If the latter is true, then perhaps we do a lot more “compensating” than we generally acknowledge. A person who is hard of hearing provides a common example of ambiguous perception. How much of what he hears is actually perceived and how much is “reconstructed?” My father might hear “Did you save the milk?,” but since neither of us uses milk, he will correct that to what I really did ask: “Did you pay the bill?”
Some ultra-pragmatic, super-materialistic people can be exasperating when they insist on rigid adherence, without interpretation, to strictly sense-perceived data. Arsenic in the soup would simply indicate careless cooking habits. A burning cross on the lawn would be a “fire hazard.”
The point is not so much that we’re all psychic, as that we’ve almost lost the faculty through total reliance on logic and analysis. The senses were originally designed to serve as microscopes and telescopes for zeroing in specifically, to fine-tune what we already know in a general way. This is, of course, why you experience ESP in the twilight zone of near-sleep. The normal brain is like a cat that as a kitten was never allowed to suffer touching privileged paw to common earth, so that now it can’t walk.
CLOACONIMBUS — A permanent smog overhanging heavily populated areas (such as Mexico City), composed of dried or vaporous fecal and other excremental particles.
COBRA — The Hieroglyphics of Horapollo Nilous explains the metaphorical aspects of the Egyptian hieroglyphics. The first entry is about serpents. It seems the Egyptians used the cobra to designate royalty because of its power over life or death. Since, when coiled, its tail disappears, it is also a fitting symbol of eternity. The Greeks called the serpent ouros, whence the “Uraeus,” which is a Greek word for the cobra-shaped crown displayed by gods and kings alike. To demonstrate its “eternal” aspect, the Greeks depicted the serpent devouring its own tail (Ouroboros, “serpent devouring”). Oddly enough, the Greek rho is very similar in shape to the beta, and some scholars believe ouros (read oubos) is taken from an old Hebrew word for sorcery, ob.
That’s all very instructive, to be sure, but what interests us is that the Egyptians believed that the cobra was so deadly that it didn’t even have to sink its fangs into a person, it barely needed to graze him. In fact, it merely had to “breathe” on someone to inflict its venom. Now, since we already know that the “king” cobra was associated with royalty, it’s not surprising that the Greeks should call it, in their language, “the little king” or basilisk, bringing along with the word, the Egyptian version of its natural history.
By the time we reach the Middle Ages in Europe, the basilisk (since cobras don’t exist in Europe) had turned into a fabulous beast with wings and a fiery breath fatal to every living thing. A similar transformation had happened to the poor white rhinoceros of Africa. In Europe the unicorn was turned into a fabulous horse with a horn. And when we learn that the most fearsome of sea serpents, the Nichus, was born of a medieval monk’s mistranslation of an original misspelling of the Latin version of the “Nile” river (Nilus), an obnoxious pattern emerges.
COGNITIVISM —Theory of Artificial Intelligence that the human mind is to be understood and can be examined as though it were a computer analog. Only the right half of the brain, though, is the analog. The left half is digital in nature. Cognitivism now replaces Behaviorism as the dynamic theory.
One thing is becoming increasingly obvious in today’s information explosion: knowledge without meaning or understanding is merely another aspect of ignorance. So it is clear to us now that being and non-being have to be one and the same thing — as the metaphysicians have always insisted, despite our yawns. Science is just now coming to the realization that the flip side of being is knowledge. Therefore, whatever is, is a counter-chaotic emblem of meaning. Mind, let us go so far as to say, is the origin of matter: as the result of its seeking to experience (i.e., “know”) itself.
Today the Individual Mind is the province of Magician and Alchemist. Psychiatry is no longer equipped to deal with the Post-jungian insights of an increasingly advanced, possibly Sirian-based, lay understanding. Therefore, the question of origins doesn’t begin with mysterious hydrogen atoms popping spontaneously into existence, nor with the cornucopious outpourings of a White Hole as the reverse of another dimension’s Black Hole, nor yet with negative forces roiling around inside Nothingness, nor even with society’s usual weird Creator-God or Demiurge, least of all with any “Big Bang.” It begins with the first faint stirrings of body-independent, meta- or pre-cerebral mind.
COLOR MEANINGS —
WHITE — Oneness, Universality
GRAY — Privacy
BROWN — Practicality
PINK — Frustration
VIOLET — Leadership
BLUE — Inspiration
GREEN — Individualism
YELLOW — Spirituality
ORANGE — Energy
RED — Risk
BLACK — Denial
COMICS — Comic strips (and animated films) are not necessarily the silly, childish trivialities that many serious-minded adults, in their sublime ignorance, would prefer them to be. They represent the 20th Century’s craving to balance its pragmatic materialism with the urgencies of the collective dream-mind. They reflect deep undercurrents of the collective unconscious and afford a freedom of creative expression possible nowhere else outside of dreams. They are the unconscious understanding and acceptance of the merging of the rational, the irrational, the subrational and the suprarational, which are the directions of all M/magic(k). The first sacred writing, that of the Egyptians and the Mayans, actually were comprised of highly stylized comic strips.
Mayan Comics
COMITY OF STARS — Refers to our planet’s entry into post-historical galactic union after the Ultimate Temporal Culmination of 2012.
CORYBANT — Priest of Cybele, characterised by noisy music, wild abandon.
COSH — An acronym for “Church Of Secular Humanism.” Xtians refer to Secular Humanism as a religion. COSH is the hyperbolic cosine-haversine function of celestial navigation and engendered by transcendental numbers e and pi, which in turn derive from Gaussian complex numbers involving i, the irrational square root of minus one. This is fitting enough, since calling secular humanism a church is also hyperbolic, deriving from transcendental Irrationality. Since Gauss’s parents were “liberated from the shackles” of the Xtian religion it gives the ultimate origin of COSH an infinite lineage. Since the fundamentalists have themselves conferred religious status upon Secular Humanism, it is the opinion of COSH’s founder, Gerald Baker (1984 lowan presidential candidate for the Big Deal party), that it ought to be given tax-free status so as to empower it to solicit funds for the purposes of widespread evangelism.
COSMIC SWITCHBOARD —The Grid of Omniscience or “Universal Mind” into which anyone may tap at any time to obtain any datum or understanding of past, present or future. We are all eventually hooked into omniscience, but in order to avoid being overwhelmed by a chaos of information and meaning we set up a thick wall between ordinary consciousness and omniscience.