Headlines of Yesterday

This sounds like one of the saddest situations to come out of the whole too small to succeed, indeed too small to even get your name in a story which ends with 'the gunman dead.' This guy did not take some child hostage, he took 5 young -- tough -- trained -- firemen, hostage. 

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/04/11/us-usa-georgia-hostage-idUSBRE93916X20130411?feedType=RSS&feedName=domesticNews

Nor did the negotiations with a swat team last long, but I don't know, maybe they had to move in.  The thing is -- he wanted his electric power turned back on, in his home which was being foreclosed on. We are wired to everything in this world. And I can imagine the panic, the aggravation, the rage, the sense of undeserved injury, that man felt. And our being able to put ourselves in his place is an aspect of how we are all wired into the larger world.

But  what is the logic of hostage taking? This sense of being in a corner and trapped, okay. But adding a mind to a physical animal, how do you get to the point where it makes any sense to hold another person prisoner to exchange for your demands being met? Why would you think they would carry through on any promises some negotiator made? Apart from anything else, promises made under duress are not binding. And then there is the statistically significant outcome wherein you are gunned down like a dog.

All this points to the fact  hostage taking shows a great faith in the logic of the mind. A faith in words, a belief in the things you learned in school. That is one conclusion to draw from the actions of hostage takers: I have this, if you want it, you must give me such and such. That this is fantastically out of touch merely means that the logic of the hostage taker is ordinary. 

No doubt many will say he was irrational. Well sure, but what does that really explain? There is something else to be gleaned. It may be that we see a subterranean logic at work here, a hormonal wisdom, which is just, out of step with the times. Because for millenia fleeing was a sensible, and often used, tactic. Jan Cox, mystico-philosopher of the last century, pointed out that for the first time in history, there is now, no place to flee to.  When there were woods to hide you, and far valleys where the only sure thing was, that your enemies could not find you, there was a horizon of some kind of freedom for the sturdy. The logic of the man pushed to desperate measures may rely on this ancient knowledge,a forlorn but not irrational, knowledge. 

Illustrating a pedagogic technique which is rarely used, for good reasons

As I  walked by an evergreen bush a cardinal bolted up away from his hidden spot. Perhaps by the end of this post the relevance of this event to the topic will be clearer to me.

Everybody has mystical experiences. Mostly they do not recognize what happened. But this kind of event is a major component of the known and unknown energies defining the planet and beyond. This came to mind after I remembered the fact some Christian sects are based on the fact they do NOT observe certain holidays. And you can see their point -- how could getting presents for Christmas, spending money, be commemorating the life of an unwitting founder of a faith which is so widespread? You see their point and you imagine, probably accurately, that some founder of some similar sect had a bolt of awareness on this subject, and taking that experience, felt authenticated to found a whole faith on this 'revelation.' What I am calling a mystical experience. 

Yet, that recent founder did not have a big enough picture. This splinter realization is not the engorging reality it seems at the time. He is defining a faith on a moment which was not as encompassing as it could have been. The confusion in the wake of this authenticating type of experience is typical of human knowledge. That it works, and that it is right, does not mean it is the ONLY thing that defines reality and yet so wonderful is the experience that people charge ahead without keeping in mind the proportion of known and unknown. For most the experience means they know the important things. The unknown is irrelevant. This is an ordinary assumption.

The topic in this post  is not religion. Religion was just an example of the way the mind works. Those studying and writing about the natural sciences do the same thing. Take the pork chop for a pig. Those 'flashes of insight' scientists report are just low level mystical experiences. Typically the popularizers of science think they can measure what science has remaining to discover. This belief  hints at the ordinariness of the rational mind. For a brief consideration suggests that only from a perspective of the whole can you accurately define the parts. And this whole is beyond the grasp of modern science. I will be kind and say, it is beyond them at the moment. 

 That you have to focus, and by doing so, leave out relevant details is part of the binary mind. This narrow focus is a necessary part of human progress and intelligent community. Yet to take a detail,and assume it gets the whole picture, can be very misleading, misleading to those seeking to figure it all out. Fortunately for all, such folks, bound to figure it all out, are few. 

