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Progressive Thinkers as of 12/1/2022
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While the reader might want to think that my open musings might qualify as a modernized exploration of some ancient divination, such an idea might not come to mind, but is used as a remark to deny that anything I am offering has any value, because it does not support any conventions that a given reader is accustomed to use for navigating what they assume to be the prevailing normalcy required in their respective milieu. And yet, in a discussion of language, it is of need to pay some mention of divination since it can easily be viewed as a symbolic extension of thought processes influenced by a language that may have been developed in concert with superstition, irrational fears, socio-economic turmoil, multiple dangers, misinterpretation of Natural events which may have been erratic, episodic or consistently patterned in a way that a given human psyche noticed and arranged according to a wildly speculative impressionability.
Indeed, if we think that dreams may have been developed during a critical period and that was a time in which the environment was not settled, then the rather kaleidoscopic, shard-like fragmentations of dreams with or without attachments to basic physiological functionalities (sexual, enuresis, screaming, etc...), may have been the activities which were presented as a role model for a primitively developing behavior system. In such a view, dreams represent a moment in time... a tally stick... of a time period in which a "critical period" (a period of heightened sensitivity, susceptibility, suggestibility) was manifest. Dreams then are a record of physiological development during a given time of a species which came to be the predecessor of present day humans. And yet nightmares has been suggested as a mechanism by which our physiology has adapted itself to persuading a given individual to arose from sleep when life threatening physiological rhythms are being experienced. It does little good for a physiology to use dream-like material of another person or time period or subject matter that will not create a channel of wakefulness to occur.
Dreams and other forms of speculative cognitive activity such as divination, witchcraft, ouija board practices, etc., are all types of tally sticks about humanity. We just don't know how to read them, though we may attribute some personal model of anthropological consideration without once using the word "anthropology" in our respective interpretation, because in so doing we alter the intellectual context and make our view, our belief less personal and more amenable to an analysis seeking authenticity. Language has the power of altering perception. The many languages which have come and gone in history no doubt exist in remnants in present day languages because of the close physiological aptitudes which all humans share. Yet, let us ask... for instance, if a given language such as Aramaic was the language of Jesus, and Jesus was supposedly in close communication with a supposed god, would it not be a superior advantage of one's religious countenance to keep such a language as the dominant practice? Why does the supposed language of a supposed middle-man between god and men come to be extinct? Indeed, why have all the languages of the deep past come to be buried in the sands of time? Were they not the best vehicle to be used between a particular god and humanity? What was wrong with the languages?... or what was wrong with a given belief?... or what was wrong with the humans of a given time and place? If the rule of thumb is to have a single god, why not a single language and a single language as well as a single nation with a single culture and a single commerce and single currency... if such items of social business are needed at all? Should an investigator into human conduct make such correlations or even suggest such a pattern?
Speaking of patterns, heaven forbid anyone taking a look at the behavior of criminal activities throughout history and how they have been adopted and transformed into legal activities by the government, such as the numbers racket and the lottery system or the use of a Ponzi scheme and social security, or the use of a non-democratic model of a military organization being used by a supposed democracy as a private security. By renaming and asserting control over the Numbers Racket so that the once non-taxed monies gathered by organized crime syndicates are no longer free to do as they please, the government now gets a cut of the take and makes the once defined illegal activity a legitimate business, though the public remains duped by the manipulation of the underlying mathematical algorithms employed to ensure the "house" (of which the government retains a full partnership in), is appreciably financed under the guises of proposed good-for-the-public ideas of assisting government-controlled institutions like education, roads and other socialized organizations funded by taxpayers. It goes without saying that the Lottery is viewed by some as another type of tax on the already taxed-to-death poor. When it is said that a Democratic practice uses voting-for-one's-leaders as a hallmark, the practice of not letting all soldiers in a military vote for their leaders speaks loudly of the absence of democracy and the rather hypocritical situation we find a nation in. However, such practices are part of a cognitive tally stick not commonly being looked at. And to make matters more visible for those readers unaccustomed to thinking in such a manner because they are too busy indulging in expected illusions and delusion as accepted normalcy and rationality, let me provide a short list of occurrences in the US military which boil over from the cauldron of perception that patriots might want to label as the views of a witch or warlock or sorcerer gazing into a tripod secured portal of divination by the 3-headed creature called me-myself-eye... and thus add them to the list of other triadic models from myths, legends and Fairy tales:
And yes, the foregoing list is a tally stick, whether or not you agree with the tally, and whether or not all the tally sticks used in the past were accepted as valid representations of the actual, much like the SEC (Security and Exchange Commission) looking at the tallied activities of companies to see whether or not the ledgers conform to their view of right and wrong standards of conduct proscribed by laws which are themselves part of a tally stick which can be altered and re-whittled. Language is such a strange vehicle by which we measure right, wrong, good, bad, sanity, insanity, smart, dumb, etc... Indeed, take a person in jeans and a t-shirt who is over 65 rambling on a park bench cursing and making false claims... and many may label them either senile or mentally ill; but place them in a suit in the White House doing the same thing and many people claim they are speaking a type of truth that a silent majority has been wanting to voice for a long time; they might be judged a prophet, visionary or THE true leader of a free people. The context and appearance of a person can alter the perception of their language.
