CES- Consuming Energy Simplified

Some might suggest that the internet has strengthened individuality: now we can set up niche news feeds, and social networks geared to some obscure interests. A truly boggling amount of information is available, not boggling in terms of quantity perhaps, so much as boggling in terms of ease of access.
Still there may be a case for the opposite, that our technical environment actually homogenizes people to an unprecedented amount. 

That humanity is something larger than the individual is true by definition. That the accent of reality may glint brighter on Humanity per se, rather than the individual is not a common proposition but one that could be defended (at another time).  That humanity could resemble a machine which may be, itself, part of larger machinery, is verifiable by quiet logical consideration.

A friend noted that it felt strange to be privy to the life of someone you do not consider still a part of your own life. The subject was facebook, a social networking site. She echoed sentiments I had not myself expressed, but noticed. There is something different about social networking sites. That difference may be partly that the function of social networking is not to strengthen our own adorable individuality, but rather to diminish our originality so that each person is a better fitting cog in a larger machine. The person then would be a more easily replaced cog, a cog which suddenly has increased functions it needs to serve in the larger machinery.
This kind of adjustment might be especially important to a machine which is increasing in size. This makes communication between parts of the machine subject to adjustment to allow efficient (let's say nerve impulses) which must now cover a larger distance in the same or even smaller amount of time. This is just an example, of what may be adjustments growth demands.

The above though is too abstract---what would the individual notice that would prompt thoughts like those above?  The discomfort my friend mentioned is an example. My own example involves the diversity of people on my friends list. People who see different aspects of me and in fact may not be able to comprehend some things, like my dumpster diving habits. Now what has happened--I may temper my comments to something blander that will not provoke confusion on the part of people who have known me for a long time. Notice the pressure to have a high number of friends on your fb list, notice that you are only supposed to have ONE profile on facebook, and then notice if you do not also tailor your comments in what could be called self-censorship.

The effect of this is, just on the mechanical level, to make people blander. This is what I meant by talking about homogenization. Everybody is a little more alike, everybody thereby makes a better cog.

This is an example, the web itself may be considered a more highly evolved level of nervous system, for an organism the parts of which do not need to appreciate their own actual function. I think of twitter, and the character limitations.  And the popularity of twitter, and perhaps speed bumps would be an analogy of the function of twitter. 

These are just some thoughts,  not necessarily true or false, but designed to help us consider our world from a fresh perspective. Or, I may just be saying that...

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....