Driving on Ice

There is an inherent inconsistency in writing about a man whose
technique to point people beyond the horizon of the obvious, was
original thought, a man who said, don't think the same thought twice.
He called the techniques, for reasons which might be clear if you
followed the above, various names, of which neuralizing is one.
The group of students to whom he spoke (those whom he allowed to
attend) presented a variety of names to the public aspect of his
activities, as one means to explore the dimensions such cerebral
discipline illuminated. We were Evoteck, The Future Now, and many
other titles. But how can such details be recalled without using
words that we learned from others in our early years, words we did not
invent, for who then could understand anything one said? And how can
one write about ideas some one else spoke? To glimpse these questions
is to have some grasp on a major technique used by the radical mystic
Jan Cox.
How to explain his ideas without violating his basic message, is a
question that must stay in the forefront.
It is even possible the dilemma I am bringing up is not the worst
trouble you can get in when struggling to apply his directions.
All this came to mind recently when I pondered how to mention a
wonderful quote from someone who died many centuries ago.
(120 AD). The author of Parallel Lives,: Plutarch.

"The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled."

Am I going to end this post with some kind of resolution? Just
this--Jan said to us one icy night: To drive on ice do one of two
things----drive very slow, or drive VERY fast.

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...?