Experiment:

We collect various dung samples from the wild, and also samples from cows, dogs and people on a Western diet. We arrange these samples at random and introduce the eggs of the same species of fly to each so that they will hatch one very generous batch per day. The fly species was selected to find all the samples acceptable. This means that each day we have a large number of flies from only one dung sample.

When each batch of flies was ready it was tested by putting part of it in a room with students, part in a room with dogs, part in a busy petting zoo and part in a picnic outdoors. The videos were compared.

Result: the flies that grew to maturity in the wild dung consistently proved benign to all concerned compared to the flies grown in the other three.

Conclusion: flies have emotions, and are disturbed if they have been cultivated in unnatural dung, dung from creatures who deviate from their niches. They transmit these emotions to those they socialise with. We further conclude that the same will prove true using bacteria.

Experiment:

Preschoolers are selected who have never used a pair of binoculars, and whose vision seems normal in both eyes. They are taken to a field where they can see their friends, who they have not seen all that day, playing, but at a distance where they can only recognise them through the binoculars so that at first they are not aware of them. The binoculars are set up, pointed, focused and adjusted for the child so that all he has to do is set his eyes to them to find his friends.

Result: The children see their friends and forget they are seeing them through the binoculars, so that they call to them in a normal voice, a voice designed to reach about a tenth of the distance. Usually they then look inquiringly at us, as if finding it inexplicable that their friends don’t answer, wondering if we would explain it. Some of them do the same thing three times in a row.

Conclusion: we presume it is reasonable to equate binocular-obliviousness with self-obliviousness, a tendency to ignore that perception is rooted in the body, which derives from an intensity of perception peculiar to the earliest years of human development (and to people who have had LSD-like drugs administered to them as done in Germany for curing addiction).

Experiment:

Two dogs and their owners standing next to each other, a series of volunteers from the student body, one monitor who also serves refreshments, one or two escorts and a camera person.

First the volunteer is introduced to the owners and the dogs to make sure he has no issues with them. Then the escorts take each victim some distance away from the dogs, owners, etc. and drop a firecracker behind him without warning, watching to make sure there is a gratifying effect. The volunteer is then escorted to the place where the dogs, owners, and monitor are waiting.

The volunteer is presented with two cocktail glasses full of sparkling water by the monitor, one for each hand, and is asked to take these to the dog’s owners several paces away and hand them both over simultaneously; and he is told that part of the test is to see how much of the water will actually get delivered.

Result: the volunteer approaches the dog’s and owners with the two glasses of water, but before he can hand these to the two owners he has a fit of panic just like the one he had when the firecracker was lit behind his back, and he spills a good deal of the water.

Observation: from the video we conclude that the hormones of the panic emotion are discovered by the dogs, but in the discovery process these hormones are not excreted into the dog's blood; rather they are excreted into the volunteer's blood by the dog's discovery. We are calling this a "self-oblivious” discovery or emotion. In the dog it is an emotion of the mind, which is a difficult thing to define, while in the volunteer it is an emotion of the blood. The dog understands the feeling perfectly without physically feeling it, but not without re-inducing it in the volunteer.

The experiment is repeated to try to determine if it matters to the dogs if they have heard the firecracker or not.

Then the experiment is repeated using an embarrassing wet spot, where the volunteer puts a spot of water on his clothes where it may be misconstrued. He then is given a folded paper to hide it with while he is walked through a crowd of people. Hiding it this way he does not look quite natural, and inevitably he becomes embarrassed just the same.

When the spot has dried and the embarrassment is presumed gone he is taken to two dogs and their owners who are close together to see if the dogs will discover the emotion as before.

Result: There was no way to check the hormones without more invasive technology than a camera, but the volunteers agreed that the dogs brought the embarrassment back. One volunteer denied the feeling, but he also became suddenly visibly angry with the dogs for some reason at the point where the other volunteers nodded.

On this blog we are looking at the impediments to discovery, to learning at a phenomenal rate. And where do we impose these impediments on children? We impose them as the trick of posing as this and as that. We show them that it is not rewarding to find authority figures transparent. We trick them before they can even conceive of trickery, establishing a lifelong susceptibility to experiencing poses as genuine others, to accept mirages as company.

On the road to senility there arrives a reflex: The other person is speaking or writing, and we see this as a successful manipulation. We have pretended to pay attention, making this other feel that he has someone to speak to or write to, and that was the desired effect, to con him into speaking or writing to a mere pose of attending his words.

