Weblog: June 28, 2006
Today is my mother’s 99th birthday. While she is here ‘in spirit’ and in ‘ongoing influence’, she is not here in body, to celebrate, having rejoined the all-inclusive flow some months before her 94th birthday.
Some quantum physicists say that ‘birth’ is a ‘quantum event’ that sends information cascading out for enfoldment in the evolving space of the continuing present, so that it is hypothetically possible to backward-continue that ‘quantum-event-imprinted’ information or ‘influence’ to the point of its birth. David Bohm described the space of quantum reality by the metaphor of a pin-prick drop of black ink in a treacle-like fluid, the fluid being stirred until the blackness of the trajectory of the stirred drop was transformed into an overall pastel gray of the stirred fluid, suggesting that the influence of an individual can ‘colour’ the quality of the space that the individual, and its fellows, are included in. In this quantum model, the substance of the universe is the enfoldment of cascading influence of many such quantum events.
Be that as it may, her influence continues, in some way or other, to pervade the dynamical hostspace I and those that knew her are included in, and today I am going to make note of what sort of influence that is.
My mother was a ‘home-maker’ and ‘home-making’ is all about conditioning the shared space we live in. The politicians and the university professors, when they are speaking to us in their usual terms of ‘how things work’ and ‘how to make things work better’ etc. say nothing about how to cultivate quality in the space we share inclusion in.
That’s where ‘home-makers’ like my mother are way ahead of the ‘experts’, political and scientific.
How this can be, is what I want to blog about today, on my mother’s 99th birthday.
Meanwhile, it involves an understanding that one has to ‘sneak up on’ since it eludes direct description.
One can start with the basic notion of ‘home-making’ and couple it with the thought of ‘holding others in one’s heart’.
It takes poetry to speak of this sort of spatial-relational-inclusional realm.
But scientists and politicians, rather than being ‘poetic’ are a literalist lot, that speak in terms of ‘independent objects’ and ‘what they do’ and their discourse lacks the poetic/musical spatial-relational understanding of the ‘home-maker’.
As children-in-the-home, from the time we rise in the morning till we snuggle in fresh bedclothes to sleep again at night, we walk in a space that is highly organized in a manner that accommodates the actualizing of our assertive potentials. The toothpaste, soap and towels are in the bathroom, the cereals are in the cupboard and the fruit and milk in the fridge, ... we walk over vacuumed carpets and washed floor-tiles and we come home to the delightful smells of supper simmering in the pots and sizzling in the frying pans.
The scientist tends to constrain his discourse to what ‘independent objects do’ and thus what we, as ‘independent objects’, do, ... and so do the politicians and priests of our western culture. Both the scientists (who feed their models to the politicians) and the priests model Nature and the world of social dynamics in terms of ‘independent material object-beings’ with ‘independent material-object behaviours’. Space as the mother of our dynamics was banished a long time ago in our western religion and western science, when we switched to ‘belief’ founded in terms of mutually exclusive objects, ... which could EITHER ‘exist’ OR ‘not-exist’, ... or be EITHER ‘good’ OR ‘evil’, ... but not both at the same time.
Mutual exclusion is foundational to the western conception of individuals as ‘independent’. And because we conceive of ourselves as ‘independent’, we notionally endow ourselves with ‘free will’ or ‘self-determinism’. This compensates for breaking ourselves out of the continuing flow and seeing ourselves as ‘independent’, by endowing ourselves with a notional capacity for internal ‘first cause’, sole-authorship of our behaviour driven from the inside of us. This is a convention we impose on our mental modeling that allows us to characterize the whole world dynamic and the whole social dynamic in terms of ‘what independent objects do’, so that we no longer need to incorporate and take into account the accommodating quality of the space that we are included in, in our mental modeling of the world.
Thus, when little Johnnie goes to school or when he goes to work at the grocery store, we see it in terms of ‘what little Johnnie does’, and the accommodating space that he is included in is nowhere to be seen. We cannot ‘see’ in this imagery of him moving, the accommodating potentials that his mother has sown into the space that he is asserting into, that induce a blossoming and shaping actualization of his assertive potentials.
The invisibility of the home-maker’s contribution is what the Nicaraguan poet Claribel Alegria is talking about when she says; “my grandfather was a famous engineer and my grandmother had no name.”
A culture that is obsessed with ‘what things do’ or ‘what individuals do’ blinds itself the accommodating role of the space we are included in.
Alegria also says of herself, in this same spatial-relational-including vein that ‘she is a cemetery’ who offers herself as a resting place for the many that went missing in the civil wars.
It is possible to ‘hold others in one’s heart’ and it is possible to cultivate order in a shared living space so that that space opens up and inductively shapes the actualizing of the potentials of those included within it.
The words that describe it can only be ‘poetic’ rather than ‘literal’ because the influence of what has been cultivated by the home-maker is invisible (we can only see ‘what the boy does’ and not how it is being shaped and made easier by the cultivating of an accommodating quality in the space he is included in). What is literal must be picturable and factual. Meanwhile what is beyond literal description can certainly be ‘real enough’, such as the felt experience of being situationally included in an accommodating or disaccommodating space.
What ‘home-making’ is all about is the conditioning of space so that it lightens, from suppression to receptivity, the accommodative backpressure that shapes the actualizing of an individual’s assertive potentials (metaphorically, in the inner-outer manner that one might experience by being enclosed by a plastic balloon which pushes in and smothers you if the pressure outside of it is too high, and which can itself expand and put you in a vacuum that bloats/inflates you if the pressure outside of it is too low.)
One cannot realistically speak of ‘what an individual does’ without acknowledging that they are situationally included in space and that all dynamics are relative and involve a mutual shaping that goes on between the actualizing of individual assertive potentials and the accommodating of the space that they are uniquely situationally included in.
The settler who came to the fresh and richly resourced space
of the
To attribute the blossoming actualization of individual potentials to some power within the individual is to blind oneself to the accommodating role of the space they are included in.
But that’s precisely what our western scientific and religious (doctrinal) cultures have been doing. They have stripped down the innate relativity of individual-asserting – spatial-relational-accommodating into a unipole (individual asserting) by imposing the notion of ‘free will’ or ‘self-determinism’ into the interior of the individual.
“Just as no outside force caused God to create the world, so no
outside force causes people to choose certain actions. For
man is created in God's image, which includes the possession of free will.”
By this ‘device’ of imputing ‘internal first cause’ in the individual (as ‘independent object’), the innate relativity of individual-asserting and spatial-accommodating is artificially removed and we are free to speak of dynamics in the sole terms of ‘what things do’ and social dynamics in terms of ‘what individual people do’.
Some philosophers speak of this as ‘the banishment of the Goddess or ‘feminine’, ... but by whatever name, it is an artifice that reduces the accommodating role of space to nothing, and thus reduces the essential contribution of the home-maker to nothing. It nullifies such spatial-relational understandings as ‘it takes a community to raise a child’, and has us instead focusing exclusively on the facts of what individuals do, ... facts that ‘mark the place where our investigations cease’.
Such is the result of imputing the ‘device’ of ‘internal first cause’ in the individual so that we can ignore the accommodating role of space. Such is our western manner of isolating the authorship of criminal and/or terrorist behaviour exclusively to the individual;”Just as no outside force caused God to create the world, so no outside force causes people to choose certain actions.”
Western science (mainstream) uses the same model. It regards the ‘organism’ as an ‘independent object’ with ‘independent object behaviour’, ... centrally managed, in the case of the human organism, by the brain (i.e. an ‘independent organism-object’, because we purport it to be ‘independent’ and to be capable of ‘independent behaviour’, requires that we impute to it ‘internal first cause’ of behavioural authorship. It is common for us to notionally ‘house’ this ‘internal first cause’ within a notional ‘central governing authority’).
Of course our experience as humans is that we are a continuing inner-outer dynamical balance-seeking entity, ... balancing fluid flows, balancing material flows, balancing gaseous flows, balancing pressure flows, balancing thermal energy flows, ... even when we are asleep and in a coma, and even when our brain, the notional ‘housing’ of a notional ‘central governing authority’ degenerates or is damaged beyond repair in an accident or by a stroke.
That this exclusively ‘internal first cause’ based authorship of individual behaviour, which makes the notion of individuals as ‘independent material objects’ ‘hang together’ does not accord with our experience is not sufficient, in the western culture, at least, to have us revise our model. Individualism and the pursuit of individual self-interest is very deeply infused into the everyday structures of western society. Even if we are being carried away in a tsunami or in a cart that is taking us to the guillotine, we like to insist that we have ‘free will’ and to prove it by kicking our feet when and how we choose to, and in the cart, by singing a song and dancing a jig of our our own choosing, when we choose to. Of course, such visual images involve the imposing of an absolute space-frame that we visualize our actions relative to. In reality, we are inextricably bound up in the flow, the evolving space of the continuing present and our actions are not really ‘our own’ (as they appear if we reference them to an absolute space frame) but they are instead RELATIVE to the spatial-relational flow in which we are situationally included.
This preference for thinking in terms that we act out of our own free will, rather than conceding that our actions are relative to the spatial-relational flow-dynamic we are included in, is why the wisdom of ‘home-makers’ is ignored by the political and scientific experts. Their models only address ‘what things do’, as in the absolute-space-frame referencing view. They do not see that the ‘relative’ dynamics of the host flow-space are the more fundamental reality while the dynamics of individual objects are illusion based on the absolute space-framing conventions we have imposed. After all, an ‘object’ is an ‘imaginary-line/surface-bounded closed geometric form’, one of the ‘invariable bodies’ of mathematical geometry.
Inner-outer spatial-relational dynamics give rise to such entities as ‘hurricanes’ that are nonlocally inferred flow-forms, rather than independent objects with independent object behaviours. Understanding how we can reduce this inner-outer standing-wave form to an ‘independent object’ and talk about it as having its own behaviour, as ‘Katrina is heading for this or that place’ and ‘Rita is doing such-and-such’ is a lesson in how our western acculturated minds banish the innate (spatial-relational) relativity of the world dynamic, the mutual shaping of individual-asserting and spatial-accommodating.
Further examples are mentioned by native traditionalists who
mock the existence of ‘Canada’ and ‘the United States’, not as the natural
reality of peoples and their lands, but as ‘imaginary-line-bounded independent
political objects’ that are deemed capable of ‘independent object
behaviours’. As the natives point out,
‘
The colonizing settlers were presented with this; “We are holding onto an imaginary-line-bounded property-object’. You can have a piece of it if you agree to swear an oath to believe in this imaginary line-bounded property object (nation-state) and to bear arms and defend your belief in it with your life, if necessary against any unbelievers, such as the indigenous peoples.
