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Jan’s Posted Daily Fresh Real News
JAN’S TWENTY THOUSAND LEAGUES UNDER THE CORTEX
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April 17, 2002 © 2002: JAN COX
Man has an instinct to build, and does so in two fashions: in actions and in words;
he builds with his hands, and he builds with his speech.
Physical building by his hands is the fundamental evidence of civilization;
mental building by his words is the refinement thereof;
building is much easier in words, and it alone has no restrictions —
there is no limit on what a man can build with sound waves,
but the material building he does with his hands must conform to physical laws;
this is why the majority of men find subjects such as: god, gossip & politics
more interesting than: gravity, glaciers & protons.
When you look at it, there is only so much you can say about the barn a man built,
but there is no end to the comments you can make about the model of morality
he has constructed in his mind when you hear about it.
Men build physically to protect their bodies;
they build in words to protect their words;
as his hands do the bidding of his instinct to physically survive and flourish,
so do his words work tirelessly to better entrench themselves,
and expand their sphere of influence.
With their actions do men build physical constructions: large and small;
plain and decorative; public and private,
and with their tongue do they erect ethereal constructions:
large and always capable of becoming larger;
decorative, and with each man able to freely add to the adornment;
mental constructions that can be collectively shared by an entire community
while being simultaneously savored in a quite personal manner by each member
in the privacy of their own head.
Physical buildings of: houses and courthouses;
intangible buildings of: myths and history,
and by no instinct is man made to commonly mark a distinction in these
two different realms of reality the two types of building separately occupy.
In the ordinary life of everyday men,
a cathedral is real — and so is religion;
a theatre is real — and so is drama;
a campus is real — and so is knowledge;
a house is real — and so are social contracts of the people in it,
a man’s brain is real, and so are the thoughts in it;
in all instances, the physical building constructed as a result of a verbal concept is real, and so too is the non physicality it symbolizes,
but the realities are of two different orders;
in the routine, automatic running of mortal existence the two work complementary,
and were either absent — man’s life would be nothing like it is now.
Ordinary men living ordinary lives have no need to make or think about the distinction between these two totally different forms of reality;
if it is plainly pointed out, they can momentarily acknowledge it,
but are not wired to see any significance therein, and indeed,
if forced to look at the matter for more than a second
their minds will immediately begin to interpret the pointing-out as criticism of
intangible realities.
Only a few people are born with the unusual neural potential to get their
mental arms out-&-around, what is to them,
the staggering and intoxicating situation of there being two totally different realities
in which man exists, and which no one else finds interesting,
and for these few, not simply, interesting — but infinitely informative.
If — on your own — for yourself — in your own individual way –
you ever suddenly grasp the ultimately indescribable, full significance
of there being two separate, but parallel forms of building that man has done,
and constantly continues to do,
and that one form uses materials and one employs nothing but words,
and that to him they are both real and both necessary,
some permanent something-or-other happens in that operation of your brain responsible for words and for the function that normally makes distinctions like this one which are such an integral part of ordinary men’s conception of life and themselves.
The collective majority will build man’s necessary constructions
with or without your willful participation,
but if you do pitch in, either by helping out or by criticizing the work of others,
an unrecognized scientific law will keep you absolutely blind and ignorant to
the projects in which common humanity toils — for the good of all —
but whose existence means nothing to the secret lives of a few.
When it rains — all get wet,
but the sogginess of mind caused only by words
afflicts only those still hypnotized by them.
Those structures built by man’s words,
(which commonly overshadow even his physical ones),
exert a strong and natural hold on man’s consciousness;
myths affect an ordinary man’s thoughts as much as do material facts,
which, from one analysis, is a bottom line definition of being normal and ordinary.
The mind you came with can never totally flee these buildings;
the religion/culture/ideas into which you were born will forever be heard by this mind,
and it will be confined (as it is supposed to be)
to the environs of these verbal constructions, and nothing short of making a shift
in your brain
will allow you to ever move away from these collective buildings common to all men.
A man who has broken-the-hold may go into a palace,
but he does not enter into the dream of government;
likewise, even though he & his original mind must occupy the same brain,
he does not have to join it in its verbal dream house.
J