Safely behind the pose we can pursue our agendas as long as we have the other speaking or writing to that pose. We feel we have conned the whole world into thinking that we are simple enough to have time for them, that we can spare the time from our plotting and scheming to actually become absorbed in what they have to say. We have become anti-social, and no one knows it.

And when we try to get someone’s meaning we always fail (unless the meaning is inane enough to serve as mere verbal petting) and then we congratulate ourselves for having become immune to change (except for decay).

What happens if we find ourselves transparent to someone? What happens when someone turns and points, the way this is doing, to the hidden workings? We intend for someone to be simple, and instead he is complex. Do we cherish this effect, do we cultivate this relationship?

We know the ego is preying, and we know predation injures others, so do we want our children to find the hidden workings transparent, to see the tiger in the bushes before it strikes? Or is this hidden self so precious to itself that it would resent having children in the world who could see past each pose? Is this a tiger who has children for the sole purpose of feeding tigers?

To rescue the complexity of perception with which children are born, the ability to grasp and to discover, we must rescue them from our own intent to indulge in hidden processes.

Here we continue on the subject raised in the previous instalment, educating the whole mind.

We can approach the problem of introducing material that becomes memory by its falseness or oversimplification in two ways. The first and best is to never introduce any; to spare the child the forming of a contrived memory. The second is to introduce the naturally complex form or version of what is in memory. The oversimplified version will not survive in the face of the real one. The false can not exist in the shadow of the true.

Michael Crichton introduced seven quite good fractal iterations to the general reading public in his book Jurassic Park. Fractal math, sometimes called "reality math”, asks us to realize that there is an infinite scope to all observation, and that one can not get to infinity by taking steps (there is no fraction of infinity; a trillion is not closer to infinity than 2). One must begin with infinity in the first place. If I can only find ten steps I don’t put it down as the ten steps of reality. To do so is a kind of blasphemy.

In astronomy, for example, we tend to stop where we can’t see, which is beyond about 14 billion light-years. That leaves us somewhere inside a universe, or close to one; hard to tell the difference. A universe that was actually crashing into ours, the way some galaxies crash into others, wouldn’t be noticed by our astronomy unless it were incredibly old and incredibly close to just our Galaxy. So when we are speaking of the cosmos we tend to stop at the word and the mass called "universe”, just because we can’t see another universe.

In truth universes do not shine. Light isn’t fast enough at that scale to be found actually moving out of a universe in such a short time as 14 billion years, or even a hundred times that. (Try it in your imagination: you are watching a fast car from a helicopter, and you climb and climb until you see the whole continent. The higher you climb the more you see and the slower the car.) So we get a world full of eager graduates who want to talk about how the universe began without accepting rule one: it didn’t begin by itself. "Let there be light! One, two, three, Big Bang!” It began as a direct consequence of its environment, which is a profound environment, far more so than a universe in its infancy.

Inconceivably creative, is what a mature part of the cosmos must be called, since even here in our universe we have the evolution of the elements and compounds advanced to something fairly impressive even though it is for the present contained inside of galaxies as far as I know. When do galaxies begin to contribute to the intergalactic medium, to compost themselves? And the g-clusters? etc. And how do they do it?

And where there are universe clusters, just as there are galaxy clusters, and these contain up to hundreds of billions of universes, our presumably rather unformed u-cluster averaging, let us say universes about 4, 000 billion years old (which still isn't old enough for centrifugal force to have lent them much shape or even identity), then we have a universe that is very active. We have a grander iteration of the spinning galaxy, the spinning galaxy supercluster, etc.

We also have a question of how profoundly dynamic a universe is, the RELATIVE rotation (which is virtually none if we don't compare it with greater masses instead of lesser), the extreme velocity at the u-equator, relative to the positions of other universes within the cluster. And in the next iteration there are clusters of universe clusters, and so on, until we come to a question of shape: Are universes "born” at some growing tip of the cosmos, as a root grows, most of it old and the tip being new?

If we approach things in this complex way (of course this is just a preface to the complexity we want in the study of the cosmos and microcosm; here it is just an illustration, not science) we have a potential for actually feeling the phenomenon, and this is the mind at work naturally. The feeling mind will make new discoveries without trying to. Preserving the feeling mind is the key to granting a joyous lifetime to children and producing a humanity the planet can live with.