A person can be too sane, too sober for a given time and place. If they are a person not known to prevailing leaderships, they might be judged a threat. Many people may want to know the person's background and judge their comments according to how much standardized education they have with accompanying merits of attendance and completion of memorized facts, scripts and general acceptance of ideas by those thought to be knowledgeable about a given subject. In other words, do they have a University degree? At what level? Where from? Who did they study under? Have they published any books or had any perspectives subjected to a peer-review process in a respected publication? Has anyone else held the same opinion? Does it support or refute an accepted point of view by which all others standardize their assumptions and research models after? Such are some of the repetitious points of view which abound in the field of intellectual endeavors. Such is the present model of divination. It may resort to the use of computers, mathematics, and various other tools and rules-of-thumb dedicated to a given subject such as the Stock Market, but such devices have in many cases become the substitutes of the once used animal entrails, tea leaves, bones, and other such tools of the divinator's (diviner's) trade in an effort to discover, discern and deliver some truth (usually with a price tag).
Divination (is) the practice of determining the hidden significance or cause of events, sometimes foretelling the future, by various natural, psychological, and other techniques. Found in all civilizations, both ancient and modern, it is encountered most frequently in contemporary mass society in the form of horoscopes, astrology, crystal gazing, tarot cards, and the Ouija board.
In the context of ancient Roman culture and belief, divination was concerned with discovering the will of the gods. Today, however, scholars no longer restrict the word to the root meaning. Divinatory practices and the beliefs undergirding them are greater in scope than discerning the will of the gods and the fatalistic view of the human condition that inspired so much of early Mediterranean religious thought. In some societies, in fact, divination is a practice to which many persons frequently resort, but never in terms of discovering the will of the gods. The idea of a godly providence controlling human affairs in such societies is unusual, although humbler spirits are often thought to intervene in troublesome ways. While divination is most commonly practiced in the modern Western world in the form of horoscopic astrology, other forms were and continue to be of equal importance for other cultures.
Nature and significance
Divination is universally concerned with practical problems, private or public, and seeks information upon which practical decisions can be made; but the source of such information is not conceived as mundane, and the technique of getting it is necessarily fanciful. The mantic (divinatory) arts are many, and a broad understanding can emerge only from a survey of actual practices in various cultural settings. A short definition, however, may be offered as a preliminary guide: divination is the effort to gain information of a mundane sort by means conceived of as transcending the mundane.
Though the act of divination is attended by respect and the attitude of the participants in the divinatory act may be religious, the subject matter of divination (like that of magic) is ephemeral—e.g., an illness, a worrisome portent, a lost object. Divination is a consultative institution, and the matter posed to a diviner may range from a query about a few lost coins to high questions of state. The casual or solemn nature of the matter is normally matched by that of the diviner in terms of attitude, technique, and style. Where the diviner is a private practitioner, the elaborateness of the procedure may be reflected in the fee. In contrast to the worldly motives of some diviners, the calling of diviner-priest was seen by the ancient Etruscans in Italy and the Maya in Mexico as sacred; his concern was for the very destiny of his people.