The cult of believers is the only foundation for the ‘reality’ of the ‘existence’ of the imaginary-line-bounded independent-property-object we know as the ‘nation-state’. Such ‘existence’ is established gradually, by people being so severely punished for ignoring the imaginary-line-boundaries of the independent-property-object nation-state as to ‘make believers, or at least, acceptors, out of those who would deny it (apart from the animals, birds, insects, fish, bacterium, spores, winds, rivers etc. which belong to a natural reality that has no place in it for such cult-based belief in imaginary objects).
Making imaginary-line-bounded independent-property-object nation-states backed by ‘cults of believers’ foundational to our world’s social dynamics (i.e. ‘political nationalism’) is yet another ‘twist off’ from reality that characterizes our western culture and its escalating dysfunctions.
By the same ‘device’ of imputing ‘internal first cause’ to the behaviour of independent objects, we play a language game wherein we say ‘Canada does such-and-such’ and ‘the US does such-and-such’ in the same manner as with the hurricanes Katrina and Rita, ... ignoring the inherent relativity of nature’s dynamics, wherein the asserting of any individual and the accommodating of the hostspace it is included in are a dynamical unity. That is, just as in the case of the child growing up, the actualizing of assertive potentials and the accommodating of the hostspace he is situationally included in, are a mutually shaping dynamical unity.
One cannot speak of ‘
The home-maker knows that that the organized potentials of our shared hostspace, that accommodate the actualizing of our assertive potentials are in a natural primacy. That they are denied and nullified by the device of visualizing the world in terms of ‘independent objects’ and their ‘independent object behaviours’ wherein we impute ‘internal first cause’ to the object so that these notions ‘hang together, stems from ‘literalizing’ our intuitive understanding of space, an understanding that is innately ‘poetic’.
To bring to a close this note celebrating ‘home-makers’, a view of how the poetic is being reduced to the literal is offered, by way of the works of William Blake.
There have always been ‘poetic tales of heroic deeds’ and this, at first glance, appears to be a glorification of the male-assertive aspect, outside of the context of the just-discussed primacy of the accommodating role of space.
But this interpretation is not so unless one literalizes
these tales of assertive heroism, since every ‘hero’ is mutually shaped by the
accommodating backpressure or ‘challenges’ of the space he is included in. There is always an inner-outer balance-seeking
individual-asserting – spatial-accommodating two-sidedness to the dynamics of
mythical heroes (not simply two polar opposites in a win or lose event). For example, Beowulf’s heroism depends on
going inside the space of Grendel’s lair; “As Beowulf sank beneath the murky waters, he was immediately
encircled by enormous and vicious creatures”
This relativity of individual-asserting and spatial-accommodating pervades the works of William Blake. Blake decries ‘generalization’ that strips the ‘independent object’ out of the space that it is included in that gives it its identity and particularity,.... ‘generalization’ that reduces the inner-outer spatial-relational to linear-temporal objects dynamics. The self-referencing of inner and outer is the very source of the unique and particular;
To see a world in a grain of sand,And a heaven in a wild flower,Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,And eternity in an hour.
A robin redbreast in a cagePuts all heaven in a rage.
And
in this same vein, it was when Blake was a (rebel) student at the
“Over time, Blake came to detest [the school’s president] Reynolds' attitude to art, especially his pursuit of 'general truth' and 'general beauty'. During an address given by Reynolds in which he maintained that the tendency to abstraction is "the great glory of the human mind", Blake reportedly responded "to generalise is to be an idiot; to particularise is alone the distinction of merit".
Here we see Blake speaking in terms of a ‘particularity’ that derives from an entity’s unique situational inclusion in space. The grain of sand is given particularity by its unique situational inclusion in the world (the world is its reciprocal complement as ‘relativity’ would have it), and the same for the robin. To generalize about the beauty of a robin by ‘objectifying it’ in visual terms is to destroy its particularity deriving from its unique situational inclusion in the common space that we, the observer, share inclusion in. The same is true for the grain of sand, which generalization would characterize in terms of its own geometry and substance, while lying on the beach it speaks to the rocky cliffs from whence it came or in the desert, to its spatial-relational place within a moving sea of aesthetically shaped dunes. Generalization that removed this spatial-relational particularity was anathema to Blake.
Blake realized that we ‘poetically’ impute God-like powers in the visual entities that are the ‘object’ of our attention, and that by taking this poetical imputing of internal power ‘literally’, we end up with the abstraction of ‘self-determinism’ or ‘internal first cause’. As western religious monotheist beliefs go;
“Just as no
outside force caused God to create the world, so no outside force causes people
to choose certain actions. For man is created in God's image,
which includes the possession of free will.”
In the picture-triad below, on the left is Blake’s plate 11 from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell wherein he explains how the literalizing of the poetical created the religious priesthood with its ideas of God-given ‘internal-first-cause’ in the individual ‘object’, the same sort of thinking that we use today to mutually exclude ‘criminal behaviour’ and ‘terrorist behaviour’ from their inextricable enfoldment within the accommodating quality of the hostspace dynamic.
In the middle picture, a painting by Brian Wallace entitled ‘The Guardian of the Falls’, we see the images of the west coast native poetic tradition wherein there is a personification of ‘the falls’ and a poetic imputing of divine power within the ‘falls-object’, ... something that the western scientist takes literally, thus giving him amnesia as to the spatial-relational (hostspace-based) source of the power.
In the right-most picture of the triad, we see the ‘old mill’ with its water wheel, where our language games impute ‘internal first cause’ powers to the water wheel and its turning axle, ... and then again, to the miller, who maintains that what he produces is ‘produced by him’, imputing ‘internal first cause’ based authorship to himself as an ‘independent material-individual’ with ‘free will’. (This recalls the joke about scientific man becoming so proud of ‘his own’ ability to create, that he tells God that He is no longer needed since scientific man can now create new men by himself. God asks for a demonstration and scientific man obliges, starting off;‘first we gather some material, such as some of this dirt over here, .... ‘ and God interjects, ... ‘use your own dirt.’)
Blake calls into question whether there really is a God-in-the-waterfall giving the falls its power, or the monotheist alternative, whether there is a God-given power in the waterfall infused by a monotheistic God beyond nature. Blake raises the same question with respect to the powers of the water-wheel and the ‘heroic’ powers of the miller. The aboriginals know very well what Blake is saying, that it is by poetry that we impute divine internal powers to individual entities, these entities being included energy-flow-forms in the dynamical unity of nature. And it is by reducing the poetic to the ‘literal’ that we split apart the innately unified spatial-relational balance-seeking energy-field-flow-dynamic of nature, into a discrete collection of divinely-powered objects, each with their own ‘internal first cause’ based behavioural authorship powers.
For the reductionist-literalist split into an ‘animate’ and ‘inanimate’ world, Newton has given the absolute attribute of ‘inertia’ to each object, the stubborn individualist internal-first-cause by which the ‘independent’ object refuses to move unless a force is applied to it. And for the ‘independent organisms’ of the so-called ‘animate’ split, the science of biology has imputed an ‘internal first cause’ that sole-sources behavioural authorship from within the ‘independent organism’, deferring and obscuring a ‘full explanation’ by burying the ultimate source of this internal first cause so deeply into biochemical and biophysical processes within the organism, that an understanding of them has to be ‘back-burnered’ along with the deferred explanation of the internal sourcing of ‘life’ in the organism. (avoiding the obvious, that life is the inner-outer balance-seeking property of our energy-field-flow space, ... and continuing to insist that it is a ‘biochemical process’ found down in the internals of certain ‘independent animate objects’ not only erodes the credibility of science, but makes science look silly).
So adept have western thinkers become at creating ‘imaginary-line/surface-bounded independent objects’ and imputing ‘internal first cause’ based authorship powers to them, that, to the astonishment of aboriginal peoples, this same approach has been applied to the dividing up of the unbounded continuous landscape into ‘property objects’ termed ‘nation-states’, ... endowing them with ‘independent behaviours’ even though they are total abstractions, and playing the language game that has this ‘independent-property-object-nation-state’ doing such-and-such and this other one ‘doing such-and-such’ and getting seriously caught up the political games that are founded on these delusions.
We are a culture that has amnesia, though perhaps not unintentionally, as to the accommodating role of space in our lives. An amnesia that has us translating all dynamics into terms of ‘what independent-object-things do’, imputing to those ‘independent-object-things’ (those imaginary-line/surface-bounded closed geometric-form-objects) the capability of ‘internal first cause’ that reverse-engineers the needed consistency with the notion of the behavioural independence of the objects.
In the delusional reality of such a world as understands social dynamics exclusively in terms of ‘what independent individuals do’, their behaviours seen as being sole-authored from their internal God-given self-determinism, the contribution of the ‘home-maker’ has little meaning, since the essence of its value is in the cultivating of accommodating ordered potentials in the shared hostspace of the family.
We
will search for the home-maker-cultivated accommodating quality of space in
vain, in western science explanations of dynamics that are exclusively in terms
of ‘what individuals do’ since such literal and scientific description
inherently lacks the capacity to address it.
‘To see a world in a grain of sand’ is
not possible by constructing reality from the reductive, generalized reality of
grains of sand seen in their own independent right (out of their
spatial-relational context within the evolving space of the continuing
present), ... from a ‘generalization’ of nature that reduces the continuously
self-enfolding energy-field-flow to ‘independent objects’. But we can ‘see the world in a human face’,
as well as in Shakespeare’s ‘Shall I compare thee to a
summer’s day?... Thou art more
lovely and more temperate.”
There is a ‘particularity’ in the manner in which each entity in nature is situationally included in the evolving space of the continuing present, that our western culture discards in favour of de-situationalionized (disincluded) generalization, ... choosing instead to generalize and categorize by way of objectifying an innately un-objectifiable (i.e. a transforming spatial-relational flow-based) reality. After we abstractly ‘surgically-excise-from-the-flow’, cookie-cutting by means of the imaginary-lines-and-surfaces of closed-form-geometric-figures, even such inner-outer spatial-relationally connecting entities as ‘waterfalls’ and ‘hurricanes’ yield to our new reality of dynamics in terms of independent object behaviours, ... by-the-way, there are two triangles in the following diagram, are there not? ... or does our mind simply impose such geometries?
