The Difference Between Physics and Philosophy

The Difference Between Physics and Philosophy could be phrased this way:

Philosophy (at it's purest, as in the radical empiricism of Jan Cox) is distinguishable from physics by the fact

philosophy has wheels.

The Significance of Jan Cox

Regarding the historical significance of Jan Cox:

A man finds out what is going on. It happens through out history. What the man has, perhaps, found out is the nature of words. This is not how it would have always been phrased by those who know. You might say, the man has found out what knowing is. A wrinkle here, first noticed, to my knowledge, by Gurdjieff, is that how this is phrased, and how the learning occurs, is an aspect of an historical process. Gurdjieff talked about the physical man, the emotional man, the intellectual man. Since I am a little vague on the exact terms here, let me stress my point is just this: men learned differently in different eras. Jan talked about this: what was sufficient for the physical man is no longer enough to "wake up." Now the physical element of waking up, is subsumed in Jan's phrase: lateral expansion. Necessary, but not sufficient, for awakening. I am speaking now, not from personal knowledge, but from a recollection of the words of one who knew. This puts my input here, in a slightly different category than book learning. There is no word for it, (the quality of information) and I am not going to invent one now.

There are many many spiritual teachers now who have not appreciated this simple point about waking up in different centers. And there are plenty of books written by those who have stumbled into experiences which lead them to make assumptions about their own spiritual states. It is a mental awakening which is necessary for modern man. What is the difference you ask, men still have bodies, they still have emotional centers, shouldn't their experiences count as awakening. Their experiences count as data (so to speak) for a topology of mankind, yes. But the wrinkle in the carpet here, is that these spokesman for spiritual learning, they do not know how they got where they are. And by labeling it falsely, (that is, by using words) they diminish considerably the odds of their own further progress. Jan Cox put this point more vividly. It is on a tape someplace. The task for modern man is more complicated than that of earlier seekers.

Jan Cox understood this. Alone, in the second half of the twentieth century, it was Jan Cox who clearly saw what was needed for a person to progress in the only meaningful way possible for our species.

Science and Its Discontents

C. P. Snow made a career describing what he called the gulf between religion and science.  Nobody reads him much anymore, and that is mainly because that battle is over. That gulf may even, as one wag said, have never been more than a ditch anyway.

Still scientists seem not to have gotten the word. They spend as much time distancing themselves from the those intellects who feed on the fumes of the fast food wrappers that scientists leave, as they do denouncing religion.  In both cases one has to ask what is going on here.  

Why expend energy on denouncing the kooks and fundamentalists?  The evidence of quantum entanglement is not proof of mental telepathy.  Why waste your breath on denouncing such rooky thinking when there is the mystery of dark energy to occupy one's intellect. Nobody but the scientists takes certain fundamentalist preachers as exemplars of religion. And especially since there is a sociologically interesting class of intellects-- the scientific popularizers-- whose job it is to keep the borders of science pristine, why expend your energy in this direction. 

 What are they afraid of---an invasion of a faculty meeting by people waving diagrams of perpetual motion machines or rattling rosaries at them. .

I do not suggest there are not shades of gray here. Look at Perelman, declining the Field medal, the Nobel for mathematicians. I mean ---LOOK at his figure in photographs. Is he not the picture of a Russian staretz? (The holy men from the steppes of Czarist Russian).  

Nor is my intent to denigrate scientists, they are a critical portion of humanity, the mechanical brain in fact.

Still this wasteful use of humanity's brain cells, leads me to propose, just a thought, and probably not by any means a comprehensive explanation, but--- it is as if scientists are trying to forget, trying to obscure aspects of a planetary reality, wherein the distance between a scientist and a foil capped  kook, is so small as to be insignificant, compared to the cleavage plane between  a master of radical mysticism, and the natural scientists.

