If People Were Cells in an Larger Organism

If people were cells in an organism called----called what, I will say
Humanity, though really I am not sure if there even is a better
descriptive term. Jan Cox, the radical philosopher spoke in these
terms, and they will serve our purposes now. If People were cells in
an organism called Humanity, how would we know, how would we know we
were cells in part of something larger.
Well, for one thing we would apparently take seriously apologies on
the part of public figures, Apologies for being human, even though,
what could there be to apologize for?? People who operated on the
basis of their intellect, (as everyone says they do, but if they
really DID.) would find it confusing that someone would say I'm sorry
for being what they are, and what everyone else is, and for doing what
everyone else does. No, this phenomenon makes most sense if it is an
aspect of processing happening on a larger level, a processing that is
only called morality at the blind level of an single cell.

And what if someone hits you, what if someone knocks over your stack
of blocks, and you get so mad you pay a huge amount of money, and
blood to extract revenge, to destroy these other people who hurt you.
You want to destroy these people who attacked. Okay, this makes sense
at the level of hormones and self preservation. But---why then do you
not do the sensible next step to destroying them, which is try to
understand why this other tribe would attack you. Would not
espionage,successful surveillance, all depend on your understanding
your enemy, yes, destroy them, but----to do this----you have to
understand them first. Yet that is the one thing we do not do---we do
not make a concerted effort to understand the motivations of those who
consider themselves our enemy. Surely that is the rational approach.
But if we were part of a larger organism, the idea that intellect
guides our actions may be a useful ploy, a means of transferring
energy. We might guess something like this is going on when we
exhaust ourselves, kill our young, spend our treasure, and still do
not do the obvious first thing to defeating our enemies, which first
thing is----understanding their viewpoint. The logical first step,
using our vaunted intellect, is exactly what does NOT happen, and
which is now, years later, still not even an option which can be
discussed publicly. What could be going on here??

The crowdsourcing in your head

The quote below is from an article about what happened to a facebook group called Secret London:
(http://eu.techcrunch.com/2010/02/07/startup-to-launch-after-secret-london-facebook-group-amasses-180000)

'The explosion in the SL group is reflective of the generation online now. As Philippou says "Everyone of my generation is on Facebook. I'm 21 and have completely grown up in the online evironment. Time Out doesn't really connect with me on the Net. Things like crowdsourced content do."'

What struck me was that ---mainly---I finally got what the word crowdsourcing means and then MAINLY--
I noticed a thing that makes it so difficult to talk about what Jan Cox called "This Kind of Thing," which is
crowdsourcing.  But not the kind in the article, the kind in your head, where every thought is a crowd, and what you have to do, like looking between the slats on a fence, is --- see between the words, between the voices.
So, interestingly enough, crowdsourcnig is not new---the reason words are the unfootable  terrain thy are to the seeker, is because all words are crowdsourced.  A word that was single sourced would communicate nothing to another. How could it, you just made it up.  Hence the popularity of This Kind of Thing.

Quoting from a quote

Connie Jones, the New Orleans cornetist working with Jack Teagarden at the time of the trombonist's death, was a pallbearer for the wake, held at a funeral parlor on leafy St. Charles Avenue: 'I remember seeing him there in a coffin, a travelling coffin. They were going to fly him to Los Angeles for burial right after that. The coffin was open and I remember thinking 'Boy he really looks uncomfortable in there'. "'Not that he was that tall. Maybe five foot ten or so, at most. But he was kinda wide across the shoulders - and most of all he just gave you the impression he was a big man, in every way. In that coffin, - well, I can't really explain it, but he seemed to be scrunched up into a space that was too small to contain him'

This quote of Connie Jones, about Jack Teagarden's body, not fitting into a coffin, made me think of words, and how they--words--can become a coffin. Do, for most folks. Words are coffins is kind of the default settings for humanity. It is hard to find the default settings, and once you do, and adjust the settings to "original thought," (your only chance) the developers do a mass reversal, and you have to start all over, finding the settings.....

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.