Novelty can alter your genes

This report on current research was exciting. Jan Cox based his 20th century work school on the necessity for the new. He did mention also, that you could not alter your genetic makeup. In this context I found the article excerpted below, interesting.

From an article in the OUP blog

Experiments with rodents indicate that normal cognitive processes can also initiate epigenetic events. For instance, when we encounter novelty in the world, we register it with structural changes in our brains, changes that require epigenetically controlled protein production. Storing information in long-term memory also appears to utilize epigenetic mechanisms. Thus, the way we think is affected by epigenetics, just as epigenetic factors affect the way we feel when we find ourselves in stress-inducing situations....


Some things not addressed by the writer:

Surely if you talk about change you must address what does not change. How else measure change? And also --- if you do not understand the question, how can you answer it. These are just thoughts this essay brought to mind.

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Is there a Nobel for taxidermy

It was interesting to notice  there is no verb for doing taxidermy, none using that word. And that is appropriate because by 'taxidermy' we mean to emphasize the product of man's mechanical mental effort -- words. We tend to think that words allow us to explicate and illuminate our world. Yet Jan Cox described words as never hitting their mark because by the time you spoke any word or phrase, the world you were responding to, was already, changed. And certainly any verbal phrase that is out of date, even by microseconds, is a clunky something, and not a verbal lunge. The spoken word can even be thought of as a stuffed something, once vivid, now vacant, a furry creature frozen in critical form. Forever, beside the point, Furnishing a diorama of dynamism in a museum of human perspective.

What is time

There she is scannng the shelves in a used bookstore
There it is, a used book, a rare book by an undervalued writer,
There he is, a signature on a fly leaf, after all these decades.

Or,
as Jan Cox said, "Time is personality."

Can you put planks across an abyss

Max Planck is said to have said (I hesitate assuming he wrote in German, and myself finding translations often lead to distortion):

Science ... means unresting endeavor and continually progressing development toward an aim which the poetic intuition may apprehend, but which the intellect can never fully grasp...

I like this quote. I don't like where I found it, in a book which has the phrase "Quantum-Mystical" in the title. You might think that is what I have been pointing to, and you would not be wrong. But I don't like this labeling of the unknown. It violates the very nature of the unknown. The thinking that Jan Cox demonstrated was that you carry rational thought as far as possible. You cannot then, plant a flag on some further territory.

Words obscure the reality of the mystical as much, even more, than they clog the apprehension of the knowable. In the latter though, words serve an important function.

So it makes no sense to find an edge ,and say aha. Here is what I meant. No, you have thereby, in the flagging of it, lost it.

Yes, it is tough. There are of course, rewards along the way.

Is it fair to blame religion on religion?

Religion was once an answer. Because it no longer is, does not mean that the question prompting it is gone. And anyway, few ever,EVER, got the point of religion. So few--- that it makes sense to ask---- can you blame religion ON religion. 

The Awe of Edge

The reality to which the Work, to use Gurdjieffian terms, or TKS (This Kind of Stuff) as Jan Cox termed it, briefly, points is slender, beautiful, and is perhaps, all that can accurately be called "the real." This moment when the new is first apprehended, is lost when memory, when anticipation pile on. What if though, it is true, that reality is that momentary fragment and all else is figment? 

The glimpse of a new celestial body, is only fresh briefly, and yesterday it happened to a lot of people. 

Words and Their Limitations

As if I had any other topics, being as how this blog is about the teachings of Jan Cox. He said, you may recall, that "you have to make your own maps".  But a good example occurred recently. And the point of this story is any speaker has to recall that any speech ---- is only a partial aspect of something larger. Let's go beyond, for once, counting dandelion petals, (my normal example of the edge of the unknown in discourse.) The point of my story below, is how you always, philosopher or grocery shopper -- in speech -- that you are only getting part of the story. 

The story--- I had observed this homeless person, younger than me, before, and started talking to him in the grocery parking lot which was part of our larger neighborhood. It was very interesting, -- a nearby church benignly allows their creek side camping area to continue. And I, referring to his comrades, said--- 

"are they violent people?"

He said,

oh no, but eh, sometimes it's so weird I just have to get away.

He thought I was asking why he walked around the neighborhood so much. What I meant by my question, "are they violent," was, am I in danger.

My surmise is that this situation typifies not just chatter, but, the content of most books. 

It may be that ignoring the layers in verbal situations, is the reason history seems like tumbling arguments that only look like progress. People assume they are addressing the same issues; writers only assume they are engaged in a dialogue with the past.  Actually they are missing the purpose, the point of some previous argument. Analysts rarely start by asking about a statement, what is it in response to. 

Or, at least, that is part of an answer to a question about the mysteries of human discourse..