A step for the wise

Perhaps you are a tight rope walker. Perhaps you can picture what that is like. A  famous example is the Frenchman who walked between the twin towers on a high rope. 

My purpose in this picture is to help others understand what Jan Cox means when he speaks of "effort."  He said to people who asked if they were doing it right -- that is self-observing, or one of the many names he called this ancient mystical discipline -- he said to the questioner-- if you have to ask you are not, because it always requires effort. 

The strider in the sky, must maintain a kind of balance and proportion. His thoughts cannot drift off. If he makes a mistake, he could be a wad on the sidewalk below.

Those who seek a view known to but few in history, those people practise this self-observing as much as possible, The city small below, the empty sky, this is all possible, But it is requires the mental currency of effort. If we or our fellow seekers, slip on a cerebral tightrope, we fall into imagination. No harm is apparent, at first. 

And that may be one difference between the physical and the mental. Some mistakes have the very same cost. The only difference is that the mental tight rope walker can, with patience and consistency, improve his performance, and, the view. 

Pre-dating and predation

Is this what the mind likes to do--- not really know something NEW, but classify something according to what it already knows. This could be called a kind of pre-dating -- to sort something in advance. 

Interestingly predation, the act of capturing AND killing, sounds like pre-dating. Interesting because in fact the killing part is common to both pictures. The mind in fact must kill the next moment, the newness of the next moment, if the mind is to retain an orderly progression. Because this orderliness is fictive, possibly. The mind loses the newness, the opportunity to learn something, by the progression of ordinary thought.

Jan Cox pointed out that ordinary thought cannot originate ANYthing new. What the ordinary call originality is just rearranging known things, not creating anything. His example of what the ordinary call originality was flying pigs. Wings, pigs, all stuff we know. Not really original the way The Way of The Work makes possible.

If you cut it in two, you just make it harder to put back together

There are several reasons why it is misleading to say the message of Jan Cox is 'about consciousness.'

For one thing you are "saying" it ---- saying what you do not understand, as if you did understand it. But if you understand consciousnesss -- you should alert major neuroscience labs--- for that is the one thing even the natural scientists can be made to see --- they do NOT understand -- what consciousness is.

In these circumstances it can only be considered careless chatter, to throw out that word, as if it explained something.

But that is not the real point----my reservations are not  that you are doing the opposite of the guidelines to which Jan Cox pointed, in the sense the path is a path of real knowledge.

For the above is not the reason the word is objectionable. Nor is it really that the word consciousness is a great example of binary thought-- as if there were the mental and then the material. One or the other. A great example of binary, ordinary, rational, mentation. 

That the work is 'about consciousness'  is not what Jan Cox said. In fact, what Jan said, was that man had no spiritual nature. Jan said , that the world was all material. And what he pointed to, was boundaries, not the still flopped pieces that result from the use of a binary knife of ordinary mentation. When Jan said "There is nothing out there," he did NOT mean, there is something "in here." He in fact spent years, pointing to a third direction. 

There is a reason the word "consciousness" is so popular now. Among New Age pools of talkers. I may get to that sometime soon. 

These zoo enrichment guidelines fail to impress

There have been lots of idea the past few decades: most of them amount to painting cement green. Making cages larger. And then there is the plan to to hide their food, so they can have the primordial experience of hunting for their meal. For some, the only zoo experience that could count as enriching would be eating a zoo-keeper. 

Just an example of ordinary academic chatter

Quote-

The Tolkien problem. Hobbits and dragons dominate the popular imagination. The result: We've lost sight of actual medieval history?.

End quote of a blurb at http://www.aldaily.com/

This summary of somebody's thesis, on which we base a few thoughts:

That actual medieval history was long gone before Tolkien brandished his pen. Certainly it was long gone when someone coined the word medieval.

That words must obscure, they render the vast squirming and glory of a moment into something manageable by thinkers, speakers, talkers. 

That Tolkien probably knew this as well as anyone of his adorable ilk.. 

Cite the source or cite your ignorance

The bigger the font the more ordinary the thought

The quick and the invisible

A small wild creature is a good example. The chipmunk will freeze, not flee, when he senses a threat. For him stillness is invisibility. 

Is it too much of a stretch to see the motion of wild creatures as words-- the tumbling of discrete particles, blocks, in a space which is cerebral, the eternal seeming flow, of verbal entities -- constant, heedless, only occasionally purposive. 

Invisibility is safety in a hawk eat rodent world. But such refuge is temporary. He must move to hunt, to survive, interact with the world around him. Man must speak to move, interact, at another level, also.

But it is only the quiet which makes possible the appearance of a chipmunk god.