy to spend imagining situations which were not in front of
him. You saw a situation of an animal in need, you did the possible,
and mainly, then, you did not let the situation dwell in your mind. He
would use pesticides at times. And one night he said to us, (words to
this effect): "there is no need to move earthworms off the sidewalk."
The ordinary might find these contradictory situations. I am amazed at
the thought of his patience with his students.

The Right Tools

The wonderful advances and exciting  perspective of theoretical physics are like a jigsaw puzzle. When presented with the unknown, scientists will argue there are still pieces to find, to fit in, but they are working on it, (they have been saying this for centuries.) What they do not perceive is that the jigsaw puzzle needs a board to fit the pieces into, a table for the board to rest on. This, since they are unaware of the limitations of the tools available to physicists, is invisible to the scientists and so the limitations of their knowledge is not apparent.
There are tools available to those who seek to know, mental tools whose existence is mentioned in historical texts, tools which if consistently applied lead to reproducible results.
Without a feeling of spaciousness which an awareness of one's ignorance allows, the real questions cannot be addressed.

Periodically Speaking

Gurdjieff is mentioned in a recent Psychology Today blog. I recall Jan's interest in that publication: he thought (I am suspecting here) of it as a means of checking the state of the larger mass of humanity. Certainly his interest did not reflect a concern for psychology itself, the vast majority of which is just dreamlike constructions, with no basis in scientific evidence.
And we are already in the blog in a bit of a morass, as we need to bend words to express for common consumption uncommon insights about man which are better described as anthropology: Man considered from the outside as part of a larger structure. So from the perspective of a visitor to this planet, Jan Cox would leaf through issues, in a manner which was not really reading. He remarked more than once that he could sum up a book simply by glancing at the preface. I would call this talent as reliant not upon imaginary facts, but the altitude of the knower. That last is my phrasing, not his. He asked me once to recommend his website to be listed in Harper's. He was always aware of the worth of his contribution to a world of knowledge, and despised waste of any kind. He never gave up the thought that people would hear something in his words and be attracted to learn more, from he who understood the limitations of any speech.
Of course----Gurdjieff died sixty years before the passing mention cited here....

What Jan Cox might have pointed out about a new movie, had he been still alive

Just saw an interview with James Cameron, whose new movie, Avatar, looks to be a hit. Not going to see it, don't need to. The director's movie Titanic, tells me all I need to know.  We still though can glean some interesting points. Apparently a lot of trouble went into conceiving  thousands of new plant species, a new language, for these inhabitants of another planet.  All this novelty is spent on --- a boy meets girl plot.  Couple of things-- for someone with a certain aim, all fiction becomes inane, it is recycled fumes for one trying to breath at a new altitude (altitude measured in millimeters of course)l.

Also---we can ask, what underlies this reliance on a threadbare plot.  When I spoke of trying to get a breath of air from a higher zone, I was pointing to the possibilities for an individual.  This focus on coupling is magnetic perhaps because it points to the dreams of the mass of humanity. For the species to endure, we must procreate.  These biological necessities point to the fact of immortality---or should I say, the possibility of immortality--at the level of a species. This game is worthy of the attention of fictioneers, regardless of the silliness of their plots. In this particular movie too, we get to see what is a growing trend, I think, and that is the mechanical dreams of some scientifically based individual immortality, on the part of those who think they have given up the illusions of mechanical religion. (In the movie a crippled person is put in a new body.) This whole impetus behind research into and stories about  robotic intelligence, brain dumping, cryogenics, are driven by children who cannot accept the fact that immortality, is, so far as anyone can tell, not an option for the individual. 

At least with mechanical religion the plot lines were a little more interesting than boy meets girl.  That thought could be a last salute to mechanical religion.

The Climate Inside, (as Caro once said)

Another report on declining Siberian tiger populations. These
reporters are part of the problem, though symptomatic is a fairer
label. What these wild animals need is lots of free space,
untrammeled by people, and what you have are researchers setting up
camps and making trails through hitherto isolated wilds. The
researchers and scientists are part of the problem.And THEY will say,
without our reporting the world will not rally to save the tigers.
And they are right. This is the mechanical mind, only notice----you
cannot hold both yes and no together. The ordinary mind, that machine
that is responsible for the progress of millenia, that binary
computer, will say, well, which is it? And that is the ordinary
mental apparatus of man. Being able to see with the stereoscopic
vision of one who grasps that yes and no can both be valid, and merely
present, together, a fairer picture, is a step on the way to....

Odd Odds

"Homeless Brothers set to inherit billions:" that's the headline for a
recent news story. My story is about -- odds. Lottery winners get
written up, and people find this encouraging, he won, why not me. What
no one thinks, unless they have listened to or read Jan Cox,
philosopher of a radical empiricism, is that, the event being in the
news, its newsworthiness, is why it will NOT happen to you. The
opposite, to speak loosely, (since another thing Jan spoke of, in his
attempt to point people's heads in a certain direction, is that "the
opposite is never true." This quote points to the nature of binary
thought though.) --- so speaking loosely, --- people find their doom
encouraging because they have no idea what is going on.

Similarly people take a so-called mystical experience, as an
authentication of whatever they believed before, rather than
conceiving the possibility that this event is a common experience,
rather like getting splashed by a car driving by you in the rain.
Except the forces involved are not glimpsed, much less understood. And
the possibility such is just pointing in a direction, rather than any
arrival, is not even in the universe of everyday assumptions. Jan's
picture of the nature of these common, wonderful, and transitory
'mystical' events, was they were like signs for Istanbul in a Parisian
train station.

What if, the odds of a sustained awakening, to speak loosely (I should
invent my own linguistic codes, tsl) are actually smaller than those
of finding one has inherited a fortune...?

Disignorance

Wow is this a great holiday or what. Here is another story that speaks for itself. This link,
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/carroll09/carroll09_index.html
is to the comments of a theoretical physicist Sean Carroll and the cool thing is, here is a scientist, not a science popularizer, so, after you read his assessment of what modern physics is lacking, notice---the number of times he says we don't know the answer to that and, his solution "think harder." This is a real scientist here talking, and there are some comments to be made on this category of person.
1. Real scientists have fun. That is why they are not more interested in the work of Jan Cox. (Of course now that Jan is dead, it is a question a living teacher, which I am not about to get into here.). Real scientists already DO a low grade version of "real work," and it is ------- fun beyond words.
2. But as I hinted, these fun having scientists are not driven by the psychological discrepancies which motivate many to search for some version of Real Work. So they miss the push to go forward and miss, well, everything. That's okay. We recognise our brothers even if they fail to get the family connection. Of course most who seek to solve a certain disignorance, never find the real work either. And at least the scientists are having real fun. Their yellow circuits are flashing on newness, they are living on an edge.

3. Real scientists do not have to face the primordial problem of how do you remember to (let's say, remember the work, it has different names.) All the natural scientist has to do is glance at the physical world surrounding him---that is where his intellect is focused, and the external world is where his achievement comes from. The natural scientist is using the mechanical mind for the job it is designed to do. Of course they are going to put words where words can't go. But you can't have everything. So the link I am giving is to an example of the most fun you can have with words on.

The link should be above, but here it is again:
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/carroll09/carroll09_index.html