While the scientific experts and the nation-state politicians and the religious priest-doctrinists continue to ‘go on about’ the ‘independently existing objects’ of our western reality and their ‘independent behaviours’ (endowed by God-given internal powers of ‘first cause’), ... the home-makers of the world will continue to operate on the basis of a deeper, intuitive reality, a reality that is poetic and musical, coming from an unbounded ongoing spatial-relational flow whose flow-forms that emerge and persist, transform and rejoin the flow, have a uniqueness to them that is beyond all manner of objectification-based generalization.
Home-makers are like bodhisattavas that give themselves up to creating an accommodating space for others so that their fellows may actualize their potentials for enlightment before them, and this ‘giving of themselves’ is the very ‘light’ of the enlightenment.
For anyone who has moved from a less accommodating situational inclusion in space where the actualizing of one’s assertive potentials meets with an oppressive backpressure, ... to a more accommodating situational inclusion in space where the actualizing of one’s assertive potentials meets with an inductive receptivity, ... or vice versa, ... the question may arise as to whether the ‘boost’ in one’s assertive achievement performance derives from some ‘internal first cause’ powers within oneself, ... or whether one’s individual-actualizing and spatial-accommodating mutually shape the manifest actualization.
While the religious priest can maintain that the boost in individual actualizing is ‘God’s will’, thus preserving the ‘independent object’ paradigm, the scientist (mainstream) may choose to attribute such boosts to ‘catalysis’, wherein the transformation of certain participants is enabled or accelerated within a group dynamic by others that don’t participate in the transformation but which ‘catalyze’ it. Such is the scenario consistent with those reductionist mental models that deny the participation of space in physical phenomena (‘the principle of relativity’, meanwhile, insists on the participation of space).
As we know from our life experience, home-makers are not just ‘catalysts’. They are sowers of accommodative potentials into the shared hostspace that enable an accelerated actualization of the assertive potentials of their fellows who are also included within that common hostspace. They make the shared space we live in pregnant with accommodative potentials that invite the blossoming forth of our assertive potentials.
Unfortunately our western culture ‘knows nothing’ of this quality of space. All it knows, or all it wants to know, is that the world dynamic is constructed from the assertive actions of independent individuals, and thus it encourages each individual to ‘make the most of itself’ in pure, one-sided ‘assertive behaviour’ terms, western society rewarding and respecting those individuals that are the highest performers on an assertive achievement basis.
You can be sure that the ‘home-makers’ will not be listed amongst those ‘high achievers’ since they give themselves up to cultivating the accommodative quality of space that inductively shapes and amplifies the actualizing of the assertive potentials of their fellows (sons, daughters, brothers and sisters) who share inclusion in that common space.
My
mother was a ‘home-maker’. She had a
fiery authenticity that to me recalled the anarchist ethic
(non-submission-to-hierarchical-control-ethic) of Arturo Giovannitti who came
to North America from her own tiny ancestral village in
Her
wisdom, which could never be accused of reducing the poetic and musical to the
literal and monotonic, transcends the plodding ‘knowledge’ of generalizing
scientists, priests and religious doctrinists.
As William Blake observed; “The tygers of wrath
are wiser than the horses of instruction.”
So, here’s to 99 years of my mother’s post-quantum-birth-event influence in the spacetime continuum as a home-maker, understanding the value of cultivating accommodating potentials in the shared hostspace, and who by her life and ongoing influence mocks the too-common blindered obsession with individual assertive accomplishment. My hope is that her ongoing influence will continue to enfold constructively with that of other home-makers, to subsume that home-space-quality-ignoring pursuit of individual self-interest that currently characterizes our western-acculturated society, both at the pseudo-reality level of the ‘independent object-human’ and the ‘independent-object-nation’.
* * *
Weblog: June 19, 2006
The rise of Non-Government Organizations (NGOs) orienting to the restoring and cultivating of global peace, harmony, ecosystemic balance seems to point to some kind of limitation of social management by means of ‘property-ownership-based nation-states’. The most wealthy and powerful nations on the earth, whose Justice systems protect the right of the ‘individual’ and ‘individual nation’ in the pursuit of self-interest seem to be consuming the ‘common wealth’ (resources) of the earth at a disproportionate rate. The impression recalls a disparity in blood supply which induces one limb to grow fat and strong while the other withers and weakens.
There is no sign that ‘nation-state governments’ are ‘backing off’ since the ethic of the pursuit of self-interested individualism is a built-in political philosophy. Individual persons, individual nations, and individual corporations are competiting harder than ever, theorizing that the more the ‘high performers make’, the more for everyone. But it has not been working that way.
On
the issues of ‘war and peace’, there are many NGOs that are not into the rising
‘war on terror’ mentality and watch in amazement as people are led by their
governments (as in Canada) into this stance without public discussion even. At the second ‘People’s Peace Summit’ at
The implication is, that ‘the people of the world’ need to do what the nation-state governments of the world seem unable to do.
That is, the growing emergence of organizations such as ‘doctors without borders’ and ‘peace-makers without borders’ and ‘environmentalists without borders’, ... raises questions about the basic ‘make-up’ of nation-state (property-ownership-based) government and whether it is ‘getting in the way’ of cultivating and sustaining balance and harmony in the world, not only in the global social dynamic by also in the global ecosystem dynamic.
The ‘unbounded good will’ and gregarious affability of the NGOs clashes with the imaginary-line-bounded individualistic pride and self-interest of the ‘political nation’ with its stern ‘central authority’ based management scheme.
In where or what lies the source of this difference.
A
clue comes from one of the early participants in the Peoples Peace Summit,
Penny Joy, founder of
“I realized the potency of conflict transformation. Not conflict elimination because that’s
impossible. Acknowledging that there
will always be conflict but not going at it in a way that is violent and
divisive. ... There are ways of learning
how to do things in a better way. And
for heaven sakes, its about time society and
government operated in that way.”
In dealing with conflict, the alternative ethics of ‘transformation’ and ‘elimination’ imply different types of ‘logic’. While ‘elimination’ implies the Aristotelian logic of ‘the law of the excluded middle’, ‘transformation’ implies the logic of ‘the included middle’, as was developed by Nicolai Vasiliev.
We have noticed that (a) the notion of a ‘central governing authority’ of a nation-state depends on a belief in its ‘existence’ and a belief in its existence depends on a belief in its imaginary line-boundaries, and (b) that the logic of animals, birds, insects and that nature-attuning aspect of our human selves does not give deference to imaginary line boundaries. But without the ‘belief’ in the ‘existence’ of the imaginary-line-bounded ‘independently-owned-property-object’ we know as ‘the nation-state’, the notion of ‘central governing authority’ makes no sense.
Indeed, as has previously been mentioned on this blog, traditionalists amongst the indigenous peoples of North America mock belief in the existence of ‘Canada’ and the ‘United States’, observing, with uncomfortably overt historical accuracy, that these ‘sovereign owned properties’ are simply the result of how thieving Europeans fought amongst themselves as to how to divvy up the lands they had stolen.
It has not gone unnoticed to the native mind that these political nation-objects not only provoke wars by their stealing ethic (law-protected acquiring and amassing of more than one’s ‘market share’ of ‘property’), but boost support for their own existence by provoking wars since the job of ensuring security has been proxied out to the same ‘central governing authority’ that is inciting conflict, and security is something that people are more than ready to invest in in times of conflict.
Also ‘transparent’ to the natives was the ploy, in the early days of the colonial land seizure, to organize a crowd of committed ‘believers’ in the imaginary-line-bounded property-object by giving them a free piece of the imaginary property object, provided the recipient would swear an oath, not only to his commitment to believing in the imaginary lines, but in defending them, by bearing arms and giving his life if necessary. This was a not-to-be-missed opportunity to potential settlers who were described, on the Statue of Liberty, in the following terms;
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me.
I lift my lamp beside the golden door."
(from ‘The New Colossus’ by Emma
Lazarus)
So, as the natives would put words into the mouth of the European thinkers, ‘vee haff vays’ to make believers out of people, so that they will let their behaviours be directed by imaginary-line-bounded-objects and the ‘central governing authorities’ whose existence depends on the imaginary lines and imaginary objecthood known as ‘political property’, ... that no fish, bird, animal, plant, spore, bacterium or native will ever believe in (humouring the ‘vested interest’ believers is another matter).
For those of us who simply by intuition do not believe in giving precedence to imaginary-line-bounded-political-property-objects and the commands-and-controls that issue forth from their centers (centers that depend upon belief in those imaginary-boundary-lines), over and above one’s instinct to attune to the relational dynamics of the common, unpartitioned natural hostspace one is included in, ... the logic of the INCLUDED middle is instead at the helm.
Vasiliev’s insight was that while we normally think of logic as applying to ‘individual things’, which sets up the law of the excluded middle since one thing cannot, at the same time, be any other thing, ... if logic is deemed to apply to collectives, this condition of the excluded middle is naturally violated (is over-constraining nonsense that fails to address natural reality).
Thus, Vasiliev’s view was;
''Therefore the law of excluded middle ought to be completely removed from the cannons of the laws of thought''
For example, in the collective of planets (including the sun and moon etc.) the condition of ‘simultaneous mutual influence’ prevails that cannot be logically deduced on the basis of the behaviour of the individual objects (to even speak of ‘the behaviour of an individual object, we must impose in our minds an absolute space-frame to frame its ‘individual’ motion, breaking it out of its natural inherently INTERdependent relationships within the dynamical collective).
Vasiliev followed the same path in the development of ‘Imaginary Logic’ (logic of the included middle) as had been followed by Lobachevsky in refuting Euclid’s fifth postulate, opening the door to non-euclidian space geometries, as were necessary in addressing the principle of relativity. Vasiliev further observed;
''Imaginary logic inserts into logic the principle of relativity,”
There is a general finding here about the different ways we can make logical statements. For example, we can speak in terms of the existence of an object and what it does or what happens to it; ‘the chair is over there’, ‘that chair was made in 1946’, ... ‘yesterday someone broke that chair’. These are ‘factual statements’ where, as Vasiliev says, ‘the law of the excluded middle’ DOES apply, ... but if we start from non-factual, conceptual qualities of the collective of chairs, we know that chairs can be of different colours and thus a chair can be ‘something else’ at the same time as ‘it is what it is’ and the law of the excluded middle does not hold. Just as in the case of the planet in the collective of planets, there can be something ‘imaginary’ that the individual entity is included in but which is invisible if we are dealing solely with the existence of the individual entity and what it does or what befalls it. It is as if the ‘green chair’ is included in a green ether or the planet is included in a harmonious dynamical ether that ‘colours its existence’, since there is something more to it than we can get to by its basic existence and what it does or is done to it. An additional example given by Valentin Bazhanov, Vasiliev’s biographer, is the innate distinction between the logical statements; “Ivan is sick today” and “Ivan is a sick man”. Where the former is a factual statement marked by a ‘time-stamp’, the latter conveys the notion of Ivan’s inclusion in a green funk or ether, something which has ‘come over him’.