Divination has many rationales, and it is difficult to describe the diviner as a distinctive social type. He or she may be a shaman (private curer employing psychic techniques; see shamanism), a priest, a peddler of sorcery medicines, or a holy person who speaks almost with the voice of prophecy. To appreciate the significance of the diviner's art in any culture or era, one must be familiar with prevailing beliefs about man and the world. In Christian times Europe has moved from a horror of necromancy (conceived not as consultation with a ghost but as a literal "raising of the dead") to an amused tolerance (among the educated) of spiritualism as a sort of parlour game. To assert that European religious beliefs have remained the same throughout the Common Era would be to ignore the impact of modern science and secularization. On the other hand, to suppose that divination has been doomed by science and secularism would be to ignore the abiding popularity of astrology and recurrent fashions for other mantic disciplines—and perhaps to misjudge the security of "modern" beliefs.
"divination." Encyclopædia Britannica, 2013.
While there is a lot more information in the Britannica article on Divination, let me stop here and make a more formal reference to what is described as a "popularity of astrology and recurrent fashions for other mantic disciplines", one of which is numerology and another is engaging in puzzles of different types and forms. If such forms are popular, could they represent underlying patterns of cognitive activity which attach themselves to whatever is most available to the pattern? In other words, it is not astrology and other recurrent fashions of ideology which are of importance, but some underlying "pattern" that finds itself a symbiotic-like home with a given type of "alternative" investigatory tool? Do such tools as Astrology and Tarot cards or numerology (etc.) resemble a hole that a given cognitive peg finds itself settling into? So why are such underlying patterns repeating? What are they actually? Can the be enumerated or use some other form of labeling to assist us in our research?
Numerology and Astrology and Tarot cards, etc., hold no fascination for me other than as a representative echo, mark, reverberation, etc., of something more basic that may exist "on" human cognition, and such patterns reveal themselves in other subjects in different ways. Hence, I seek to find repetition in the form of a numeral, but the absence of a repetition with or without the presence of another pattern is also intriguing. Indeed, why are human cognitive processes using old themes of orientation, though modified by current appreciations of valuation? (Such as engaging in Astrology, Numerology, etc., for fun, instead of taking it as seriously as some have in the past.)
Out of all the numbers at my disposal via an infinity of numbers, I can not tell you WHY I latched onto the number 3, (or else it latched on to me); but I can vividly remember in childhood that my general interest in playing around with number combinations repeatedly let me back to the "3". With a primary interest in reading Encyclopedias or "serious" books about any subject, I can recall finding myself mentally cataloging numerous instances in which I encountered some mention of the "three", such as the Earth being the third planet, three basic parts to the Earth, three states of matter, three laws of motion and planetary motion, three colors on the U.S. flag, three colors on traffic lights, the various "threes" in Fairy tales, the "three" of the Christian Trinity, etc... And let me note that although my younger brother and I were encouraged to attend bible study at a church on Sunday's, we eventually were not asked to return because we incessantly questioned the person about the so-called "facts" he was presenting. I was about six or seven and my brother two years younger. He later became a lawyer, by the way, along with an MBA and other educational attributes. I can vividly remember he and I have fun posing questions to the bible teacher which he had no answer for. A favourite question was "Why?" Another was "How do you know?" But perhaps the statement which clenched our removal was "I don't believe it!" Even now upon reflection I have to laugh, and so does my brother when we reminisce about it. Such a good chuckle it is.
In the present Narrative on Language, you may have noticed that I am not approaching its structure in a 3-part sequential standard such as Beginning, Middle, End, though there is a rather loose accommodation to the trio of Title, Subject, Body. And as I think about it, I have to wonder if the approach is more like a 3-part mixture of periods, question marks and exclamation points, even if I do not know of any preferential regard of these three has some typical application of presence and occurrence; or is one free to pick and choose without being sent to the proverbial dunce corner or principal's office where one must grab their ankles so as to be paddled with a "board of education" with holes in it. Nope, there can be no real Start-Middle-Finish relay since I am still gathering materials for a larger project working its way into consciousness. The present Narrative is not what may be described as a typical historical review of Language, since I have incorporated a much larger cast of characters whose parts and dialogues may at time appear at odds with some previous or post-occurring scenery of thought. No less, let me account for the occasional reflection such as this commentary as being a moment to catch my breath, take a look at some vista, get a drink of water, take a bite to eat, accede to a call of nature, jot down something to think about longer at a later period, or remove a nagging pebble from a shoe... unless I brushed against some thorny patch and got a bristled seed trying to hitch a ride on a sock or pant leg while creating an irritation needed to be addressed more appropriately then a mere flick of the hand in its direction.
With so many paths attached to the very wide and long road of Language, how does one make a choice, or choose to make one's own path chasing some butterfly of opinion which is musefully thought to have chanced upon you by a design created by serendipity?
