Let someone else describe self-observing

An interview with Thich Nhat Hanh was replayed on NPR today. A detail in the discussion about the practise of mindfulness delighted me. He said there was a necessary vigilance in your thinking, a practise, like "Walking on Stilts." This is what Jan Cox called by a variety of terms, the variety of course reflecting his methodological insistence on originality in language. 

But neuralizing is well described as 'walking on stilts' in your cerebral awareness. 

Erase the zoos

What is this sense for freedom that all creatures have, from moths to mollusks, and 

how is it the most complicated of those creatures, with a featureless crinkle in their brains, 

would deny it to the others. 

How we exist in a world we know is delusory

A cat watches the birds through a screened window. The birds seem unaware of his presence, though the window is open and they must be able to smell the cat. The cat, jerks his body to follow their hops and flights, his tail twitches. The cat is focused with a leopard sized attention on the birds. The cat is positioned to leap. 

And yet, the cat does not lunge through the screen. He does not even touch the screen. 

How or why he does not, is unclear to me. Just as it is unclear to me how one can continue accepting the propositions of ordinary media. How one believes again the prepositions on the platters proffered.

So to speak

How wonderful to think rats might be finding a safe place, so to speak. 

Near-death experiences are 'electrical surge in dying brain' This is a headline in the BBC write-up of the widely reported research wherein a surge of electricity has been identified in dying rodent brains. 

Jan Cox spoke of such experiences, in people of course, as something we did not NEED to wait for death, to experience. 

The interesting thing about the reports though, are that the scientists are treating this as some kind of explanatory refutation of the reports so common in the literature, of NDE experiences. 

Quoting the article, [Scientists] measured a sharp increase in high-frequency brainwaves called gamma oscillations.

These pulses are one of the neuronal features that are thought to underpin consciousness in humans, especially when they help to "link" information from different parts of the brain. In the rats, these electrical pulses were found at even higher levels just after the cardiac arrest than when animals were awake and well.

The curator of this link wrote:

Guess there's no tunnel then? 

Your whole life is this electrical activity. There's no tunnel the way there is no mental constructs beyond the physical in human life in general. These findings in no way diminish the cognitive content of such electrical brain activity. Whatever that cognitive content may be, and I do not know how that works. 

But it is lovely to think that other animals have something akin. Unless we follow the path laid out by a real teacher,  or somehow accept the challenge to explore such possibilities on our own, -- and I am not sure how realistic that is, not having a teacher -- our own options will be --- ordinary.  

The decline of the illuminated manuscript

Should we not confront the fact that the foliate flourishes associated with the medieval illuminated manuscript are not some embellishment of the page. They are not a decorative diversion from the text, as if the job of hand copying of books were not already a strenuous and time-consuming enough undertaking. How could this be? How could this not be?

Surely the ubiquity and beauty of the medieval sentence is one whole, and this means the illumination of the manuscript is a crucial dimension of the message. 

What then was the cognitive burden of the illuminated page? What then was the "progress" of the printed book? 

To be continued....

The death of printed books

Discussions about the death of printed books miss the point. All these tears over the demise of a book you can lay in your lap, annotate in the margins, crease the page corners of, ponder until you daydream, leave in a purposeful stack, when you need to mark your turf in the stacks alcove, these tears for a tearable page, are beside the point---

which is---

Can we live in a world without  book jackets? 

Science and modern science

The popularizers of natural science, and most scientists, stress the importance of repeatability as a token of validity, as the measure of truth.

That leaves one's own experiences as, statistically insignificant.Jan Cox, himself coming of age during the heyday of this philosophical trend, would smile at his students, and say, while pointing a finger at his skull, here is your lab. 

This environment of the natural sciences relies on a false division of inner and outer experiences. The inner are supposedly subjective, and thereby invalid. Only the external world can be set up so tests can be repeated. 

The problem with this view is that nobody really lives in a world divided into inner and outer. There is, to use an old Latin term, "in media res," in the middle of things, which describes the situation humans participate in, in learning, communicating, studying, anything. 

This middle ground, neither in nor out, but both, is the human experience. I don't understand it completely now, but it is an approach for study--this middle ground. 

That is the relevant arena, and in fact, not only does modern science ignore this, they are uncomfortable with this prospect.

The natural sciences would.have to confront the valid question of why people disagree, have contradictory experiences and conclusions. Life was simpler when you could lop off half of reality, the so-called subjective side.

We've got the lab set up.