Vasiliev’s ‘imaginary logic’ of the ‘included middle’ is a ‘subtle and succinct’ development in logic which is alive and well today, though we don’t, as a habit, seek to understand our manner of thinking in terms of the different systems of logic that we can bring to bear. However, ‘relationships’ and ‘relativity’ have everything to do with the ‘finite and unbounded space’ (non-Euclidian space) of our natural experience that takes precedence in the ‘peacemakers-without-borders’ work of NGOs and which is addressed by the logic of the included middle, a natural capability we all have which is simply formally recognized in Vasiliev’s formulation of it.
Today,
we are being asked to proxy increasing authority to the central governance
authorities of our imaginary-line-bounded-property-objects known as ‘
Here we come to another basic property of individual entities and the logic of the excluded middle we handle them with. In declaring our political-property-nation-objects ‘independent’, and being capable of ‘independent behaviour’, ... having surgically excised them from the continuous natural landscape and the continuous natural dynamic of our common hostspace, we must now invent some creative source for their behaviour that resides within their interior. This source is know as ‘first cause’ and it has religious origins though these continue to be accepted in science as ‘hidden conventions’;
“Just as no outside force caused God to create
the world, so no outside force causes people to choose certain actions. For man is created in God's image, which includes the possession of
free will.”
The religious notion or axiomatic scientific convention that ‘independent objects’ (human individuals or individual nation-states) are equipped for internal ‘first cause’ (‘self-determinism’) is important to an understanding of our western justice system (which orients to ‘fact’) and to the dealings of political-property-object-nations with their fellow ‘political-property-object-nations’. Logic that constrains itself to operating on ‘fact’ is like the logic of Newtonian physics that constrains itself to operating on the time-stamped existence and actions of individual material bodies. ‘Does the earth rotate?, the philosopher-mathematician-physicist Henri Poincaré asks, in the same vein as Lobachevsky questioned Euclid’s fifth postulate and Vasiliev questioned Aristotle’s ‘law of the excluded middle’. The point is, there is no way to explain, in the time-stamped factual terms of the existence of the material body, ‘earth’ and what it does and what happens to it, ... the green funk it is included in by its participation in a simultaneous mutually influencing collective dynamic.
Johannes Kepler attempted to address this in his ‘Harmonies of the World’ (1619) in chapter 8, entitled “In the Celestial Harmonies Which Planet Sings Soprano, Which Alto, Which Tenor, and Which Bass? [‘Saturn and Jupiter sing bass, Mars sings tenor, Earth and Venus sing alto and Mercury sings soprano’]. The point is that the individual instances of the same class or category can be situationally included in the hostspace dynamic in different ways, that are invisible to factual, excluded middle logic. The same thing (a chair, a planet) can be, at the same time, ‘something else’ due to its inclusion in something else that ‘colours it’ differently.
When we start from a logical base of independent objects and describe them in positivist terms of their time-stamped existence and actions/interactions, ... there is no way to get to issues of ‘inclusion’ that are important to understanding the dynamics of our natural experience. That is; “a disparity in blood supply which induces one limb to grow fat and strong while the other withers and weakens”, as applied to nations, ... involves ‘inclusion’ (in the nourishing flow of blood) that is beyond the scope of factual information in terms of ‘the existence of the limb/nation and its actions/interactions’.
Life is innately balance-seeking. The very existence of a hurricane is in balance-seeking that strives to transport thermal energy from thermal energy rich equatorial regions to thermal energy poor polar regions. When we speak of a hurricane in factual terms, time-stamping it with its birth and death and its actions/interactions, by shifting the focus to the individual ‘atmospheric disturbance’ we lose sight of the behaviour-sourcing role of the dynamical hostspace it is included in,... the atmospheric disturbance collective that is transforming under one-another’s simultaneous mutual influence.
Our unique ‘situational inclusion’, the blue or green or rainbow funk that colours each of us as individual human beings or as individual communities, is invisible to logic that seeks to understand things in terms of the positivist, time-stamped, facts of individual existence and actions/interactions.
Will the behaviours of the withering individuals in the human collective, the ‘runts in the litter’, be inductively shaped by their being recipients of a disproportionate short supply of nourishment, as it dries up and slows down to a trickle? And will the behaviours of the plump individuals in the human collective, the ‘fatties in the litter’, be inductively shaped by their being recipients of a disproportionate over-abundant supply of nourishment, as it builds to the flood?
Or will those who in over-abundance develop ‘hoarding practices’? As Chief Maquinna of the Nootka’s, who lived not far from Royal Roads, observed;
"Once I was in
Aristotelian, law of the excluded middle, logic based on time-stamped factual information concerning the existence and behaviour of individual object-entities inherently lacks the capability to address such questions as the manner in which the dynamical space the individual is included in, inductively shapes his behaviour. Such questions imply an aureole of over-achiever funk that the ‘fattie in the litter’ is included in, and an aureole of unfulfillment funk that the ‘runt in the litter’ is included in. To the wielder of excluded-middle-logic, all space-induced influences have to be re-located to the interior of the individual in his ‘inner purpose’ where they can manifest in a positivist sense by way of his ‘self-determinism’.
No matter how carefully we monitor the factual information of individual rocks breaking off from the mountain and their actions and interactions as they roll down into the valley, we will not address the fact that the mountain and valley are two aspects of a mutually influencing transformation in the manner of the crest and trough of an ocean wave. This is because we consider the rocks to be ‘independent material bodies’ where in fact they are included in the landscape and the landscape is included in them. The conflict we project to exist between the mountain and the valley, wherein the valley seeks to bring down and eliminate (nullify the existence of) the mountain and the mountain seeks to ‘fill in’(nullify the existence of) the valley are the artefacts of our excluded middle objectification of ‘mountain’ and ‘valley’ as independently existing objects, when in fact they are dual features of a balance-seeking transformation (a dynamical unity). This transformation (evolutionary dynamic) is the source of pervasive beauty in nature; e.g. the naturally aesthetic dynamical form of migrating sand-dunes. Nevertheless, we are free to use the logic of the excluded middle in ‘split-apart’ independent-object-based thinking of a relationship of binary opposition between mountain (presence) and valley (absence).
This foray into ‘the logic of the INCLUDED middle’ brings us back around to the Penny Joy’s statement;
“I realized the potency of conflict transformation. Not conflict elimination because that’s impossible.”
‘Conflict elimination’ is what the logic of the excluded middle is all about since we use it to explain everything in terms of individual entities that exist independently and the essence of what they do comes from within them. If conflict arises, as users of excluded middle logic, we identify the ‘causal agent’ by reviewing ‘the facts’. If the solar system developed an instability, if the planets were using this same excluded middle logic, they would seek out which of them was responsible based on who was doing what when it first became perceptible (the ‘smoking gun’ approach wherein ‘the facts mark the place where our investigations cease’). The problem is, the base case was never ‘stasis’ or ‘not-causing-problems’ as implied, it is instead the continuing collective dynamic that is sustaining harmony in a condition of simultaneous mutual influence. The ‘instability’ constitutes a ‘departure from dynamical balance’, a dynamical balance which, in the case of three or more interdependently moving bodies, cannot be solved in terms of the explicit contributions of the individual participants.
If the participants are of a ‘causal mindset’ (a ‘logic of the excluded middle mindset’) then their logic-based beliefs will have it that each individual is the fully responsible author of their own behaviour and that the overall collective dynamic is determined by the dynamics of the individual contributors. Thus if the dynamic of the collective they are included in begins to manifest conflicts and instabilities, it ‘logically follows’ that they will launch an investigation, based on the ‘facts of the matter’, to identify the individual or individuals who are ‘causally authoring’ the instability.
Meanwhile, conflict as the fuel for transformation is what the logic of the INCLUDED middle is all about. If the solar system begins to manifest instability, or if three people rising back-to-back from a sitting-on-the-floor to a standing position manifest conflict and instability (giving and taking in an erratic over-balancing, under-balancing manner that threatens collapse), there is logically and mathematically no way to identify individual causal responsibility. An individual accused of ‘pushing too hard’ can claim that another ‘wasn’t pushing hard enough’ leading to an innately unresolvable circularity (the ‘three-body problem’). The team of three (or more), if employing ‘excluded middle logic’ would identify ‘who was mostly to blame’ and seek to eliminate and replace him. The team of three (or more), if employing ‘included middle logic’ would recognize that it was impossible to explicitly resolve ‘causal authorship’ and would therefore use the conflict, as nature does, as a means of inductively orchestrating attuned and harmony-sustaining (dynamical-balance-sustaining) collective dynamics.
The mountain and the valley do not go to war with the one aiming to prevail over the other, the mountain to ‘fullfill the valley’ and the valley to ‘eliminate the mountain’. This would be the logic of the excluded middle where the mountain would be seen as ‘one’ (presence, truth) and the valley as ‘zero’ (absence, falsity) rather than as slow moving aspects of one thing; i.e. the crest and the trough of a lithic wave in the landscape. In nature, ongoing transformative balance-seeking is the primary reality, and binarily opposed contradiction is an abstraction that we impose.
As
Penny Joy says, in remarking how
“We are moving more and more towards a belligerent stance in
the world.”
This is all we can
expect when, unlike the animals, birds, fish and natural selves, we put into
precedence a belief in imaginary-line-bounded-independent-property-objects and
their internally authored self-determined behaviours, since; “Just as no outside
force caused God to create the world, so no outside force causes [individual
humans and nations] to choose certain actions. For [individual humans and nations
are]created in God's image, which includes the
possession of free will.”
This type of excluded middle logical thinking, embodied in the
thinking of governments of political nation-states, creates the view that
naturally-arising dynamical imbalances should be resisted and that we should
seek out the causal authors of the conflict, and suppress or eliminate
them. Every nation will have their own
preferred candidates to hang the blame on, of course, and this can only be
resolved by the principle of Lafontaine; ‘La raison du plus
In response to this resistance to ‘conflict’ (rather than accepting it as the energy for orchestrating transformation) and the seeking out of causal authorship and the suppression elimination thereof, ... there follows an escalation of conflict and debalancing, in the manner of the tide running against the wind, increasing crest-to-trough differences (intensifying antithetical polarization seen in the over-simplified reductive terms of the logic of the excluded middle).