I shall return to the topic of tally sticks (bones, sheets, shells, etc...), because it is a language. Just like the Binomial Nomenclature, as a pattern-of-two cognitive tally.
Yet, I am looking for repetitions (or absence thereof) to label as patterns, and that these patterns may (or may not) be representations of a communication; with or without an understandable message or communication meant for other-than-human conceptualizations. It is rather arrogant for humans to think that all patterns are communications meant solely (or at all) for humans to have their lives enriched by such "messages" (formerly noted as "signs" in early human history) or as a similarly expressed warning. However, this is not to say our human type of perception(s) have the ability to perceive or capacity to... at the very least... catalog all the different types of patterns whose frequency may not be detected or even be detectable by the present model of human physiology, and thus cognitively appreciated even in the most simplest and perhaps crudest of evaluations. (I think of humanity's cognitive ability as being a stupid creature who makes things up and decides to agree with that which is made up and choose a hierarchy to go along with the chosen belief. Humanity's physiology is even "slower" and acts as ignorant savage still stuck in a jungle requiring reflexes, hormones, etc...) Alas, that is what we have to work with... a pile of clay to be molded... though I do not go along with the "clean slate" (Tabula Rasa) Hypothesis.
Tabula Rasa, (Latin: "scraped tablet," i.e., "clean slate"), in epistemology (theory of knowledge) and psychology, a supposed condition that empiricists attribute to the human mind before ideas have been imprinted on it by the reaction of the senses to the external world of objects.
Comparison of the mind to a blank writing-tablet occurs in Aristotle's De anima (4th century BC), and the Stoics as well as the Aristotelian Peripatetics subsequently argued for an original state of mental blankness. Both the Aristotelians and the Stoics, however, emphasized those faculties of the mind or soul that, having been only potential or inactive before receiving ideas from the senses, respond to the ideas by an intellectual process and convert them into knowledge.
A new and revolutionary emphasis on the tabula rasa occurred late in the 17th century, when the English empiricist John Locke, in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), argued for the mind's initial resemblance to "white paper, void of all characters," with "all the materials of reason and knowledge" derived from experience. Though Locke himself fell back on "reflection" as a power of the mind for the exploitation of the given "materials," his championship of the tabula rasa signaled even more radical positions by later philosophers.
"tabula rasa." Encyclopædia Britannica, 2013.
Sensationalism: in epistemology and psychology, a form of Empiricism that limits experience as a source of knowledge to sensation or sense perceptions. Sensationalism is a consequence of the notion of the mind as a tabula rasa, or "clean slate." In ancient Greek philosophy, the Cyrenaics, proponents of a pleasure ethic, subscribed unreservedly to a sensationalist doctrine. The medieval Scholastics' maxim that "there is nothing in the mind but what was previously in the senses" must be understood with Aristotelian reservations that sense data are converted into concepts. The Empiricism of the 17th century, however—exemplified by Pierre Gassendi, a French neo-Epicurean, and by the Englishmen Thomas Hobbes and John Locke—put a greater emphasis on the role of the senses, in reaction against the followers of René Descartes who stressed the mind's faculty of reasoning. Locke's influence on 18th-century French philosophy produced the extreme sensationnisme (or, less often, sensualisme) of Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, who contended that "all our faculties come from the senses or . . . more precisely, from sensations"; that "our sensations are not the very qualities of objects [but] only modifications of our soul"; and that attention is only the sensation's occupancy of the mind, memory the retention of sensation, and comparison a twofold attention.
"sensationalism." Encyclopædia Britannica, 2013.
After my slight digression (by providing a 3rd problem), let me return to the topic of knowledge with respect to the question of its origin since it is ultimately to be tied in with the origin of Language, unless one insists the two are totally separate and can be viewed as different entities, bringing us to the old chicken and egg dichotomy phrased as "Which came first, Language (Linguistics) or Knowledge (Epistemology)?" Undoubtedly, some readers will say both came at the same time or that they were preceded by something else, or even that neither have arisen and that what we presently called language and knowledge are precursors to something yet to be developed as a mature behavior. In other words, present language and knowledge are like an infant's babbling... if that.
Date of (series) Origination: Saturday, 14th March 2020... 6:11 AM
Date of Initial Posting (this page): 9th January 2023... 11:35 AM AST (Arizona Standard Time); Marana, AZ.