Sycamore pods fill the air

Sycamore pods fill the air.

The single wing is born by the wind and twirls so that it really looks like a winged insect. Whole vistas can be filled with these ambitious sprigs. The wind moves them in an upward direction and an unseen determination to make the most of this chance can be deduced.  This spring phenomenon is proof of the sycamore's desire to fill the planet, and for a quiet moment each spring you can believe in that massive whole leafed effort to turn the world into sycamore.

Same with everything really, you just notice it in spring, this drive for abundance. Only by attempting to exceed a reasonable target, can any target be accomplished at all. So there are breeding cats, cardinals, bees 

When Jan Cox said that cause and effect was an illusion, that everything was really just "mushed together," (sorry for the technical language) he might have been glancing at my point here. 

Words too, they bounce up and down on the wind, determine to reach some far shore, to cover everything, to take over. Like leaves they give it their all, before descent and dust. Some wonder if words can't have unforeseen consequences, injurious angles. That is only a matter for concern if your perspective is not big enough. 

All the historians and scientists need to start a trek to amazing reality

Normally this blog, designed to enhance and extend the reputation of the 20th century mystic and philosoper Jan Cox, does not quote him in large chunks, feeling, as the author does, such is available elsewhere. And a central technique was not repeating anything you heard, -- anything you heard inside or externally. You had to see for yourself what he called the psychological (internal) and the cosmological (external.) Still----always--his words are superior, and, his silences unimitatable. And so we have this, written before he died. What if it is true?

The feeling that man must be "saved" from something coincided with the appearance
of his thinking...which coincided with the disappearance of something else.
And now -- periodically -- he has the sensation of a loss of such significance that
he indeed feels as though he may be in danger of premature destruction, from which
he needs be saved.

Note: There is available, for all purely "human problems, a direct, uncomplicated cure –
the abandonment of the refusal to see what's going on in the human mind.

Swaying in the wind

It must be men-on-ladders day. High on a billboard they are adjusting ropes and ladders, while on a platform. And simultaneously around a few corners, a man on a two story ladder, one resting atop a truck,  is changing light bulbs in shopping center street lamps. The view from these heights, not like the ones the car drivers glance into, is sure to be different than most people in traffic have. Further, with tree tops below you....

And, like those who patiently pursue an inner discipline, intended to gain the heights of objectivity, there is a genetic element. Not speaking for sure of the guys I saw today, but apparently the window washers of skyscrapers are often indians who may have a squirrel like disdain to considers the narrowness of high perches. Jan Cox said there was an inherited talent, tendency for those attracted to what he sometimes called, This Kind of Thing----this need to be free. 

It wasn't snakes that got kicked out of the garden

It was not snakes that got kicked out of the garden. Yet people act as
if hacking them up will allow the killer back into a certain garden.
Nobody talks about the declining snake population, not even
scientists, yet it is part of the shrinking population of reptiles.
And we desperately need snakes. Without snakes rodents increase in
population, and the two legged types will buy poison to get rid of
what snakes will get rid of without polluting everybody's gardens and
rivers. Leave that wood pile alone. Keep some parts of your yard
unmowed. If you are personally afraid of snakes, keep a walking stick
to poke ahead in your path. Snakes only want to avoid your presence. I
will not mention keeping snakes confined as pets. Nobody that would
read my blogs would do something so contemptible.

And P.S. --just like mysticism is the skeleton of literature, snakes
are the skeleton of man's real awareness.

P.P.S--of course if you live in Belize, ie, already in the garden,
different guidelines might apply.

What is ignorance

What is ignorance, is a question most would not find interesting, yet
it may be at the heart of a spiritual anthropology.

Most would not find this question interesting because they assume they
know what ignorance is. Here is the typical view of personal
ignorance. All mature persons at some point assume that ignorance is a
measurable commodity.

The idea that ignorance is a measurable commodity, or perhaps,
unquestioned, working assumption that ignorance is a measurable
commodity, explains a lot. From the pathetic, 'I have learned from my
mistakes,' to the spit in the wind, 'our reactors meet all the safety
requirements, ' a picture of operant assumptions about man's ignorance
can be sketched. The boxcar beyond the horizon is big enough to
contain all that we do not know, both as individuals or as a society,
is a metaphor of this working view of ignorance. Or---. If knowledge
is a gumball machine, then ignorance is just one of the gumballs that
is still heaped in the glass dome---that is the view of human
knowledge and ignorance prevalent in society, from university
presidents, to the bottom of the middle class.

Step back though---how could it be that ignorance is something one can
factor in? Does that not assume that we know what we say we do not.
And--Real Ignorance is extant. Real ignorance surrounds,
interpenetrates, and pricks out the horizon, of ---- our thoughts. The
man intent on figuring out wtf is going on, is given in this essay a
big hint, on how to proceed.

If one could examine, and test, one's own ignorance and ideas of it,
one would be on the path to ---someplace interesting.

A stitch in space loses fine

Scientists rue the crackpots---those with tinfoil clocks. The person who perseveres with the methods of self-observation (to use Gurdjieff's phrase) views the religious, those who pronounce about god, rather than questoining man, rather similarly. Unlike either though, he has no time to rule the obvious.

Selecting shells by the seashore

Is not the phrase "self decorating species" a fair description of us homo  hopefullysapiens? They found shells with holes drilled in them that are 75,000 years old ( Blombos.). Apparently as soon as man thought anything, he thought of changing his appearance --- by wearing jewelry. And this helps us understand that phrase in Genesis, that what those paradise dwelling folks did wrong, was get the knowledge of good and evil. Never could figure that out, why would learning something be a bad thing. But maybe it fits in. Maybe even then some of us knew that good and evil is not a classification of verities. That to use this kind of phrase means that one takes the words seriously, rather than the things words refer to. In other words the final reason for the expulsion is they KEPT discussing reality in binary terms, not that they got some insight. So men got the boot because they could not separate fiction from fiction. Women of course were a separate case---they are still doing the innocent silly things you do if you come from a rib. Do you think if I wear a necklace he won't notice how skinny my hips are? (In those days, that's what they worried about---skinny---hips.)