The ‘kicker’ is that this rising conflict, sourced by the oversimplistic logic of the nation-states that owe their existence to this same over-simplified logic, leads to the strengthening of the central control mandate from the people due to rising fear and the need for security (which has been proxied off to the central governing authority), ... justifying increases in military capability to be used to ‘eliminate conflict’ and at the same time, for increased defenceness to ward off the increases in the military capabilities of the adversary. In this manner the Aristotelian logic-armed people of the independent-property-object-nation-state collectively cultivate and nurture the red funk of rising conflict that they now find themselves included in, by way of putting the logic of the excluded middle into an unnatural precedence over their included middle logic. The improvements in defence permit increased belligerence with increased impunity, a combination that enables increased death, destruction and suffering in our common hostspace (the burden of which is born primarily by the poor who are most without defences) without collapse of the belligerents. This is an intensifying red funk aureole in which we are included that cannot be told in the factual terms of the individual belligerents just as the collapse of the mountain cannot be told by studying the actions and interactions of falling rocks. That is, the logic of the excluded middle is all about things and what they do, and in its over-simplicity, fails to address that other thing that Aristotle wrote about (not so popular as his logic), the source of all ‘things’, which is otherwise known as ‘place’;
“The physicist must have a knowledge of Place . . .. namely, whether there is
such a thing or not, and the manner of its existence and what it is, both
because all suppose that things which exist are somewhere (the non-existent is
nowhere --- where is the goat-stag or the sphinx?), and because 'motion' in its
most general and primary sense is change of place, which we call 'loco-motion'.
Further, the typical locomotions of the elementary natural bodies, namely,
fire, earth and the like, show not only that place is something, but also that
it exerts a certain influence. Each is carried to its own place, if it is not
hindered, the one up, the other down. Now these are
regions or kinds of place --- up and down and the rest of the six directions.
Nor do such distinctions (up and down and right and left, etc.) hold only in
relation to us. To us they are not always the same but change with the
direction in which we are turned that is why the same thing may be right and
left, up and down, before and behind. But in nature, each is distinct, taken
apart from itself. It is not every chance direction which is 'up' but where
fire and what is light are carried; similarly, too, 'down' is not any chance
direction but where what has weight and what is made of earth are carried ---
the implication being that these places do not differ merely in relative
position, but also as possessing distinct potencies, . . . These considerations
would lead us to suppose that place is something distinct from bodies, and that
every sensible body is in place. Hesiod, too, might be given to have held a
correct account of it when he made chaos first. At least he says; "First
of all things came chaos to being, then broad-breasted earth," implying
that things need to have space first, because he thought, with most people,
that everything is somewhere and in place. If this is its nature, the potency
of place must be a marvellous thing, and take precedence of all other things.
For that without nothing else can exist, while it can exist without the others,
must needs be first; for place does not pass out of existence when the things
in it are annihilated."
Let’s hope (and let our energies serve) the health and growth of ‘people-without-borders’ initiatives such as the ‘People’s Peace Summit’ with its ‘INCLUDED middle logic, so that we can restore our common unbounded community ‘hostspace’ dynamic to its natural primacy over the excluded-middle-logic world of ‘imaginary-line-and-surface-bounded-independent-property-objects that exist and do stuff’.
Weblog: June 10, 2006
Okay, I admit it, ... I let this blog slip for a few weeks, to attend the graduation of my daughter and granddaughter. Getting back into my work seems to take a little taper-in time.
In the interim, I have had lots of interesting conversations about education, science and life in general, and my feeling is that more people are coming around to questioning the role of science in society, which to me is as it should be.
But it will take a while before the average person to get around to (I am not average because I quit my job to work on this stuff continuously, year after year) questioning, in depth, the ramifications of imposing the abstract notion of ‘property’ on the continuing landscape.
Ok, everyone knows that by carving up the world into a patchwork quilt of little property tracts, at the level of the individual, the corporation, the nation, ... we open the door to everyone exploiting their local property without considering the overall Gaian ecosystem need, ... but that not the half of it.
Property ownership puts ‘religion’ into people. They didn’t call the landlord the ‘land-lord’ for nothing!
In particular, the property owner gets this sense of ‘first cause’ which is where he thinks that what he did with his land is what HE did! He says; ‘I came to this country with only a hundred dollars in my pocket and now I am producing over a million dollars worth of food products every year.’
This sounds better than what Jesus did with the fishes and the loaves. If God comes down (or ‘the Creator’ emerges from Nature) to check it out, he may ask the immigrant,... are you sure that YOU did this miraculous thing?’, ... the immigrant answers, ... ‘Yes, I did it.’ God then asks him to demonstrate how he does it. The immigrant starts off; ‘first, I bought some wheat seed and, in this dirt on my quarter-section homestead, ...
‘Wait a minute, says God, ... use YOUR own dirt!’
* * *
As the indigenous peoples of North America note, ... those tracts of land called ‘Canada’ and ‘the US’ and all the imaginary-line-bounded homesteads they are divided up into, are simply the way that the Europeans divided up what they stole in the colonial wars. The homesteaders were promised a piece of the action in exchange for swearing an oath of citizenship which obliged them to bear arms to protect the title of the imaginary line bounded land from any internal or external threats. That’s a good way to make believers out people who might otherwise mock the ‘existence’ of these ‘properties’.
So,
the immigrants in the new lands ‘did very well’ and of course it was ‘them’
that did it, and the beautiful, mineral-rich, fertile lands, quite unlike the
over-grazed, over-farmed and rich-and-royal-landlord-monopolized lands of
So the problem with dividing up innately interconnective land into discrete ‘owned’ parcels runs far deeper than ecological sustainability issues, ... it concerns this religious notion of ‘first cause’ or ‘self-determinism’ that property owners (nations and individuals) tend to be infected with. The following statement on ‘self-determinism’ (‘first cause’) shows the comparison that supports the notion of first cause;
“Just as no outside force caused God to create the world, so
no outside force causes people to choose certain actions. For man is created in
God's image, which includes the possession of free will.
Did the immigrant farmer act out of his own free will, ... or was his behaviour inductively shaped by the land, so that he moved to the fertile plains, and also by the seasons, so that he was induced to plant seed in the spring, ... not to mention the inductive pull of the offer of 160 acres of free land if he was willing, as his predecessors has been willing in the era of the indian wars, to put his life on the line (bear arms) to fend off anyone questioning the land ownership.
Apparently, the immigrant farmer intervened into a lot of established natural processes and cycles, rather than sole authoring his miraculous production. So his statement about turning a $100.00 investment into a $1,000,000.00 production is going to underscore what the indigenous peoples’ note is a colossal disregard for the life-sustaining contribution of the land, our common hostspace.
This
idea of ‘self-determinism’ or ‘first cause’ is not confined to immigrant
farmers and businessmen, it infects second generation politicians too. The president of the
If we are going to deal with individuals smitten with the illusion that because they are on what they declared to be independent properties, that they are self-determining, ... we are going to have to deal with the abstract notion of imaginary-line-bounded ‘property’ because these two absurdities are tightly coupled, ... which leads me to my today’s letter-to-the-editor;
Multiculturism: the core issues
Countries used to be formed by fairly ‘mono-cultural’
populations. Colonialism opened up land for multi-cultural
population. As the incarceration of Japanese in
If we did away with multi-culturalism, then we would wipe
out terrorism, and replace the violence with ‘just wars’ since state-based
violence on the part of duly authoritized governments is classified as
legitimate war; e.g. if there was a ‘Wahabi nation’ then it could cite its
grievances, vote and to go to war against the western power nations and this
would be legitimate war rather than terrorism (The Wahabi nation would still
have to disperse its citizens globally so as not to provide a concentrated
target, but this does not infringe on the legitimacy of war; i.e. they could
not be labelled ‘unprivileged belligerents’ aka ‘terrorists’.)
Meanwhile, this anti-terrorism strategy is complicated by
the fact that ‘labour’ is a sub-culture within a country that can terrorize its
government for the government’s unfairness to the labour sub-culture in other countries
as in the ‘anti-capitalist’ movement. Labour could not have its own
nation-state since someone would have to move into management.
Another way to take care of this would be, as John Lennon
suggests in ‘Imagine’, to do away with countries. This would also do away
with the practice, that Karl Marx criticized, of objectifying the innately
continuous landscape by imposing imaginary-line-bounded ‘property ownership’.
Then we could wipe out war, and all violent conflict would then be
‘home-grown terrorism’. There would be nothing but ‘trojan horse
cultures’.
This is somewhat more realistic since we all share
interdependent living in a common hostspace; i.e. the surface space of the
Earth. We could call the new cultures who like to live in their own way;
Together-Residing-Individual-Brotherliness-Enterprises, or ‘tribes’ and the
overall government, responsible for sustaining inter-T.R.I.B.E. balance and
harmony would be an ‘inter-tribe-al council’ something like the UN, except that
there would be no imaginary-line-based defensive wall building since there
would be no ‘imaginary-line-bounded sovereign-owned nation-properties’. ‘
Hey, what goes around comes around.
This would be ideal for those of us who find the notion of
‘just wars’ and the invoking of ‘God’s blessing’ on imaginary-line-bounded
property tracts (tracts that represent ‘the way that Europeans divided up the
lands they stole’) to be bunkum.
Weblog: May 12, 2006
University graduation time is arriving, ... a milestone event in the lives of many young people.
I remember my own.
After high school I worked in the highly mechanized environment of a paper mill, pretty much as a cog in the machinery set up by management. I went to university in search of my own authentic development and to escape boredom and enslavement within a highly routine work environment. I certainly didn’t think of it this way at the time, but I went, involuntarily (unconsciously) into a training program where we as graduates would be empowered by society to set up routine machinery for others to work in. In some sense, we were just re-positioning ourselves within the multi-tiered machinery of our own making.
That was not my interest or ambition. I was interested in learning skills that would help to make me a valued contributor within my community so that I could earn a living through useful activities that I also enjoyed, ... which brought out my natural capacities and put me in a kind of authentic inner-outer resonance within the community/hostspace flow-dynamic. But in the process of developing these skills, I also became ‘part of the system’ which was oriented to ‘making things happen’ through corporate control hierarchies. That was where the ‘earning-a-living’ receptacle into which my university-education skills could plug into was located. It was not within a local man’s-relationship-with-the-land based community.
