and WHY was Prometheus a -- "thief"?

Why in the story of Prometheus stealing fire for mankind, stealing it from the gods, why was he labeled, a thief, why was the story structured so that the gift to humanity was something stolen? Perhaps you could say this was a reflection of what Jan Cox meant when he said when man developed an intellect, (got kicked out of the garden) he fell upstairs. Both stories involve crimes. Stil, what got me started on this was another aspect: because, Prometheus botched the job, had to of course---but he only got half the treasure, when you could say something else the gods had, was necessary for fire to be a gift, rather than fire being "hot" on multiple levels. In this reading Prometheus was a thief because he botched the job, he stole, not from the gods, but from Humanity.   And this would be, because, Prometheus only stole a tool that could be used EXTERNALLY, when as the gods knew well,  there was an internal world that need controlled ignition to be functioning at its highest level.
Crime, clumbsiness, makes me think of the big bang idea, that without some unimaginable small tremor in the explosion, the universe would be uniform, an identical soup in all directions, rather than diverse with planets and space, and different colors of matter.  Just a thought...

In Greek the word for spirit and wind is the same

Catching a ride on adjacent natural events got man started on the road
to civilization. He used a forest fire to cook his dinner. A river to
bath in, a cave to duck into for shelter. Is it any wonder the Greeks
spoke of four elements: earth air fire water. (I think those were
their elements.) And gradually he learned to manipulate these powers
which all had the power to destroy him physically. Prometheus was
considered a man who stole from the gods. What we forgot was that he
stole just a bit of the godlike powers. Crucial to man, fire for the
gods was just a crumb of the cake of their powers. Now man considers
he knows the full formula for energy. He would not admit this, science
he says, has not YET fully revealed the secrets of the universe, but
really, that is his defacto belief. Without this faith in his own
powers, man would not act upon them, and thus his formulas would not
have led mankind on the path history reveals. He had to believe his
insight was in fact, the whole picture.

All this is looking outward. Actually man is part of a flow of earth,
air, fire, water, and every breath he takes is proof of this
commingling. Man forgets his own partialness and partness of
everything and this forgetting disables him--disables his need to
understand himself. The inward life of man has a potential for being
understood and, to some extent, harnessed; there are internal energies
which can be used for a kind of ignition. Of these the scientist
knows nothing, and in fact, actively, often, discourages these
investigations.

Many of these internal investigations are absurd. But as Jan Cox
reminded his students, the counterfeit would not exist were it not for
real gold. (This is one of the few times he quoted another.) One
hesitates to even call these internal quests spiritual, considering
the abuses of the word religion which dominate the intellectual
landscape of modern man.

The task --to grasp and harness if not totally control, internal
energy flows--though is not just legitimate, it is crucial, for a few.
It is obviously not necessary for most people and this fact may
perhaps reflect larger energy flows and needs which man cannot
comprehend. That does not answer the question of why so few people
are drawn to, the Real Work. An answer to this question was written
down long ago, and it is a good of an answer as this person knows: The
wind bloweth where it listeth.

I Piss Them Ologies

Google has a program they hoped would compete with wikipedia. They named it Knol, which they say is a unit of knowledge. Is knowledge something composed of units, like bricks, to put together and make a wall? Students of Jan Cox will recall him saying, and elucidating, that "everything is connected." But this essay is concerned with how to convey this to people unfamiliar with basic epistemological concerns.  I am beginning to think the important questions are epistemological, rather than say, ontological, but----that is not the focus now.  How we know, what we know, that is epistemology.  The idea of knowledge composed of units has a certain obviousness.  We're young, we gather bits, like alphabet blocks, and when we get bigger we have a bunch of bits, and can converse and know stuff.
But---can we discover anything, can we add to the sum of Humanity's knowledge, can we ask basic questions, can we, in effect, know in the sense of originality, of real change, while playing with these bits, these units, that others have defined?
There are advantages to knowledge as composed of bits.  It avoids the skepticism that comes from recognizing, glimpsing that one thing affects another, because then you have to say, is this another unit of knowledge, this connection? And don't you get, this way, such a huge pile of bits that they are uncountable, and unmanageable, daunting regardless of the realms of mathematics marshalled to ride herd on these bits.  Or could a glimpse of this chaos be, exciting...fun...knowledge at a new level.
One advantage of knowledge as units, is this picture also fits our experience, we open a book, and find out that scientists used to rob graveyards to get bodies to study anatomy.  They, another nit, (is that short for unit, no, it's a typo, and I am not going to continue calling units, nits) called this practise, of getting corpse, 'burking." Another unit to stack on top of the first.
But--is this--- knowledge? I never stole a corpse, a whole planet of detail is hidden in these words, and obscured by putting a period at the end of the sentence, and the persuasiveness of everybody else agreeing this is a fact.
Would real knowledge involve questioning all assumptions, and resolutely trying to follow what you see; would knowledge involve an element necessarily of character, in bravely facing consequences?
Would knowledge involve internal change?
I merely raise these questions now. 
Let us close with an example. A king rules over several countries.  He says, Abalonia is my country. If there are at that moment, insurgents in neighboring Clambakia, planning an invasion to assist their brothers in musselhood, to what extent is that king ignorant? Did he ever know anything? If he keeps or loses that country after some external actions, how does that future outcome, affect what he knows, now. It is just a question.

