Sun Rings In Winter

Is The Cell The Body or is The Body The Progenitor?
One of the fascinating counterpunctual aspects of the mass mind of consensus reality is the surface tension that is felt increasingly between the traditional arbiters and intermediaries of  information and those who chose to explore what Krisnamurti termed a "pathless land." Ridding oneself of the coloration that enters the clear liquid of perception is a daunting challenge..one that requires a sort of erasure of one's embedded doublespeak and perhaps to hold two contradictory binaries at arm's length and simply determine that these dualistic whirligigs of  the personal and the transpersonal represent an absent commodity in our human environment of competitive and increasingly contradictory aims on a societal level in a marketplace of sloganeering propaganda between the buyer and the seller.
Mark Twain put it simply;"All I know is what I read in the newspaper"
No one individual is responsible so no one is, says P.D Ouspensky.
The Forteans took the radical approach of pointing out the demonstrable contradictions of  consensus knowledge long before the Uncertainty Principle surfaced.
 Gurdjieff said the issue is with the observer who simply happens to be largely, a well trained parrot. Nietzsche went so far in this conceptual model of the mind being an objectification of automatism that  he placed it in Time\ Space via Eternal Recurrence. Then again the Air Force recently announced that robotic weapons will always have a human trigger man to insure that killing is not impersonal matter, as if this has not been the case leading back to our animal origins as war faring tribes with territorial prerogatives on natural resources, which of course is a sort of automatism itself.

The Autopilot of Historical Significance?
The question is we don't know what is missing and many assume what you see is what you get, while others what you don't see gets you. Hmmm...Is the historical world a machine or does it require someone occupying it, free of the mythologies, propaganda and baggage that has literally taken a life of it's own? One thinks of McLuhan's philosophy that harkens back to Luddites, that industrialization has made man an extension of his machines, now perhaps the robotic extension of his invention of The Synthetic Age, where the distinctions between using a tool and being an extension of our tools has reached a sort of exponentially inbred level of babble.

A Distant Star As Oneself
In regard to the last post, "The Tale of Two Planets" I recall faintly an obscure traditional myth of South America that explained the deluge at the end of the last Ice Age as a response from the Gods to the unceasing babble of humanity. That is certainly an expression of post editorial cynicism regarding the human condition. You could say all of this is depressingly predictable but there are some who would reasonably disagree with that premise. And in this season of Christmas for Christians and Non
Christians, maybe there is a hope poised against hope that thank goodness, there are other human beings in dialog as I write this who explore this very topic. One could say with reasonable certainty that should anyone see through this miasma of the mass of observers being rather helpless in the aggregate sum this would be an enlightened approach, or so it seems.

I read this short essay today..and for some reason unbeknownst to me, due to my own automatism I immediately connected this with Dicken's "A Christmas Carol" as well as the serviceable defining of what is missing when it is contrasted to the increasing polarization and isolation of the individual buried underneath the machinery of patented bullshit.

"For expediency’s sake, I’ll define enlightenment as a complex and multi-faceted process by which the mind comes to know – and over time rest more securely in – its own ground. As this happens, our habitual sense of being a separate and bounded self begins to fade. Ultimately, the person for whom this happens no longer feels themselves to be an autonomous entity looking out at an external world; rather, they feel themselves, more and more, to be an intimate part of that world’s humid expression, an unfolding natural process no different than anything else in nature. As a result, practitioners report a liberating sense of freedom, ease, spontaneity. The volume of self-referential thought often decreases, although, since enlightenment happens along a deepening continuum, they are still routinely trapped in old habits of dualistic thinking."

http://www.psychologytomorrowmagazine.com/the-science-of-enlightenment-by-jeff-warren/

I was also reminded of the saying of Gurdjieff that my thick skin prevented me from comprehending for some time, "There is no hope for humanity but there is for the individual" Humanity being composed of individuals being common sense, it all either is ending or beginning or as Dylan put it, he not being born is busy dying." Indeed. A long row to hoe that recedes into an infinite past that requires the untying of a thousand knots, a hundred lies, and the profiteering upon ignorance. Will you or this correspondent or others succeed? It may be that this question is a moot point in the face of  my own challenges in attempting to see beyond the end of my nose. The fires of an encampment of an increasing nomadic restlessness that pervades self interest.

I wish everyone a peaceful and wonderful Christmas to share among those closest to you, as well as those who pass us on the streets of our back pages within our libraries that illuminate our memories in "this winter of our discontent"