Civil Discontents Part II

So we noticed last blog some incoherency among those who assume extraterrestrials explain anything. Perhaps the academic chaps avoid certain glaring logical gaps. One hopes those sagging library shelves hold something of value.  Still my example here won't support that last hope. There is a philosophical question about the nature of man: is there any validity to the idea of a mental or spiritual realm. The extremely common view is that man has a spiritual dimension.  Some philosophers assume man has a physical and a mental nature to explain their observations, and experiences. Without this duality they are lost to explain what they consider the human dimension---man's values, spiritual worth, etc. What these folks fail to notice is this: if you assume a second layer of reality, you have to then explain how these two dimensions interact.  The addition of a spiritual, or mental realm merely moves the problem of explaining man, around, it does not solve it.  With two dimensions the consistent thinker then has to explain how these diverse realms coexist and intercommunicate.  A mental realm as a separate world just confuses the reality of man's world. Typically if you are explaining how two diverse things communicate you wind up with a third realm -- one which connects the physical and mental. Yet what does this gain us??? You really need another realm to connect the third to the other two, and, this could go on infinitely. Kind of like those who think extraterrestrials on this planet explain anything, when you step back and realize the questions are just moved around, not really explained.

Civilization and its contents

There is an interesting continuity between the explanations of those liable to a certain hysteria, I mean those who give credence to extraterrestrials, and those typically found in academe, the ivory tower billed birds.

The first group crave a certain gross excitement in their mechanical mental lives, nothing too subtle. Flying saucers serve a purpose in their imagination, satisfying a unviversal craving for an exciting edge, but one which can be oh so concretely described.  At one time angels were seen in the heavens, now it is household utensils. This coarse profanity serves other purposes---one of these functions is to explain human development, and human origins.  The visits of extra terrestrials have been used to explain both the advance of man's civilization and the origin of humanity itself. The idea is that visitors either produced a new species, and or, helped along an extant one, to produce the world we know.  The question of the ET motives is left open.  The illogic behind the E. T. scenario is unrecognised. Illogic in the sense that an explanation is produced which actually does not answer the basic questions for which the explanation is put forward.  A visit from people from other planets does not explain the origin of life----one is just pushing back the question---from where did the life on other planets derive??? And what promoted the developments in civilization, the technological superiority, on these other planets? The popularity of stories of extraterrestrials fills a gap left by the declining interest in traditional religious explanations of such questions. 

 

These objections to the E.T.answer to life's mysteries seem obvious once outlined.  How is this kind of thinking related to the typical thinking of the academic writer of books?  We will return to this question soon. 

After Dinner Dents

My sense is that the writings of Jan Cox, now that he is dead, are serving as digestive aids, after dinner mints, so the ordinary can better digest, and live on, the hostility of life, without ever seeing that Jan rejected all and every system, philosophic label, hell, all labels, and that was just to get started. His only interest was in the freedom available to our species, and nudging people to look in the direction he did. Ideas, labels----all words, all that you must learn to look beyond.

Hey, it's just a thought....

Is cyberspace a medium for sharing, learning? You could make a case that cyberspace is less so than is commonly thought. As an attenuation of man's mental realm it shares the status of what Jan Cox calls the yellow circuitry of man.  For many cyberspace is I suspect a kind of heaven because it removes the physical element from relationships.  This leads to encouraging, enlarging, the dreaming portion of man's life.  The awareness that the mystic seeks however involves full frontal reality, and I cannot see how cyberspace, with its hygienic debodying of reality (what IS the opposite for decapitation), with the lack of, oh say, smell, can be anything nourishing. Cyberspace rather, may share the cotton candy quality of man's mental realm.  Of course this realm plays a larger part in humanity's life as centuries go by, and the birth and expansion of cyberspace could be one way the larger growth of Humanity, rather than the individual cells we call humans, is kept intact as a single organism. 

Re--what?

Why is remembering mentioned so frequently in mystical literature?

Wouldn't remembering be always OF the past??? Many mystical groups in history speak of remembering as a critical technique, Yet the past, that is over, that is not where creativity is, the past. Perhaps we could get a clue here from the member part of remembering.  A member is part of something larger. Whether part of a body, or a community of people, the same word, member, is used.

Perhaps then the past part of remembering is partial, bordering and inviting, as the past must,  an infinity of detail, an infinity which can never be completely captured, Whether that infinity of detail, in the past, is an echo of another infinity, or actually itself, (that infinity of the past,) part of a larger infinity, is not clear. Yet these thoughts seem to be going in the right direction, elucidating how remembering, --the past--- can lead to the unexpected newness of reality.

Public Aspects of Attention

So much attention lately after the death of a pop icon-- Michael Jackson. It is not clear to me why exactly. I still say if it were for the greatness of his music you could ask why James Brown's death did not provoke the same storm.  Another of the students of Jan Cox told me the other night that Jan had admired Michael Jackson stressing his creativity.  A good perspective, but if creativity were the reason for the dimensions of the public outcry, then we would certainly have seen a bigger commotion when Jan Cox himself demised. I do recall what Jan said when the last pope croaked. He said the crowds were not converging on Rome because of the Pope, but because other people were going to Rome.

 

And changing the subject, a bit---some commentator said the black people knew the police had it out for Jackson and that is why the legal charges.  Here is a tricky way binary thought works.  Even though I can easily imagine the cops were happy to arrest Michael Jackson, that doesn't mean he was innocent. (I am of course merely pointing out an example of binary thought, not addressing the facts of which I know absolutely nothing. I am just saying, contra the logic of binary thought, that saying the cops have it out for you, and if they do, does NOT mean you are innocent.

Stalking the Stock Market

Stalking the stock market Of course for what can be learned about life. Jan Cox told his students decades ago to stay away from it,  Though he did not elaborate, (to my recall) my guess is he perceived there was not, nor ever would be, any kind of level playing field. Which came to mind after hearing the denunciations of Madoff as "evil." First off, these words are from people who did not investigate who was getting hurt as long as their own dividends were being paid. Secondly to label anything evil just means you are asserting your own self worth, and that is a dangerous position for anyone to take. As Jan said: do not pray for justice, pray for mercy.  This whole idea of evil may have evolved to bolster the mechanical personality.  For using such a label means you can see clearly (you assume you can see clearly) that the world is divided into two, and that one of these parts is not good. Not going into at this moment the whole ignorance of a third of reality in such maps.  What I might end with is the stunning inability of ordinary consciousness to perceive how the mechanical operations of nature, of everything, accounts for any so-called problems of evil, as long as the quester appreciates, remembers, that the mechanical personality, is not isolated, and not a source of knowledge, ---which does not mean knowledge does not exist.  It exists----just not at the level of verbal maps.