May 1, 2003                                                                            © 2003: JAN COX
 
 
 
 

An explosive, explanatory, but ignored feature of human life is that,
while not knowing about particular matters in physical reality (such as an infection,
or approaching hurricane) can kill you, not knowing about anything and everything
in man’s intangible reality has no consequences whatever:
this simple, salient fact is totally overwhelmed in ordinary men’s lives
by their words’ insistence to their professed, serious contrary.
 

A man’s knowledge of the tangible reality in which he physically and vitally exists,
he gets from sensual experience;
therefrom does he know which foods to eat, water to drink,
conditions and creatures to avoid, etc,
but as more and more men become more and more civilized, and the seat of their control central continues to lean more toward their intellect, and further from their
instincts, increasingly does he say he finds that intangible world, unique to him,
of near equal  –  or even greater importance
(e.g.): “It is as important to feed your soul as it is your stomach”  --  or:
“Knowledge of the spiritual realm is incalculably more critical than
any knowledge of the material world.”
This overall attitude embedded in the higher end of man’s nervous system being thus: to live the life truly proper and intended for man,
you must devote much of  --  nay, specifically  --  the best of your
mental-come-spiritual attention to that whole other reality that exists
intangibly inside of you, as contrasted to the physical reality outside of you.
 

“Man does not live by bread alone” --  a world wide maxim that aptly encapsulates
this perspective, genetically encoded in Homo sapiens;
those religiously wired & programmed profess the need to spread
their particular spiritual knowledge to all of mankind,
while their more intellectually bred counterparts proclaim the same
concerning education (from their view: factual based knowledge).
 

The most prominent and practical peculiarity of man’s mind is
its innate hunger to learn;
that is the only facet of man’s physique that so yearns:
the area of the brain that is conscious and the medium for thought  --
not his lungs nor his breathing  --  not his heart, nor its beating;
all other organs and operations come fully informed of their functioning;
they have nothing to learn  --  they neither lack, nor have need of any knowledge,
but the most distinctive trait of the brain’s mental activity is its indigenous desire
to learn; an irrepressible hunger for what it has led men to label: knowledge.
 

Knowledge of the physical world is of supreme and undeniable profit to men,
but knowledge of man’s intangible world (a complete creation OF his mind)
affords no such substantial, material benefit.
Via simple observation, the value of the technology
(the rearrangement of the elements of the environment) the mind has spawned in the physical realm is indubitable (insecticides and genetic engineering in agriculture, sophisticated diagnostic equipment and techniques in medicine, on and on),
but no amount of sensual scrutiny reveals any actual boon bestowed on man
by his having knowledge of the intangible world whose elements exist
only in his thoughts, and only then because his thoughts say that they do.
 

The question of whether knowledge of things incorporeal are important or not
cannot be factually approached in the world of conventional men
(due to the nature of its source, which was, in the preceding sentence, just noted);
if the thought appears in a man’s mind which says:
“It is most important to know the will-of-god” --  then that man has no choice:
to him there is no question or doubt:
it IS important, and no naysaying by any other can that change.
 

You can always literally prove whether a particular piece of knowledge
about the physical world is profitable or not,
but nothing even remotely similar is possible pertinent man’s
spiritual/cultural/mental, intangible world;
no bit of so-called knowledge about that realm can be proven profitable,
thus neither can it be proven otherwise
(a man’s knowledge that Excalibur is silver can never be shown incorrect).
 

Yet in contradistinction to this brutally prominent actuality,
life is genetically arranged in man’s nervous system to culminate via his mind
into a species wide perception that the singular world of an intangible other reality existing inside of man is, in its own special way,
as real and as important as the physical world in which he somatically subsists;
without this enforced perspective, there could be no civilization;
did not they think their incorporeal spirit and its metaphysical desires as important as their stomach and carnal hungers, men would be no more than feral animals.
 

Ergo --  naught afoot untoward in the life of conventional mankind,
but for the few born with a certain unconventionally schematicized and scheduled nervous-system-“Hello, mind,”
this facet of mortal existence of which the brain can express awareness,
it is quite another fettle-of-kish.
 

While all men are born with brains which hunger to know,
these anomalous few have minds with an intense version;
theirs hungers for knowledge ignored (or unrealized) by everyone else;
their thoughts come out of the gate, hungry for a special knowledge,
which neither they nor anyone they speak to about it can define;
all that becomes quickly clear is that none of the knowledge commonly embraced by their peers contains that for which their mind longs,
and the danger (confined only to their ilk) after that is in their thoughts
unavoidably latching to what seems to be a cache of uncommon knowledge,
largely ignored by the masses:
occult, secret, mystical and spiritual knowledge (in other words):
knowledge of occult, secret, mystical and spiritual worlds (or in still other words): knowledge of things that no one can literally: see, hear, smell, taste or touch,
and for a while (and for most, for always) this is what their thoughts believe that
they want to know about, and that not having full and correct knowledge of
the affairs of this extraordinary, trans-material realm is for them, of gravest danger.
 

Most tricky and problematic for even the uncommon mind of the few is to be able to grasp (as would a hand itself) on an ongoing basis the fact that neither knowledge nor lack thereof about matters in this extraordinary seeming world,
that has no actual substance,
has any actual relevance to them  --
to the goal initially felt and expressed by their nervous system.
The innate inclination always of the mind (even under these unusual circumstances)
is to take and be satisfied with what is presented to it as:
knowledge, germane the bodiless domain;
thus do those who originally sought to know what is going on with life,
soon settle for knowing the secret interpretations of astrology,
or the hidden inner teachings of Moses, Muhammad,  Swami Bami, etc.
 

Mind by its nature and inborn hunger to know
cannot protect itself from believing that: “What you don’t know can hurt you”  --
"If you die without having come to know god’s will and purpose for man (via this or that religion or teaching), you will be hurt by being eternally damned" --
(or in a less melodramatic setting):
"If your aim is to mystically Awaken, achieve Enlightenment,
then failure to know the ideas of a school devoted thereto will hurt you,"
in the sense of keeping you from your goal.
 

To everyone’s natural-born mind: there are things  --  in an intangible realm  --  which,
if you do not know about, you will suffer harm thereby;
ordinary minds believe this, as do most extraordinary ones also;
under almost all imaginable conditions, it does not seem this situation can be otherwise  --  to expect so is to anticipate the appearance of dancing snakes,
and for most, this is how it is and how it will forever be  --
but the man with the special banjo has the potential talent to make
high-steppers of the legless,
and in the preliminary stage all that is required is that he clearly divide in his own mind, through his own efforts and investigation, the incompatible distinction between knowledge, which a lack of can hurt you,
and knowledge, which a lack of is totally irrelevant   --  to HIM.
 

A man who is born with  --  and develops an uncommon clarity of inner vision, gradually comes to see that what will conclusively satiate his extraordinary
nervous system hunger is not the knowing-of-something-special as first seems,
but in final fact, the knowing of something special ABOUT knowing and not knowing;
the knowledge of that is what blows the nascent expanded vision into
full flown, real time sight.
(In a verbally specific, substantial seeming example:
knowing what: knowing-that-man-is-asleep-but-can-awaken  is  – IS being awake,   but: knowing that you do NOT know what:
knowing-that-man-is-asleep-but-can-awaken  is  --  is also being awake.)