Are we merfolk? Are we helplessly so?

People make assumptions. Without this they would be unable to accomplish anything at all. The rational mind does not operate without these unthinking presumptions. The presumptions are like a sense that you are on firm ground. So you go on, without looking down.

Still, what if that were not the case: what if your situation were actually that of someone in an ocean-- some creature with some fishy talents and some strange ambitions. This picture of the human situation assumes such a thing as dry land, just that people are mistaken in assuming they know what dry land is. That islands even exist is derided by some in the ocean as an archaic fancy. 

A few may by dint of mainly, luck, perceive the idea of a boat. This boat as a conveyance to an island whose existence is challenged, becomes -- easy to forget. Yet the difference between  the boat and the island, is that though no one can reach the island through their own agency, -- no one-,  the boat is something they can by themselves construct and utilize. 

The boat in my story has been called by real teachers various names-- all the same thing. Gurdjieff's self-observation, the willful consideration of Jan Cox. I call it the method, because it is under human control, as opposed to life on dry land, terra of no chatter. The latter is never something one can take credit for. Nor can one assume it will last. There is no real estate contracts there, no property lines. According to Jan Cox, if you even say so this is "Istanbul," you are gone, back to Paris.

The boat -- the method --you have always accessible. 

That is,

if you,

remember. 

Example of binary thought ripped from the back pages of academic journals

In an article on evolution, we find this riff about 'cultural evolution, ' which seeks to in fact suggest the genetic component of our species has stopped evolving, and man's cultural world counts as evolution. Demonstrating, by his words, the fact man's culture is imagination, and in the imaginary realm is exactly where we might find, this unwritten, Origin of Species. For there is only biology when we deal with man. Man's culture changes because it is imaginary. Only binary thought would put this knife between biology and culture. 

One reason this argument passes as logical is that man cannot actually deal with the continuing evolution of his brain. A topic to which we will certainly return.

quoting from wired.com

Cultural Evolution

....People, including this science journalist, tend to emphasize biology when thinking about human evolution, but that focus contains an element of looking-for--my-keys-under-the-streetlight reasoning. Genetic evolution can be rigorously measured and quantified. Cultural evolution is messy and difficult to study in journal-appropriate ways, yet in many ways culture -- our social practices and institutions, including the all-important vehicle of language -- is more powerful than biology.

After all, if we could travel back in time a few hundred thousand years, Homo sapiens would be quite recognizable. It's culture that truly distinguishes us.

In the last decade, researchers have developed tools for studying cultural evolution, from patterns of linguistic change to folktale relatedness (above) to interpretations of Polynesian canoe design. As with biological evolution, cultural evolution is clearly continuing: The advent of digital communications technologies, for example, makes new types of cultures possible.

For now, though, an Origin of Species for cultural evolution hasn't yet been written.

Example of Binary Thought Ripped from the Headlines

as well of course as every word in every ad anywhere, but let's look at an example which is a news story most people will have noticed. 

I suggest that it is obvious, if you look at it, that a person can have his dismissal adjudicated as tainted with racial prejudice AND at the same time have that dismissal upheld as valid. 

Why could not people, be racially prejudiced, and yet occasionally be correct about -- oh, an employee with impulse control issues. Proof of prejudice, and I am guessing not much proof was really needed, in a southern police force (So. Cal of course), though that prejudice may well have been hidden, in reams of bland blather, but--- that does not mean the fellow was not wisely let go. 

While if you are following me, the newspapers are acting like proof of prejudicial dealings is proof he should not have been fired. That makes no sense, except in the land of binary language which we all, must, inhabit. 

It was not death people feared

It was not death people feared. That anyway is my hypothesis for the moment. The fear of death is widely regarded as a motivating factor in human history, leading to all kinds of cultural phenomena -- religion for instance, and even physiological change, such as the birth of the human intellect. What is the sign language, for -- your mother has been still for an awfully long time, and is beginning to smell. What say we put some dirt over her? Language developed because life was getting more complicated, rather than fear of the unknown leading to some survival value for people who came up with rituals signifying human beings did not really die. 

I am suggesting people took calmly and confidently the idea of life after death. Nothing in that description contradicts the idea that we all have instincts for self-preservation, of course.

What sense does it make sense that early man was afraid of dying? It is modern man that fears death, and this has been projected backwards into explanations for some  human behavior.  I think rather than religion being a subterfuge from reality, our first parents took it's statements confidently. There were no hesitation making doubts issuing from mixed motivations in their adherence to the tribal dicta. 

After all, flowers return every spring. Birds fly far away, and then come back. Constellatins rotate in the sky. And if ancient men feared their own mortality, then why did they put the best jewels into caskets? There are many reasons to assume ancient men confidently assumed they would survive their own  demises. And considering the options available to these men, this was a sensible confidence.

What if though, what people feared, deeply, unavoidably, was -- change? Such motivations would have useful functions in the larger machinery of humanity. And also, modern man's fear of death, may be even more, a concern for his own ego psychological constructs. Those illusions are fungible. But they figure more largely in modern intellectual man. 

Provenance is the trick

Provenance is the trick. Provenance, the history of where a work of art has been, leading to a pronouncement as to its authenticity, determines whether a particular work of art is inside or outside an artist's canon. Provenance thus determines the value of a work of art. 

Provenance only ever really talks about -- not art,-- but other provenance. Though it always is apparently pointing to this art, provenance is just about provenance. Provenance is not about the thing, really, it is about what you can call, the thing. 

Words and reality.Thoughts and -- everything, are exemplified here. 

Taking a step back

As long as people assume themselves a single and singular unit, then their thinking will propose a cellular divinity, as part of a cosmological diagram. The point is not their belief, but how they picture the game. This applies to atheist and believer alike. To the extent their ego coincides with their self, then their model of god will include omnipotence. 

Possibly.

I had a dream

What if the emphasis on rationalism is a necessary corrective to religiousity (thus explaining  modernity, ahem) and the third leg of the stool is not extant or apparent yet. I am tempted to say this third aspect, the always dependable but never obvious, third flow, is what you hear in Gurdjieff and Jan Cox, but I don't know that.