Evidence in favor of my idea is the questions scientists do not ask. Scientists never ask how come we have to continually rediscover man's lack of free will and then continually forget about it, they do not ask whether it is logical to take the most literal of spokesmen for religion and treat them as exemplars of philosphical and religious insight. They do not ask whether the lack of answers to childish prayers is a relevant consideration to one exploring the dimensions of humanity. The glaring inconsistencies and illogical approach to any survey of humanity, on the part of the scientific establishment, leads me to treat their behavior as a puzzle of the piece. 

A Habit of Royalty

Perhaps you wonder why purple is the color associated with royalty.  Some relate that it derives from an old dye used in the ancient world, but how could that explain the persistence of the color as emblematic of a ruling class.  The vision of spring color, that fresh minted quality, that is unique to latitudes where there are distinct seasons, is what brought up the question. Spring denotes a rebirth, a reassurance.  There is also perhaps a sense of excess, of extravagance in the flowers and blooms of that season.  Darwin in fact, said that nothing puzzled him more than how to explain the fact of flowering.  Royalty in the past was an inherited status, and nothing was less compelling to one of royal birth than the expectation that he or she needed to explain, to justify, their right to power.  A sublime sense of entitlement was the result and the potency of their genetic heritage.  An example of this, that Jan Cox pointed out, though in a different context, was the way that dispossessed royalty merely grouped on the border of their former territory, waiting the opportunity to regain control----giving up was simply not an option--it did not cross their minds.  In the color of purple, so predominant in spring blooming,  we see this sense of unearned glory, sheer celebration, and it occurred to me that this was parallel to the attitude of royal folk and might explain their preference for the color. 

What such a class did not comprehend was the idea of another kind of royalty, a mental, self minted, royalty which was always individual, never a group label. Both kinds of royalty share a disdain for verbal justification. And both are ultimately transitory. Only, though, the mental self-minted royal, builds in an awareness of the transitory. This recollection, of the vanishing, is not as obvious as the royal class insistence on dynastic succession, but it is more realistic. More realistic, and the opposite of a group royalty in that it must be, invisible, to the world.

Picture of spring

It's spring, and the cat sits at the foot of the tree. The cat is alert but still, quiet, even the twitching tail is still. So quiet. Why is this. The cat is waiting for some vernal creature. You could be the cat, and you would be waiting for ---- a word.... Waiting like this of course will be different for you and the cat. Your triumph is NOT catching something. For both of you patience and quiet will bring success.

woods and words

One picture of the way words work is fence slats. You know, those
privacy fences. You walk or run by and you are aware of mainly of
these flat identical pieces of wood. How could that be like words?
Identical pieces of wood are like words? In a way words are like slat
of wood though, identical slats of wood. Because while there is a
small --what the philosphers call denotative value to words, (the
definitions, which you might say make words different) in fact words
have many other functions in the human economy, and these functions
--- maintaining a certain homeostatic stability in your psyche for
instance--- rely on aspects of words which are little observed or
analyzed. Words for instance function to insulate people, even
scientists, everybody in fact, beyond a certain age, from the actual
buzz and rush and constant motion of the world we share in. We could
not function if we paid attention to everything going on. What has
happened though (and Jan Cox discussed this a great length in his
books and papers) is that we have come to take words as if THEY were
the reality. Assuming words are reality is like eating a cereal box
for breakfast. You are missing the real fun of life. So when I say
words are like slats in a fence, it is to point out that between they
slats, if you can slow down, between the slats you get a glimpse of a
world you have forgotten, of color and light and wonder. Between the
words. Learning to look between the words is actually very difficult
and can take years, although some folks get a blessed glimpse
accidentally and this spurs them on investigate these events and
strive to make them reoccur. That at least is the way it seems in the
beginning. For everyone.

A 13th century straw, after 800 years

Picture a postage stamp, somehow mine is faded, purple, and cancelled,
but it can be any stamp. In your mind tear the stamp into as small of
pieces as possible. Still visible, and adhering to your finger tip.
Get out an exacto knife, put the smallest part of the stamp on a safe
surface, and slice a tinier piece of stamp. Barely visible to the
cutter. It is possible that all anyone knows, is about the size of
that partial postage piece.