The train is so loud and noisy

Metal on metal, screeching with a regular irregularity, as the rail cars rush on by, metal tracks, metal braces, metal hitchs, metal wheels. You cannot stop the train with your hands, you can only step away.

And as you back away, internally, from  ---- your own internal cerebral energy, you notice the painting on the box cars, the colors of the graffiti, on most of the train cars.

That graffiti may be your own verbalizing, the words in your head, and your words, about your intent, your life.  Those words--- are as effective as that paint on wood and metal, is
in determining the train engine.

Stick this picture in your brain

The ability to question your own interior credibility is fundamental to progress on a path toward a kind of unnameable mental  integrity. Gurdjieff and Jan Cox called a method for this questioning, self-observation. Their term is perhaps clearer than my latest picture, which is of a psychological credit card. This card is one you have to learn to keep declining, when your verbal thoughts present themselves. Debit cards, in this little fantasy, would have the funds from direct experience -- direct experience which you have not labeled with words.  The more you decline your personal mental credit card, the greater the balance on your silent but potent debit card. Okay, analogy is breaking down here. Still, give the picture some attention.

Wouldn't it be fun

Wouldn't it be fun to discover the origin of binary thought at a pre-human level?? Binary thought, that great weapon for dividing the external world; binary thought is responsible for the obvious progress of man in manipulating the external world. Without binary thought there would be no way to imaginatively consider alternatives to features of the natural world of which we are such a significant part. These alternatives allow testing, experimentation, and brilliant alternatives that leverage our external world to better support, protect, and grow our species. All of this depends on the ability of human cerebration to consider the visible world as amenable to improvement and the means to achieve this: binary thought. Something is either this or that. Two choices, that is all you get with binary thought, along with the reality crushing ignorance of the way things interact and interpenetrate. Any point under consideration must be this or that, and thus we have air conditioning, frozen food, cyberspace, and the ability to heavy mighty machines at the sky. 

Our reach is extended, our grip empowered, our vision acute beyond that of any other species. The example Jan Cox used once or twice in conveying this aspect of mental processing, was the example of diverting a river to run uphill via a watermill structure. You have to be able to imagine how things might be different, and how rearranging the external world could achieve a greater potency. Without binary thought, we'd never be able to consider getting off this planet, much less how it might happen. To achieve our special species goals we have to pretend that one and two are distinct numbers, without any fluff on the right of the decimal, or whatever point you specify as the edge.Binary thought, the focus must be on this or that. Two choices.

And what flashed on my mind was that a hunting animal, say a stalking cat, was displaying this kind of binary mental capacity on the level of four paws, slouched body, straight tail.Slow movement. And I say binary because that attention is focused on one thing, so you have the object, and everything else. The either/or capacity is necessary for the cat to successfully seize the bird. The feral cat does not eat without this ability to divide the world.

Wouldn't it be fun is there was a connection between hunting cat and thinking man?

He had a hat

Some of the people in this vignette are still alive, so I have to blur out the details a bit. Jan is standing at a bar, with a buddy. Not someone in the group. The guy is fuming about something political. (A lot like me, recently). Jan had this shrug, and I see him now, standing close to this person. Jan is nodding, big nods, with this shrug ( a yeah, well, what are you going to do, shrug) and rolling his eyes, in what someone who did not know him, would assume was sympathetic warmth. Then he reached for his beer. 

Gurdjieff left Russia in a time of civil war, he left Turkey in a time of religious strife, he left Germany quickly, and he settled in France, an exile from his homeland. When the Nazis  invaded, and though his friends were often terrified, Gurdjieff stayed in Paris, keeping a low profile. 

If the point of words is to remind you of silence, what could you say in a political context? Above are just two stories to restore perspective. 

A Hub You Have Seen

Picture this metropolitan hub, you have been there, you have seen this: buses lined up, rapid rail trains stopped or not, taxis idling, and people, hot, intent, definitely going some place. Lots of people. Empty kiss/ride lot. Best of all--- just like in your recollections--- there is a wall of paper schedules, little boxes lined up, they have identical looking folded sheets stuffed in plastic bins---but the schedules are for different city locations, and let you know times, destinations, in case, you are going by city bus.

Because this is a transportation hub, people pass through, it facilitates, but is itself not a destination. The hub is how you get someplace---besides the hub. 

Or-

That's what you have been told. Because those places in big letters on the front of the bus, those street corners in tiny print in the schedule, stops the loud speaker yells out---- the point of the busy activity, the reasons you are passing through the hub---- are just a fib---those are not the places you are going. The destinations, are all, a myth.

The destinations just exist so you will keep cycling through the hub, and not noticing -- the hub. The hub only works when you do not notice it. 

Do you see? 

The hub is in your head. 

Chew on this

Eating meat, especially red meat, was not encouraged by the mystical philosopher Jan Cox. But that is just a background point, now, to my setup of a new picture for a person's efforts in their struggle to taste, and persist in, the cerebral objectivity Jan taught his students. The link embedded is to an article about meat consumption, but my interest is in the news item there, about a cow named Molly, who bolted from a slaughter house. Our effect to remember the goal, to practice the special attention, Jan taught us, -- the goal of neuralizing, is one word he made up to describe it, -- could be likened to a black cow, leaping over a fence, and running away. Our personal effort then, is like a cow, escaping from the factory of mechanical thinking. 

That picture is of just one moment, that must be repeated, to gain any traction. Still, a black cow bolting from a meat packaging facility, is an educational picture of the reality of spiritual ambition, mechanical human mentation, and the odds of anyone, sustaining their efforts to see individually, apart from the group mind. Molly, was allowed to end her days in a pasture, but for people, the reality of freedom must be enacted every moment. 

Although Jan's students did not, eat meat, often, they were not "vegetarians" for such labeling is an example of binary thought, the very mechanical thinking one escapes any moment the neuralizing occurs. 

headline -- Gut Bacteria Regulate Happiness

"Gut Bacteria Regulate Happiness"

That's the headline of an article referenced at neurosciencenews.com, and about research being published in  Molecular Psychiatry.

You want to read this. It is consonant with most of the research of the last century. And yet the scientists cannot face the empirical implications of their research -- man is not even captain of the boats in his bathtub. 

 I will only highlight here, the last sentence in the review, a quote by a University College of Cork researcher:

"We're really excited by these findings" said lead author Dr Gerard Clarke. "Although we always believed that the microbiota was essential for our general health, our results also highlight how important our tiny friends are for our mental wellbeing."

Dear Doctor Clarke, what if, what if--- humans are the tiny friends of microbiota?  I am not saying that is the case, I am saying we are stuck in a crippling perspective which prevents our drawing empirical conclusions. And, really,  that perspective is only crippling from the point of view of someone struggling to understand their selves as well as the cosmos. For a student of Jan Cox, the views of scientists are just part of the world to be studied.