Quoth the craven, evermore

Numbers are an aspect of reality---what kind, even mathematicians disagree. To a non-math person it seems that they are the backbone, the rigidity of science. All the explanations of science largley neglect the math parts I notice. Anyway, if you want to be precise you go to the right of the decimal, and, maybe, just keep moving. 

So is it not odd that these same numbers let us avoid----reality? What brought this to mind was the way numbers of years can fudge an old mystical "method." The method is not one Jan Cox used himself, , though he mentioned it. He merely said, it was not helpful to him. My recollection is of an obvious sense when he spole that it was a perfectly valid method.  (By method I mean the doing of the mystical search, not the talking about that pursuit.) The tool then we are discussing is (odd how long it is taking me to come to the point here) is the remembering of your own  mortality. That you, the subject, whatever else you know, you know, you will die.  

Assuming that is clear, and even writing about it objectively requires some steeliness, numbers can let you avoid this fact. Yes, if you think, well who knows when I will die, and you think one hundred years, who knows I could live that long, some people do, it could happen,

you are escaping, turning from, averting your consciousness from the reality of ---reality.

Obviously I am not recommending this method. And I will recall to everyone, what Jan said, if you are not smiling you did not "get it." He did not find this method helpful. It is nice though to have an example of a method, in case we forget what methods even are. Because to speak of something actively being used by the speaker, is to diminish it's value for the speaker. 

The meaning of freedom

how interesting that in a world of governments, of people with agenda, of mechanical struggle, of electronic monitoring,  the main---only--??--place of external freedom should be, the geographical place where it all began, --the place where men domesticated, fire, ---

caves

caves of mexico

caves of asia

caves I don't know about

.

Notice I said external freedom.

The nature, possibilities, limits, meaning of

freedom

is at the heart of the teaching of Jan Cox.

And if you take the above to have any political slant,

you are reading the wrong blog.

Jan actually did address the world of history---he saw the individual struggle as where one sought knowledge alternatively between the world outside and that within

and he had marvelous things to say on the subject of the external.

Rather than risk wasting some energy in what he said, let me just mention one thing,

that change is, 

IS,

but the cycles are beyond that of the life span of the individual.

News that is new.

Is Antarctica at the top or at the bottom?

When I recall the words of Jan Cox, and his description of what he chose to spend his life doing,  "I  call it the Work, (Way Of Real Knowledge) because that is what it is--Work, " words can seem like ice. Surface ice, the ice over a continent, a continent of mountains, all underneath a plane of unbidden white. 

What there is

That can be discussed---
The method.
.

Let there be....

How do you annotate a flash of light?

Such is the chore facing, not this those concerned to convey the burden of the ideas of Jan Cox, but the issue facing anyone who investigates the nature of human reality.  

The sun glinting in the trees, the carlights on the bedroom wall, the juncture of the light switch...

These phrases only make sense to someone who has experienced them.  What can more words add to the experience itself, except the dubious assumption that our experiences are the same?

Thothing it up

Thoth was, to be brief and inaccurate, the Egyptian god of mind, and writing. His representation in Egyptian art, though, is not dubious: this deity was presented either as a baboon, (sometimes just the head, on a human body) or an ibis. An Ibis for human thought strikes a precise note, does it not? Spindly legs, for perhaps that part of the human which is in the body, but not definitively. Sharp beak for pinpointing the PowerPoint points. How inspiring that those with a claim to inventing the first political state, should have so appropriately  picked a bird to convey the cerebral aspect of human reality. 

But what's with this baboon business? From the very vapors of the first marsh ascent, the people who looked around, and, able to catch their breath, finally, thought, we can do something with this, these people thought of "thought" in terms of a baboon. Does this not seem like a step backwards. Of course they did not have the perspective of modern evolution (considered by some superior to  polytheism as an explanatory structure). But what about baboons, clarified for the Egyptians, the mental dimensions of their world. The baboon might seem a clunky, rough hewn, model of human doing. rather than a way to explain human thought. This animal is hardly the aerial model of something that might survive  death. 

But what if, these ancient analyzers were able to appreciate something obvious that is yet entirely obscured by the flow of modern living. The Buddhists have a story about a man pointing to the moon. The problem he had was that those he wanted to look up, peered at the man's finger. Is it possible that the Egyptians picked the baboon to remind people that internal words, monologues. calculations, were just pointers to something outside us, and that words, were only ever of partial, instrurmental, value. The baboon then, is like the word, pointing to a human being, in reality. The word, as in a baboon, compared to a man, must always be a pointer beyond itself to the physical world. The choice of baboon reflects perhaps, an awareness of the inadequacy, and imperial apsect of verbage, and is meant to remind the thinker, the speaker, where the accent of reality goes. 

If this approach has any value, it means the Egyptians saw clearly an aspect of human reality which eludes the current era.  Ehh. Who knows?

The physical sciences

Real science is surrounded by popularizers of science, who think soldiering a noble calling. No need to name names. The real thinkers, are like body surfers, thrilled to keep any balance on the unknown infinity.  The popularizers and, most of those they keep out, are surfing in back yard pools.