In effect, university prepared me for departure from, and handed me off from my inner-outer relationship with ‘the land’, the common hostspace, ... to participation within a genetic ‘make-it-happen’ mechanical complex. This shift from an inner-outer spatial-relationship with our natural living space to a linear-temporal ‘make-it-happen’ construction project seems to be part of what is called ‘western historical consciousness’, a form of consciousness that reduces our sense of inner-outer spatial –relational inclusion to dimensionally-reduced inclusion within a linear-temporal-causal genetic construction, otherwise known as ‘history’.
History
teaches us, for example, that WWII was ‘caused’ by the aggressive actions of
Adolph Hitler’s NAZI Third Reich, by purely internal (evil) motivation sourced
within notionally ‘independent’ people and ‘independent’ nations. But many people were saying, at the time of
the treaty of Versailles, that its harsh terms against Germany would guarantee
another war, and, for example, a 1920 British cartoon entitled ‘Peace and
future cannon fodder’ showed a German child weeping and Clemenceau (‘the
Tiger’) saying, ‘Curious! I seem to hear a child weeping’. How old will the weeping child be in 1940?,
... suggesting that the treaty had laid down the conditions for another war in
20 years time (Harold Nicolson, a British delegate
at Versailles, declared the treaties 'neither just nor wise', and called the
delegates 'very stupid men'. But Winston Churchill believed that
the treaty was the best that could be achieved, and that 'the wishes of the
various populations prevailed', a tough attitude of the type that keeps the
military-minded continually employed, making them both heros in vanquishing
‘evil others’ and cultivators of ‘evil others’ by supremacist oppression, in a
continuing cycle. There is no doubt of
the value of Churchill’s stalwart contribution in WWII, but perhaps the same
tough qu
This inner-outer spatial-relational feeling of exclusion
and disaccommodation felt by post WWI Germans cannot be ‘seen’ in ‘genetic
theory of evolution’ based ‘historical’ accounting terms wherein the behaviours
of the participating entities are seen as being purely internally sourced. Our experience and intuition informs us
differently as to the nature of evolution.
Inner outer dynamical balance between the individual and the common
hostspace he is included in is fundamental to the sustaining of life, health
and harmony. The ‘genetic construction’
portrayal wherein the ‘first cause’ of behaviour is seen to originate within
the ‘genetic components’ themselves, ... occluding the over-riding influence of
inner-outer spatial dynamics. In a
time-line plot of historical events (a genetic constructivist view), there is
nowhere to portray ‘feeling’ and inner-outer dynamical-balance-seeking is
spatial-relational experience that comes to us through ‘feeling’ rather than ‘vision’. The war that we ‘see’ erupts from ‘feelings’
and theory that envisages ‘first cause’ for behaviour as coming from within the
local ‘gene/object’ will portray this feeling in terms of an ‘evil’ intention
to do harm to an other.
Meanwhile, the British cartoon suggests that ‘feeling’,
rather than being sourced internally within the object, arises from inner-outer
spatial-relational balance-seeking, ... how the attempt to actu
The dimensional reduction from inner-outer spatial relationships to linear-temporal genetic construction is what the university education tends to deliver, in my retrospective view.
This
idea, and the general idea-theme on these ‘goodshare’ web-pages (‘inclusion
The same, in my view, holds true for universities and the ‘university education’.
And thus I find myself in the unpopular minority position wherein I see ‘the university’ and ‘the university education’ as .... ‘the tool that has run away with the workman’, short-circuiting our inner-outer relationship with the land (our common hostspace) and investing ourselves instead in linear-temporal ‘make-it-happen’ machinery (genetic constructivism).
The prime currency of universities is the analytical logic of Aristotle (the logic of mutual exclusion) and the very structure of the university, broken down as it is into departments and faculties wherein the jargon has most often so incestuously evolved that a ‘tower of Babel’ situation is the norm (which interdisciplinary studies and ‘transdisciplinarity’ is hoping to address).
My old friends who stayed in the mill or similar jobs persist in their scepticism as to the purported greater wisdom of their university educated fellows, and my own experience reaffirms such scepticism.
No, I am not saying that ‘a university education is a bad thing’.
But,
yes, I am saying that the simplistic operation
Since I am one of ‘them’ I feel I have the right to make this statement, and I am not dis-including myself.
The wisdom of the council of elders (e.g. in the native tradition) transcends ‘analytical/rational understanding’ in an important way; ... it does not search for ‘the truth’ in terms of ‘the current status of things’ and it does not seek to IMPROVE on the current status by way of some rational plan that will achieve the construction of a ‘better tomorrow’, ... a type of DETERMINISTIC thinking that pervades universities and the trained minds of university graduates.
The native council of elders sees everyone as included in the common hostspace of nature, ... in the common ‘flow’ since there is no such thing as ‘stasis’ or ‘status’ in the world; i.e. there is no naturally meaningful way to describe ‘the current state of affairs’ and to map out a plan to identify the deficiencies in the ‘the current state of affairs’ and to construct a ‘new future state of affairs’ that repairs the deficiencies.
In the view of the native council of elders, nature is a dynamical balance-seeking flow.
Thus where the western academic might argue that the persisting actions of a rogue leader (e.g. Saddam Hussein) are a deficiency in the current world condition that needs to be repaired and assemble a team of experts to develop a plan for ‘making the needed improvement’, ... the native council of elders will see the ‘current condition’ in terms of innately interdependent dynamical balance-seeking, rather than in terms of independent pieces on a chess board whose individual moves are self-initiated. An intervention is therefore not seen by ‘the council of elders’ as ‘deterministic’ but as a disturbance of the flow wherein the flow will seek to re-establish dynamical balance in an innately unpredictable way.
Whose approach is ‘more wise’?, ... that of the council of elders that believe that because of the interdependencies of all things, we must have an ethic of putting our movements in the service of sustaining harmony and balance in our common living space, ... or the council of experts who analytically determine ‘the way the world works’, identify the ‘problems’ and the ‘needed fixes’ and develop a plan of action for the construction of a ‘better tomorrow’ and seek to ‘make it happen’?
After many years of life experience and reflecting on this issue, my view is that the way of the council of elders (‘learning circle’), a way of understanding that is attuned to the balance-seeking dynamical flow of nature and to the sustaining of harmony in our common living space, ... is in a natural precedence over the western ‘analytical manner of understanding’. Meanwhile, ‘believing this to be the case’ still does not prevent me from being ‘mesmerized’ by the academic way of thinking, the way of thinking that was cultivated and refined in me during ‘my life in western society’ and which was particularly imbued in me by ‘university education’.
What I am saying is that ‘science’, the analytical understanding of the university-educated is a valuable TOOL that can be used in support of the understanding of the ‘council of elders’ but that for it to usurp or displace it, ... is a recipe for dissonance and dysfunction within our shared living space, as is often the case in our current epoch as the ranks of the academically trained, and their deployment in positions of power in society continues to grow.
Does the intuition not nag at us at least a little bit to see children come through university and go out directly into the corporate business world and into positions of power in government without ever having to touch base with ‘local councils of elders’? ... leaving the experience of the local elders to dry up and blow away without being ‘enfolded’ in the community dynamic? Does knowledge gained from academic learning really trump experience?
Or does ‘experience’ cultivate understanding that is very different from knowledge? It was Heraclitus who said; ‘The learning of many things does not teach understanding’.
What is happening today is that ‘the university’ has increasingly become the ‘supplier of product’ for the business corporation and as a result the trained mind is, in a sense, being commoditized and ‘bought and sold’ for use as a cog in machinery set up by a hierarchical management. The ‘knowledge economy’ allows one to rise up out of the ‘labour economy’, ... from out of the physical labour based machinery set up by management, ... to participate at the ‘knowledge level’ wherein the task is to design and implement the machinery of labour (the ‘means of production’).
What is ‘wrong’ with this picture wherein a diverse multitude of corporations develop and implement plans to ‘improve a product, service or condition?
What is ‘wrong’ is that the plan is based on a voyeuristic analytical outside-observer view, and intends to take its own view from ‘state A’ which is in some way wanting, ... to the ‘new and improved’ ‘state B’.
There
is a foundational problem in the academic (in the sense of deterministic) view,
and that is that the space wherein the plan has to be implemented is NOT the
‘logical space’ of the theoretical diagrams and write-ups authored by the
planning department, .... the space of implementation is the common living space
wherein a diverse multitude of participants simultaneously seek to actu
In
pursuing the actu
This
‘re
The implication is this; No-one has their own behaviour. Everyone and every system (corporation, nation etc.) is in the situation of Gould’s baseball hitter where his ‘hitting’ cannot be meaningfully spoken of, out of the context of ‘fielding’ since all we can observe is the ‘net’ of the two and there is insufficient information to resolve which part of what we are observing is due to the ‘hitter’ and which part to the ‘fielding’; i.e. behaviour is ‘relative’ rather than being sourced, ... hence the ‘Principle of Incomplete Knowledge’ that arises when we include the ‘hitter’ within the ‘fielding’ in our ‘system’ description.
“--- The Principle of
Incomplete Knowledge --- 'The model embodied in a control system is necessarily
incomplete.' ---, a principle derivable from Heisenberg's
uncertainty principle and from our experience that 'a system cannot represent
itself completely, and hence cannot have complete knowledge of how its own
actions may feed back into the perturbations.' “ (Francis
Heylighen, 'Principles of Systems and cybernetics: an evolutionary perspective,
http://www.cs.brandeis.edu/~richardw/Systems_Principles.txt)
It runs counter
to our acculturated beliefs that our behaviour is not ‘our own’ but is an
inseparable meld of the actu
The
university is a place that divides the understanding of the world into speci
If you imagine yourself as a bee, ... working in a cramped space under conditions of material shortage, ... it might occur to you that rather than everyone having to build separate cell walls, by pushing the spheres together and sharing the walls so that the outside of one bee’s cell is the inside of another bee’s cell, there will be a great savings of space (eliminating the holes between the spheres), materials (each wall can be used by two cells) and labor (half the effort in building the walls is done by ‘outsiders’). In this way of doing things ‘the inner is also, at the same time, the outer’, and it is arbitrary subjectivity that establishes which is ‘inner’ and which ‘outer’ (this ambiguity of inner and outer characterizes the non-euclidian space of relativity).