About that cardinal, a flush of red on a flash of green: no I don't know its relevance to this topic I could come up with a cheap metaphor, but I won't. 

The headline is all you need part 2

Montana lawmakers vote to

 allow salvage of roadkill

The picture of eating roadkill is a good illustration of how humans think. Any verbalized thought is already roadkill. The nutrition is vanishing. By the time you can phrase a thought the thought is in, and about--- the past. The vision of the new is for those who can attend to the edge of the future and the present. This is a discipline which must be rephrased  but is actually an ancient practise. Gurdjieff called it self-observation, Jan Cox called it neuralizing. You call it yucky. It is all there is. Hey, I didn't make the planet, so don't sqawk at me. 

All you need is the headline

Below is a direct copy of a headline in the IrishCentral site. I delinked it because my interest is NOT in the subject, but in the way the binary mind works. Binary means rational, in this context. Everything is either this or that, if you are limited to the rational mind. Jan Cox said once, that scientists can only count to two. He referred here to the binary operations of the mind. But here is just such a good example, that I am using it and assuming people can appreciate we are looking at 'how', not 'what' (she said binarilyly). Anyway how obvious can it be---- that you can be sick and criminal. And yet, the clear force of this speaker's words, are that by labeling something criminal, it is not an illness. Church people are some of the most articulate in the population, so this is a particularly good example of the operations of the ordinary mind. There are alternatives. Dublin Archbishop Diarmuid Martin states sexual abuse of children 'clearly a crime, not an illness

Archbishop Diarmuid Martin has responded to Cardinal Wilfrid Fox Napier of Durban's comments on sexual abuse. The Dublin Archbishop has stated that the abuse of a child is "very clearly a crime."

A history of self reflection

A history of self reflection would be a good subject for a book. Speaking of western Europe it is fair to wonder if there was any self-reflection before the Renaissance.Tribes on the verge of starvation have no use for self-reflection. There was no time to wonder. Nobody expects a Christianity but there it is. The stratified medieval world solved so many problems -- you were born into a niche, and mutually dependent on others in the same or different niches. No space to wonder. The church bracketed all and actually had pretty good answers for those rare troublemakers. But Humanity would keep growing. 

Notice I mentioned self-reflection, not self-knowledge. A history of the latter would be brief, and possibly culminating in the 16th century with Michel de Montaigne. Plus a few dark stars. 

The rest is pretty much a headlong rush, from treatises, to novels, to Nobel Prizes for physics. And self-reflection has shrunk to checking the likes on your facebook posts.  The progress is real and wonderful, but it does not include widespread intelligence. 

So far. 

We're not in Nepal anymore,

Toto

The Bark of Time

The Nature of Binary Thought is a question that never fails to help me, especially recalling the fragmentary nature of my grasp. Binary thought is what we think when we use words--- that is-- pretty much all the time. And it is mechanical, it is a symptom of what preserves us within the greater machinery -- (the Magnus Machina as Jan Cox titled one of his books) and in preserving, traps us. Our potential is like an insect in amber, as the present solidifies on the bark of time. 

Not that binary thought is the ONLY thing that traps us. Such an assumption---- that---oh, the problem is binary thought -- is an example of binary thought. The Everything is this or that logic is the logic of the ordinary. Ordinary Nobel winners, ordinary gardeners. They all subsist intellectually on binary thought.

We see it in the dialogue--- The rich say the poor suffer from class envy. The poor say the rich cheat at the power game and are heartless. Who considers both sides are correct. Who in the global chatter says, 'well I would be heartless too, if I were rich.'

We see it among the young--- (GMO foods are poison), and the well-retired (GMO foods will help us feed the masses.) They seem to be polar opposites. But polar opposites are the way the world thinks, not the way of someone struggling to always, in Jan's words, Willfully Consider. In fact the GMO situation is a 'both / and situation', calling for the Real Thinker to sort out, at least abstractly: some foods are poison, some will help. But where is there anyone discussing the issues in this manner. 

The essential and precious usefulness of binary thought is a subject for an later blog.