Not a Thought, But Thinking Itself

...Interview with a leading American writer, a commentator on global
culture, a professor at Wharton University and it gives us a marvelous
example of the mechanical mind. This is not about ideas, and that is
why I mention a living writer here, my point has nothing to do with
his ideas, I find them interesting in fact. No, my point here, is how
the author of The Empathic Civilization, (just out, do go buy a copy)
illustrates, not an idea, not a type of thinking, but thinking itself.
I am using Rifkin here merely as an example of how everyone's mind
operates. Rifkin's thesis in his new book is that mankind, is not by
nature, violent, no, rather, he argues, humanity is born a social
animal. You listen and it slips right by you----Why exactly must man
be one or the other? He is both, a violent creature and a social
creature. One does not rule out the other,
unless, of course, you are limited to the ordinary human thinking functions.

Rifkin is arguing on a binary basis, if man is not that, then man
must be this. This is the basis of the mechanical mind, it is not the
full measure of the human mind, but it is the mechanical processing of
the mechanical mind, that has given us scientific progress. The
Indo-European root of the word science is a verb meaning to pull
apart, and this is necessary if man is to rearrange his external
world. This ability of the mechanical mind to imagine how things might
be different than they are, as we look out at the world, has allowed
human civilization to develop. An example Jan Cox used to make this
point, is of routing water up hill. You take apart the present picture
and imagine how it might be otherwise, with water mills, for instance.

But the beauty of the mechanical mind, need not limit us to thinking
the mind must be this or that, mechanical or, mechanical and something
more. The mind of our species has potentials which are not commonly
recognised. One of these talents, is, in the words of Jan Cox, the
potential to think beyond the number two.

A Distinction

Seekers of whatever stripe and whenever time likely start on the path commonly called, the mystic quest, looking for----magic.  Magic---that the fundamentals of reality can be...changed.  The glory of what Jan Cox saw,  and cared to help others also see...is the glory of What IS... Simply to see what is.

This question is not about irony

How strange is it, that the most imaginary of man's creations, evokes the bloodiest of responses? I am thinking of religion and the wars we needn't list.  Jan Cox said once the contemporary religion was not just dead, but stinking.  This was decades ago that he used those terms.  So perhaps I am just caught up in the moment, since his terminology would suggest an evolutionary aspect to religion.  I am not confident I have exhausted the topic: how is it that the most made up is that which makes men kill the fastest.  One thought that  occurs is the need to protect that which one detects (the hollow sound of certain wood when rapped) is false.  Yet these people seem so sincere----(always a bad sign of course.)  Or...and...when hormones need to rage for unstateable reasons, they get to rage least encumbered when raging about religion.
These events will subside, and men will, after the fact,  pretend they have a grasp of what happened.  And the intellectuals will never notice that these fictions almost utterly obscure  thrilling and astounding dynamisms, discoverable through mere objectivity.

Other cultures seem to have a better grasp on basic realities. I just found this quote from a 16th century Japanese writer, named  Ikoma Chikamasa:

Fooled into believing Heaven and Hell are not fake
Some people rejoice and some people quake.

That's the 1500s.  I have no clue about the life cycle of religions.

Touring the tourist

So what is going on with these Presidential, or royal, tours of
disaster scenes? It is not a fresh idea to compare a person to a
country: you have the brain,---the governing class, running things,
you have the heart/ belly, middle class, the emotions,giving the
whole a reason to live, and you have the feet, the workers, who
actually get anything done. Nothing new in this picture really. What
got me started on a query was the universalness of a certain behavior
on the part of the king/ president, and that is---they tour the
disaster area. Their tours are always on the news. If they don't
make this visit, they are chided as 'out of touch.' Yet what is going
on here, the president does not have ministers he trusts to report
back with accurate details on what is happening? He can't look at news
photos? What--he doesn't have CNN? Why is it mandatory that the leader
go in person to the disaster area?

Because he likes to, that's why. It is fun to tour disaster areas as
long as you are up in a helicopter, and know that when you land on the
tarmac, there will be an audience to wave to, there will be reporters
eager to capture your words, there will be a clean warm dry distance
from what you have seen. Of course it's fun. Road Trip!!!! You get
to see what holds the potential for something new, something
unexpected, something different from your everyday routines--in the
toppled buildings beneath you--, without ever being in danger of
learning anything. The opportunities for the refreshments of the new--
where there is no chance to be drawn into any self examination -- are
not so common. The royal tour of the disaster area is popular because
the fun has such a low price. You are literally looking outward, and
there is a relief, though an unrecognized relief, in being able to do
what is necessary for your continuance in power AND get the reward of
having fun.

As with the president, so with the mechanical mind---the, ahem,
governing body. The mind insists on only looking outward, at a
certain point in its growth. This is for reasons of self-preservation,
a governing motive with those in power, and with that cerebral
distinctiveness of our species, the sapiens part. Just like Stalin,
self preservation comes first, and if self preservation is the only
thing, well, so bit. The mature mind really cannot admit it doesn't
know stuff. The metaphor falls apart of course when you consider the
effectiveness of a dictator compared with the effectiveness of binary
mechanical thought. But that is not really the point in this little
essay.

The mind looks out, and refuses to look inward: there is no
questioning, no increase in knowledge which comes from being open to
novelty, to say nothing of the quest of a few for real answers in the
"blooming confusion" to quote William James, which defines the
intellectual life. You can see this writ large in 20th century
philosophy which threw out metaphysics, for positivism. Just tossed
it out. Now when Jan Cox, one of the few real thinkers of the last
century, said, "if you can't touch it, it's not real, " that is
metaphysics, but he could say that because he had plumbed the shallows
of ordinary intellectual endeavors. He laughed at the thought that
modern science disregarded the inner life. In your head, he would
point, is your laboratory for, in his words, "doing this thing."

But 20th century philosophy is just one example of the intellect
looking outward, and only, outward.I hope though that it gives some
sense to my thoughts about touring the tourist--appreciating the
nature of the mechanical mind as we strive to see in ourselves, a good
example of that tourist, and press our quest to determine what else
may be inside, besides, the binary mind.