In
the middle picture showing bubbles, as the spherical bubbles in the cluster of
bubbles grows, they co-produce their own accommodative (resistive)
spatial-relational backpressure that mutually shapes the actu
The
council of elders knows that ‘we are not independent local objects with
independent local object behaviours that push out from our self-centers driven
by our ‘inner purpose’, ... that is an over-simplification as our behaviour is
inextricably bound up in the nonlocal and a-centric. the outside-inward accommodating backpressure
of our social hostspace dynamic is something we contribute to through our
inside-outward actu
The
picture on the right of the trio is of a fluid convection cell in heated water
which has no physical structure, only flow-form, the picture having been
obtained by putting fluorescent markers in the fluid. The flow gives form to itself, as is the
message of relativity and quantum behaviour and the structure is an impression
that forms in the observer; i.e. material structure is ‘schaumkommen’ or
‘appearances’ in Schroedinger’s terms,... a secondary ‘objecthood’ that the
observer imposes on a re
The analytical scientific thinking that prevails in university instruction, and in fact which gives rise to the type of structural organization in the university (departments, faculties, specialty fields) inverts the role of flow and form and re-represents phenomena in terms of ‘what things do’, ... bestowing ‘objecthood’ on individual flow-form entities and endowing them, in the case of human individuals, with an internal ‘first cause’ sourcing of their ‘own behaviour’ (e.g. in the manner that we recast the hurricane, an essentially nonlocal, a-centric flow-form dynamic (included in the hostspace dynamic), as a local self-centered object that we purport to have ‘its own behaviour’ (e.g. Katrina is moving north towards the gulf coast, ... Katrina is causing damage in New Orleans).
It is thanks to our imposing of the abstract notion of ‘objecthood’ on entities that are inherently bound up in the dynamics of the hostspace they are included in, ... a self-containment as constituted by the abstraction of closed-geometric forms, that we enable the re-representation of dynamical phenomena in object-behaviour sourced causal terms, wherein the ‘hitting’ is artificially split out from the ‘fielding’.in spite of the principle of ‘Incomplete Knowledge’.
Henri Poincaré, in his introduction to ‘Science and Hypothesis’ reflects on this re-representing of ‘fluid’ dynamical phenomena in terms of having an object behaviour authorship (i.e. by imposing the convention of objecthood). Poincaré concludes that while the imposing of absolute euclidian space and absolute objecthood are ‘the results of the unrestricted activity of the mind’ that are imposed on our scientific mental modeling but not on Nature’, ... they can be compared to the laws of a prince who rules absolutely but wisely and consults with his ‘Conseil d'État’. That is, the absolute view delivered in the abstract terms of independent local objects and their independent local object behaviours must be over-ruled by our intuitive understanding of the inherent relativity of individual entities and the dynamical hostspace in which they are included;
“ But upon more mature reflection the position held by hypothesis was seen;
it was recognised that it is as necessary to the experimenter as it is to the
mathematician. And then the doubt arose if all these constructions are built on
solid foundations. The conclusion was drawn that a breath would bring them to
the ground. This sceptical attitude does not escape the charge of superfici
Instead of a summary condemnation we should examine with the utmost
care the role of hypothesis; we
shall then recognise not only that it is necessary, but that in most cases it
is legitimate. We shall also see that
there are several kinds of hypotheses; that some are verifiable, and when once
confirmed by experiment become truths of great fertility; that others may be
useful to us in fixing our ideas; and finally, that others are hypotheses only
in appearance, and reduce to definitions or to conventions in disguise.
The latter are to be met with especially in
mathematics and in the sciences to which it is applied. From them, indeed, the
sciences derive their rigour; such conventions are the result of the
unrestricted activity of the mind, which in this domain recognises no obstacle.
For here the mind may affirm because it lays down its own laws; but let us
clearly understand that while these laws are imposed on our science, which
otherwise could not exist, they are not imposed on Nature. Are they then
arbitrary ? No; for if they were, they would not be fertile. Experience leaves us
our freedom of choice, but it guides us by helping us to discern the most
convenient path to follow. Our laws are therefore like those of a prince who is
absolute but wise, who consults his Council of State.” --- Henri Poincaré, Science and Hypothesis
(1905)
My scientific university education did not impart to
me this ‘over-ruling’ of the notion of ‘individual behaviour’ by acknowledging
the innate natural primacy of spatial-relational form. My scientific university education did not
equip me to understand why Poincaré poses the question ‘does the earth rotate?’
(which implies that the earth ‘has its own behaviour’) and then come out and
says that such a concept is without meaning (since the earth is bound up within
a dynamic that emerges from multiple entities moving under one another’s
simultaneous mutual influence, as flow-forms within flow). My education did not equip me to understand
things in terms that avoided attributing behaviour to ‘independent objects’,
whether individuals, corporations, nations, ... in acknowledgement that there
is no such thing as ‘hitting’ out of the context of ‘fielding’, that these two
things are aspects which the observer breaks out of a hostspace dynamic that
is, at the same time, outside-inward AND inside-outward as in the above picture
of honeybees, bubbles and convection cells.
The message is that the manner in which we seek to
actuali ze our assertive potentials
within our shared, common hostspace shapes the accommodative backpressure
(relatively more receptive in this respect and relatively more resistive in
this respect) we experience in seeking such ‘self-actuali zation’. As the honey-bee pushes out against his
neighbours in trying to build HIS cell, he feels the accommodative backpressure
that is emerging from the hostspace dynamic that is authored neither by ‘him’
nor by ‘his neighbours’ but which is purely relative (spatial-relational) in
the sense that ‘hitting’ and ‘fielding’ are relative.
This belief in our being able to source our own
behaviour, the belief in being able to hear ‘the sound of one hand clapping’
defies our experience. If we in a cart
being taken to the guillotine, while we could claim to possess free will and to
be able to source our own behaviour by first declaring that we were going to
get up and sing a song and dance a jig of our own choosing, and then ‘prove it’
by demonstrating it, ... this would completely avoid and occlude the fact that
we were all the time inextricably bound up in the hostspace flow. We would simply be imposing a ‘euclidian
space frame’ for our dynamics in place of the real world hostspace flow which
our experience informs us that our individual dynamics are relative to.
This is implied in the analytical scientific
thinking that prevails in university education.
It lifts us out of our real world inclusion-in-the-hostspace-flow
experience and recasts us IN OUR MIND as an independent assertive agent in a
causal, deterministic world of independent local objects with independent local
object behaviours.
While this ‘rational worldview’ is a useful tool,
... we need to, as Poincaré observes, over-ride it by consulting the ‘Council
of State’ or ‘Council of Elders’ (native tradition).
To a large degree, in the modern westernized world
this over-ride by our real-world inclusion-in-the-hostspace-flow experience is
being overlooked and rational models are being implemented as if they ‘made
sense in themselves’ rather than being ‘guides’ to be moderated by our real-life
experience.
How did we come to believe that our behaviour is
sourced from within us (one-sidedly rather than relatively with the hostspace
dynamic we are included in)? This
‘self-determinism’ comes to us in two ways, by the notion of an innate ‘intellect’
(the ‘demon of Laplace ’) and by the western
religious notion of the grace of God;
That is, in our western culture, the scientific side
of us believes that actions of
independent material bodies ‘determine’ the future from transactions/interactions
in the immediate past, ... as was Laplace’s worldview. but also in Laplace ’s
world view was the notion that scientific man was able to comprehend this and
thus to himself determine behaviours.
"We
may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the
cause of its future. An intellect which at any given moment knew all of the
forces that animate nature and the mutual positions of the beings that compose
it, if this intellect were vast enough to submit the data to analysis, could
condense into a single formula the movement of the greatest bodies of the
universe and that of the lightest atom; for such an intellect nothing could be
uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its
eyes."
-Marquis Pierre Simon de Laplace [This "intellect"
has later been dubbed
In our current culture, ... there is a
widespread belief in our ‘independence’ and our ability to self-determine
effects that comes from our western religious tradition.
What is widely believed in our culture is
that ‘the self’ is ‘independent’ and ‘the first cause’ of his own actions. This is foundational in our western system
of justice, ... even in the case where the community splits into ‘haves’ and
‘have-nots’ wherein some are basking in affluence while others are
starving. If ‘jean valjean’ should steal
a loaf of bread because he can no longer stand to hear hungry children crying
(as in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables)
our justice system nevertheless assumes ‘first cause’ (cause that is born
within him) on his part and thus holds him fully and solely responsible for the
act of theft (compassion or acknowledging mitigating circumstance may lower the
sentence but will not cancel the ‘guilty’ verdict). This is the western religious view of
‘self-determinism’;
“Many object to self determinism on the grounds that if
everything needs a cause, then so do the acts of the will. Thus it is often
asked, What caused the will to act? The self determinist can respond to this
question by pointing out that it is not the will of a person that makes a
decision but the person acting by means of his will. And since the person is
the first cause of his acts, it is meaningless to ask what the cause of the
first cause is. Just as no outside force caused God to create the world, so no
outside force causes people to choose certain actions. For man is created in
God's image, which includes the possession of free will.
A further argument for free will is that God's commandments
carry a divine "ought" for man, implying that man can and should
respond positively to his commands. The responsibility to obey God's commands
entails the ability to respond to them, by God's enabling grace. Furthermore,
if man is not free, but all his acts are determined by God, then God is
directly responsible for evil, a conclusion that is clearly contradicted by
Scripture (Hab. 1:13; James 1:13 - 17).
Therefore, it seems that some form of self determinism is
the most compatible with the biblical view of God's sovereignty and man's
responsibility.”
Thus
the SELF-determinism embraced by our culture and built into its justice system
implies the independence of the individual (by way of either Laplace’s Demon in
scientific thinking that prevails in university or by way of God acting through
our ‘inner purpose’ wherein ‘first cause’ is ‘by the grace of God’ though it is
not God Himself who is authoring this ‘first cause’). This notion of ‘self-determinism’ avoids ‘relativity’
wherein the actu
Whether
we believe that ‘God’ or ‘Laplace’s demon’ is the source of the ‘first cause’
that ‘comes
This ‘independence’ of individual behaviour flies in the face of our experience and is refuted in principle by relativity and quantum theory, but it is an entrenched belief, the questioning of which continues to be avoided in university education, leading individuals to believe that they are the sole causal authors of their effects, ... as if the King is the sole causal author of the crowd opening up before him as he moves through it, even as it ignores the pauper who seeks passage. It is on this basis that the corporate CEO now compensates himself 1000 times more than his average employee is compensated.
Furthermore,
this university teaching encourages us to take as ‘re
That ‘the tool [of rational mental modeling] has run away with the workman’ as Emerson says in ‘The Method of Nature’ is only too true, and the ‘running’ seems to be turning into an all-out gallop.
