Halloween monsters

How useful is it that one day a year people can discuss that which they endeavor to pretend does not even exist, the rest of the year?

People talk about monsters, but that term merely is another way of distancing the intellect from the reality of our world. The monsters are always carefully placed beyond credibility. 

By monsters I do not merely refer to the reality of starvation and disease on our planet. The monsters are largely  the result of the insistence of the human intellect that things are either this or they are that--- a bifurcation which while useful dealing with the external world, only confuses when it is given the cloak of invincibility. 

People cannot realize their helplessness though that is the only useful step towards defining a path with a solid foundation. They cannot because it would simply produce mass hysteria or lethargy. This effect would destroy the world we live in, without helping anybody. 

Monsters then are the realities we must ignore to survive. Yet throughout history they have been glimpsed, and so we call the briefly and blurrily glimpsed, "monsters" since that label assures us they are phantasms. 

Only a few dare peer over the edge of the cliff of binary reason. And though a "band of brothers" may help you gather your courage, in fact, the leaning forward over the edge, this is solitary. 

The annual event called Halloween exists not to encourage a resolve to pursue reality -- no, it is a chance for a group chant to ward off ----truth. 

'The Answer is Never the Answer"

Old Derrida joke. But one I think Spinoza either originated or would have approved of. The point is wherever you think you can rest, verbally, in fact, you need to press, to keep questioning, sifting pebbles if nothing else, because, the answer is never "the answer." It can't be, the answer is in words. So you must have missed it. 

Perhaps god prefers atheists

This strikes me as likely -- that god prefers athesits over believers.
He may, see the atheists as plucky, brave, compared to those believers
who are 'good' because they fear punishment. I of course know nothing
about god, but I suspect--- SUSPECT-- he is doing the best he can. And
no job description I am aware of includes concern about the voting
results of his creatures.

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.