The Internet As World Mind

If people who can't do, teach; then what is it that philosophy teachers can't do?

Maybe they can't be-co-me oracles. If they can't respond to oracular questions ala the Sphinx, then they can't have the privacy of the desert to themselves. I don't remember what the penalty was for not answering the Sphinx' riddle, but there was a price to pay for wasting it's ti-me with trivialities.

I continue to be amazed that all I really have to do about wot's sot before me is to know the exact question to ask, and to be patient enough for the correct response to sink in to the person occupying the warm body that answered the call.

The average person you might meet walking down a street full of pedestrians don't realize they can be used as an oracle by anybody who knows how. It's even harder for them to realize they already have been, and/or were before they could stop themselves from saying the first thang that popped into they mind. Becoming an oracle for a complete stranger in the immediacy of now just ain't what most people expect to happen on a day to day walk in the park.

It's a little ridiculous of me to expect people who don't even know what an oracle is other than what they've read about that used to be so in some ancient past. Why would they not. How could the very idea of oracles enchant those who don't know what they are or do?

I consulted the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the I Ching daily or almost daily for over thirty years until I was told by my inner voice to stop doing that. It was only after I managed to stop using the written copy of the I Ching as an oracle that I realized that being stopped from using the book was the only way I could have realized I was supposed to ask my unending questions of real people. I hate to say it, but any warm body will do including my own.

I've already removed myself from the presence of others to some large, lingering degree that has even me worried a little. Using other people as oracles for a body of understanding they can't possibly see themselves as a container for is a lot like using an internet search engine like Google or Yahoo. Why would they compare themselves to such a digital portal as Google or Yahoo?

Unless a comparison of that sort was brought to their attention by an external source, they would never consciously know such a thing is possible. Once a person has been online for a while it's easy to understand how to use Google. When to use it takes a little longer. I had to be reminded by my youngest brother countless times to take my incessant questions to the internet and leave him alone. That was his way of habituating me to using a search engine to answer my own questions.

It shocks me a little to realize that the questions I usually want answered are not all that unusual. When I go to type in the subject or topic I want answers to, the drop down menu already has it listed as a common inquiry. I honestly thought I was a bit more complex than that. Granted, many of the questions I use Google for are questions of some doubt that I ever did actually know the real answer to.

Google is the old person's friend. It provides me with the commonly used words and descriptions I lose from the tip of my tongue. If I'm sitting at my computer I can use natural language questions or a list of associative words to "remember" what wasn't there for me just moments ago.

The internet as one huge world-wide database is still not large enough of a container to hold the evolutionary experiences of one person, and yet each person in the world contains a complete experiential database of everything they've ever made themselves into from the ti-me they arrived on planet Earth. That's talking about something very, very small. How small is truly moot. There doesn't seem to be an end to it. The people on that quest appear to be making it up as they go along, and creating smaller and smaller stuff to base their claim to fame on.