Summary = None
Condensed News = See below
News Item Gallery = None
Transcript = None
Key Words =
Jan’s Posted Daily Fresh Real News
Things Noted Every Day That People Do Not Think About Every Day
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
IN THE CITY: DOORS UNUSED
SEAL THEMSELVES UP
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
December 16, 2002 © 2002: JAN COX
A Simple Question:
If ordinary men did not think they are personally important, who would?
Those who appear complex in the city are seen as simple from the plains.
In the city, everybody is an imitation of somebody else,
which obviously is how things are supposed to be,
but to the certain man is quite boring.
Your liver is in synch with the collective’s liver –
likewise your lungs, heart and kidneys;
what else do you think might be involved? (another simple question.)
Going from being respectful-of and thankful-for the various civilizing institutions man has created to being resentful and critical thereof
is a moving from an old juvenile prison into a more adult one.
Just another example of the collective’s concept of:
“The Procession Of Progress — The Cavalcade To Complexity.”
It is not that the herd, through its life-directed, unwitting collective effort,
does not actually improve its living conditions,
but what the extraordinary changes it effects on the external environment do not accomplish is any alteration in the individual cow’s perception of himself and life;
the thinking life makes available to men via standard city institutions and outlets
has extended his life span, but not understanding of what he is
in the universal reality of what is going on.
When you cannot comprehend stars, you study snails —
this is ordinary mind’s normal course —
when you cannot see afar, you focus on minutia;
thus do ordinary men concentrate on the mental facade of themselves
that their brain provides, and are left futilely dangling with the unsupportable idea of their own individual importance.
In the city it is all too easy to take shadows for reality — dreams for substance,
an arrangement in man’s brain that results in the imagination that
produces life extending technology, but which, in its natural condition,
can provide no useful instruction about itself;
the brain’s dreaming of the man not having to haul water from the river to his fields resulted in the invention of the pump,
but the brain’s routine dreams regarding itself never leads to anything practical,
or enlightening;
only those born with that certain interest and peculiar neural potential can massage their consciousness into operating otherwise.
(Gawd! — the ordinary cannot begin to imagine what having this possibility means to those few!)
Bring up the question of just how bad things really are to the authorities,
and other important people in the city and watch their faces instantly light up.
Taxes are a fiscal version of the intellectual one: Distribution of shared stupidity risks.
(Do you think it mere happenstance that men run in the largest herd of all!)
What It Is To Be Normal In The City (Typified At The Train Station):
every day at five fifteen — you catch the 5:15:
such is individual sanity — billionized by six, such is civilization.
It is not that there is something indigenously out-of-order with predictability;
it is the life blood of man’s physical existence,
but for those who would mentally see beyond the common horizon,
it is a ponderous impediment
(why do you think that in some quarters such people are called rebels!)
Through his institutions, life sends men many messages — yet they are all the same: “Stay in line!”
An artist who will note the praise of philistines — is no artist.
Corollary: cows who heed the cries of cow-punchers are cows indeed!
(and singing: “On the way home,
we’re on the way home,”
as they head out for Chicago).
With the realization of what is going on, the rebel’s brain loses its interest in what other humans have to say about the physical man in whom it is encased;
to the performer on the plains, roses and rotten tomatoes are the same.
In the city, it is all too easy to take bad news for granted.
An independent thinker never wastes his time on a particular idea pondering:
“Is this true or not?” but rather grabs it, throttles it, and extracts from it
insights he can use which the idea originally had no idea it possessed.
Only big boys and girls can even momentarily recognize unadorned reality
if they happen to stumble on it,
and only super duper large ones have the ability to struggle to see it.
The challenge of thinking outside of your ingrained neural patterns
is comparable to teaching a fifteen year old dog French.
A land with two rulers will never be free —
but one with three — might be.
The good news is: no one gives a damn if you try to think for yourself —
as long as you keep it to yourself —
ergo (just to be safe) does a man who knows keep everything to himself.
(“If it weren’t for me having me on constant call,
I’d never have a date on the weekend — or any other time for that matter.”)
J