Notes for a History of Mysticism

The mystical experience, that which as students of Jan Cox know, cannot be discussed, may be likened to the universe's black holes. So critical do the universe's black holes seem, at the center of most galaxies, that I expect any day, to read the physicists contend black holes play a crucial role in the formation of galaxies. They'll figure it out, never suspecting the physical world to be, possibly, and whatever else it is, a mirror of the real.  My words, light, on an event horizon. 

Science Tales

Science Fiction stories may be the fairy tales of our contemporary times. Instead of talking animals and wee folk we now have talking animals and green men. There is a story from the fifties I think, by one of the great sci fi writers, and the plot of the several pages length can be summarized in several sentences. A man finds that bugs are taking over the world. Somehow the spiders jump into the battle on the side of the humans. The narrator of the story talks to the leader of the spiders and asks, who is winning. The spider replies that you will be saved. The man is so relieved that the spider hastily adds, oh I mean, you the species, not you the individual. So all this I knew before I even met Jan Cox. Remembering it of course is the trick. 

A machinery of clouds

Funny to think that the whole edifice of humanity, everything we think and know and kick might be just -- clouds in the sky. Wonderful clouds, oh yes, wonderful clouds. Jan Cox spoke of humanity as a great machine. This of course does not connote that we do or can know ALL the levers and levels of this machine. But it occurred to me that one could make a case that the oil, allowing the gears of this machinery of Humanity, to move, the functionality of motor oil,  might be labeled, in this context : the way we, people, do not even glimpse -- that which we do not know. The machinery depends on ignorance, to continue, to grow; ignorance and ......

A Kind of Survey

If you are walking on a sidewalk, you need to know where the holes are. Holes could be a change of level, like one section of cement shifting a bit. It could be a crack where a truck had an intimate off road adventure. You need to know where the holes are, but you do not walk looking down, that way, you would see nothing. Jan Cox spoke about how people do not look up, as an aspect of mechanical behavior. You must look around, at least internally, as much as possible. That's your best chance to predict, the unpredictable -- sinkhole. Knowing where the holes are is one major distinction between the natural sciences and the mystical. The former do not even see the need to know, where the holes are.  

What the books said---

quoting an AP story By MIKE SCHNEIDER, about a January 29, 2012 traffic incident on I-75, south of Gainesville, Florida: 

 A long line of cars and trucks collided one after another early Sunday on a dark Florida highway so shrouded in haze and smoke that drivers were instantly blinded. At least 10 people were killed.....

Steven R. Camps of Gainesville said he and some friends were driving home several hours before dawn when they were drawn into the pileup.

"You could hear cars hitting each other. People were crying. People were screaming. It was crazy," he said. "If I could give you an idea of what it looked like, I would say it looked like the end of the world.".... Some cars were crushed beneath the heavier trucks.

Reporters who were allowed to view the site saw bodies still inside a burned-out Grand Prix. One tractor-trailer was burned down to its skeleton, 

charred pages of books and magazines in its cargo area. 

And the tires of every vehicle had burned away, leaving only steel belts....

It was not clear when the highway would fully reopen because part of the road melted, police said.....

End quote. 

How could the Mayan calendar be wrong---the world ends every minute. It's an easy prediction.

Where the Map Is Folded

If the mechanical mind of the human species is as artificial as some philosophers such as Jan Cox have suggested, (when he points to the binary logic of that aspect of mental functioning) then one should be able to look anywhere to see evidence of this.  Look at the conversation around the term 'empathy' for example. You often hear it defined as "feeling another's pain." Such a definition does not bear examination: if you feel another's pain you either take an aspirin or head to the doctor. Whatever is going on with empathy, it is not feeling another's  pain.

What is a better way to define the term? Here is what the dictionary says:

empathy: the intellectual identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another.

This merely moves the target to another black cup, though. What is intellectual, what is identification, what is vicarious, and so on through the sentence and through the dictionary.

You will not find an answer to how you can be another person and yet not be that person.  

The term empathy points to something that needs to recombine the arbitrary divisions of the intellect in ways the ordinary mind cannot deal with. Within the maps of Jan Cox is a perfectly good answer, but I am not going to quote him. It is too easy, and that means too mechanical. My purpose is just to point to this phenomenon, and how understanding the word, if persistently pursued, is beyond the ordinary intellect. The ordinary mind is designed to divide, to break apart, the external world. (So that it can be rearranged and further human progress) Something else though, besides that wonderful tool, is needed with understanding empathy.

Happy New Thoughts

There's an impressive video on youtube with just shots of physical feats of a gravity defying nature. It is worth looking at. Watching these skiers, bikers, skaters, and divers led me to consider the similarities between these feats of physical skill and daring and the kind of cerebral activity Jan Cox knew and tried to share during his lifetime, called among many things, neuralizing. Though it might seem a polar opposite, the goal of those in history  like Jan Cox, is really the under the same tent as these dering-dos. Everything after all, is physical. And what Jan wanted his students to see was these gravity-less moments (for such is the start for either kind of physical feat) which involve accelerating through the roof. The differences between physically twirling as you fall into the water and maintaining a precious awareness of certain elements, are of course interesting: one feat is apparent and impressive to every onlooker. The other invisible to all, those who have no clue about cerebral possibilities. One must last seconds, the other has a potential for more.