Perhaps
it is not up to the university with its fragmented disciplines and speci
That
is, the flow of analytical ideas are increasingly bypassing the ‘Council of
State’ and going directly to operation
It is our blindness to this situation, even after a university education, and perhaps even moreso because of a university education, that my reflection on graduation brings back to me.
* * *
Summary
and comments re ‘reflections on graduating from university’
Our culture has chosen a scientific paradigm for understanding the world based on ‘objects’ where, as in ‘genetic construction’ and ‘historical consciousness’, the ‘first cause’ of opinion and behaviour is seen as being fully internally sourced within the ‘object’, and we have embedded this ‘object paradigm’ within our educational system. How we regard and seek an understanding of the human individual is a prime example of our imposing of ‘objecthood’. When we start from the assumption that the individual human is an independently existing object, it follows that we shall seek to understand the object and ‘what makes IT tick’ by inquiry that drills down into its interior, to understand its biogenetics, its biochemistry and biophysics and to understand how these interior systems work together to source the human individual’s behaviour. That is, we regard the human individual in a genetic constructivist sense rather than in an inner-outer dynamical balance-seeking sense where there is no mutually excluding object-environment separation between the individual and the hostspace he is included in, other than the mutual shaping inner-outer assertive-accommodative spatial-relational dynamics.
As
the above discussion mentioned, we assume that the ‘first cause’ of the
individual human’s behaviour originates in his interior, sourced either by the
‘intellect’ (the ‘demon of
Once we have started with the object model scientific paradigm with its genetic constructivism, there is no way, by adding corrections or refinements to the basic object premise, to re-consider the human individual as an inner-outer dynamical balance-seeking system rather than as an ‘object’ that exists in its own independent right. The balance-seeking ‘flow paradigm’ gives one a very different understanding of the world and its social dynamics that resolves many of the paradoxes troubling us today, the harvest of our western scientific object paradigm as it intensifies, fuelled by university education, in its permeation of global dynamics.
While aboriginal man and the local councils and elders felt themselves to be innatedly connected to their hostspace, their relationship with the land being of primary importance, ... modern scientific-object-paradigm man sees himself as connected with his ‘temporal-historical past’, his continuous improvement being that of an object that is continually refining along a historical time axis without dependence on his hostspace. As Mircea Eliade Says in ‘The Myth of the Eternal Return’;
“The essential theme of my investigation bears on the image
of himself formed by the man of the archaic societies and on the place that he
assumes in the Cosmos. The chief difference between the man of the modern
societies with their strong imprint of Judeo-Christianity lies in the fact that
the former feels himself indissolubly connected with the Cosmos and the cosmic
rhythms, whereas the latter insists that he is connected only with History.
Of course, for the man of the archaic societies, the Cosmos too has a
‘history,’ if only because it is the creation of the gods and is held to have
been organized by supernatural beings or mythical heroes. But this ‘history’
of the Cosmos and of human society is a ‘sacred history’, preserved and
transmitted through myths. More than that, it is a ‘history’ that can be
repeated indefinitely, in the sense that the myths serve as models, for all the
responsible activities in which men engage. By virtue of these
paradigmatic models revealed to men in mythical times, the Cosmos and society
are periodically regenerated. Later on in this book I discuss the effects
that this faithful reproduction of paradigms and this ritual repetition of
mythical events will have on the religious ideology of the archaic peoples.
It is not difficult to understand why such an ideology makes it
impossible that what we today call a ‘historical consciousness’ should
develop.”
Historical consciousness derives from knowledge of the connective chronology of events. Evolution described in terms of temporal progress (apes to man) has often been refuted, but it continues to capture our culture’s tendency to think in these inner-outer-spatial-relationship-ignoring genetic constructivist terms. For aboriginals, our experience and our evolution is an inner-outer dynamic rather than logical temporal progression, as, for example, in a woman’s ‘moon days’ (which are acknowledged in native coming-of-age ritual and in ongoing custom). The local council of elders are the keepers of the inclusional relationship with the land, an ever-deepening enfoldment that each successive generation will be enfolded into.
This differs radically from the inner-outer-spatial-relationship-ignoring notion of temporal progress by means of a succession of causally connecting events. The modern space-age scientific object-paradigm child therefore has no need to aspire to move into the local council of elders to help sustain the deepening enfoldment of man’s relationship with the land (a view in which the ancestors continue to be included in the evolving hostspace). The land has got nothing to do with it in a historical consciousness oriented view. If young people can attend a university on Jupiter or Mars, ... this would appear to suffice for the purpose of sustaining temporal progress in man’s intellect and in ‘western style civilization’. The land which was the living womb, the ongoing creation or ‘Great Mystery’ in which we are included seems less and less important, as does the inner-outer-spatial-relational balance-seeking of hostspace-attuned man that comes to us through our ‘feeling’ experience, and the local councils of elders, the keepers of man’s relationship with the land, seem to be a dying breed.
Can
we safely do away with man’s relationship with the land and work on ‘the
progress of civilization’ in a lateral time-historical ‘genetic constructivist’
sense wherein the felt qu
Perhaps this question is already intuitively seeded in the hearts if not in the acculturated minds of today’s university graduates, ... and they have ‘heard’ the warnings about building shells around our individual selves and our national selves that seek to fulfill the prophecy of an internally-sourced ‘first cause’ for our object behaviour and to seemingly obviate the need for our inner-outer dynamical balance-seeking relationship with the common hostspace we are included in.
"Today we
participate almost exclusively with other humans and with our own human-made
technologies. It is a precarious situation, given our age-old reciprocity with
the many-voiced landscape. We still 'need' that which is other than ourselves
and our own creations." --- David Abram, Spell of the Sensuous
In closing, ... some inner-outer best wishes for new university graduates, including my daughter and grand-daughter
May the sun bring you new energy
by day,
May the Moon softly restore you
by night,
May the rain wash away your
worries,
May the breeze blow new strength
into your being.
May you walk gently through the
world and know its beauty all the days of your life.
- - - Apache blessing
Weblog: May 8, 2006
today seems like a kind of time for
summarizing some of the things that have come together over the past week (a
week of silence as far as weblog entries go), and the best way to do this, it
seems to me, is to include here a ‘summary’ as outwelled in an inter-associate
dialogue.
so with that, ... here it is;
* *
*
musings on quantum consciousness and
john flach,
The sheer
audacity of My Dinner with Andre drew throngs of curious filmgoers who
made the film the most talked-about art-house hit of 1981. After all, who'd
ever heard of a movie consisting of nearly two hours of nonstop dinner
conversation? Ah... but this isn't just any conversation--it's the kind of
mesmerizing, soul-searching, life-affirming exploration that we feel privileged
to listen to, and with unobtrusive style, director Louis Malle invites us to
eavesdrop to our hearts' and minds' content. The film was written by two New
Yorkers at the dinner table, noted playwright-actor Wallace Shawn and
well-known stage director Andre Gregory, who essentially play themselves. They
taped their conversations for several weeks and Shawn gradually shaped them
into a scripted conversation, but you'd never know it from watching the movie.
The talk flows and flows until you're captivated by Gregory's stories of world
travel and spiritual quests in Poland, India, Tibet, the Sahara desert... the
tales of a soul-searcher who'd dropped out of the theater world to rediscover
his zest for living. Shawn plays the skeptic, the voice of reason, his feet on
the ground but his own mind willing to soar. The cumulative effect of this
conversation is almost hypnotic, and certainly plays into our eternal appetite
for storytelling. Both primal and sophisticated, witty and profound, My
Dinner with Andre is a film that can be savored over time, offering new
revelations with each viewing as the listener-viewer develops his or her own
appreciation of life's great mysteries. --Jeff Shannon
sometimes when i read the
exploratory works of others, i get what carol calls, ... the ‘my dinner with
andré’ feeling, ... a kind of vit
where does this feeling come from?
this is the game of twenty
questions-surprise version, is it not?, ... where there is no a priori answer
to be had but the multiplicity of questions elicits a multiplicity of personal
experiences which are brought into coherent connective confluence in the mind
and we have a kind of ‘feeling’ based answer that is non-explicit but all the
more exciting since closure would bring an end to all the fun.
my personal way of thinking of this
is ‘holography’ or ‘wavefield’ imaging since that is what i worked with and on,
in geophysical exploration. if there is an object under the soil
under your feet, like a big granite boulder dropped in the valley by a glacier
and buried by fluvial erosion of the mountain flanks and redeposition that
raised the valley floor (inclusional history), ....then it can be imaged using
wavefields by a technique that knows nothing of ‘objects’ but which understands
only in a relative inner-outer self-other sense, ... how an inner-outer
elastically asserting spherical volume of litho-space (as small as you like)
and the reciprocal-complementary outer-inner elastic accommodating (or
suppressing) host-lithospace, ... engage in a mutually shaping dynamical
behaviour. amazingly, this purely relative a-centric wavefield
information delivers a three-dimensional image of a closed geometric form
object like the glacial ‘erratic’. but, of course, it is human cognition
that knows about ‘objects’ and imposes such objectification on the ‘inverted’
(‘imaged’) wavefield data. were the same technique being employed in a
marine environment, the closed form object could be a closed-geometric-form
lens of slightly warmer water in a tidal current, ... a mere ‘form in the
flow’, ... a more general definition of ‘objects’, perhaps, than the
closed-geometric-form we impose on it.
so, holography to me is like the
surprise version of the game of twenty questions, it works by imaging from the
outside-in, by ‘coherency’ as we bring a multiplicity of experiences into
connective confluence. the fewer (source-receiver) experiences, the
lower the resolution of the imagery, ... but no matter how many experiences and
how fine their qu
maybe the surprise version of twenty
questions IS all we get, ... maybe there are no ‘explicit’ answers or explicit
objects. it seems as if we could resolve the details more and more from
the outside-inwards in an inferential sense without ever getting to ‘heart of
the matter’.
this must be some kind of ‘magic
point’, must it not, where the outer-inner progression from possibilities and
inference get’s close enough to ‘the heart of the matter’ for the heart of the
matter to ‘overtly declare itself’, ... must it not?
john flach, and
Intentional Dynamics
This view of space as a
dynamic entity – every part of which is influenced by, and influences, every
other part – is quite different from
but there’s no romance in ‘fact’ and
when you think about it, what’s factual about that glacial erratic, the granite
boulder? it’s going to be exposed again and eroded, and if not, it will
be recycled as the continental plate dives down into the hot mantle.
everything is in flux and we simply
impose our absoluteness and self-centered closed geometry-form objects and
their actions on it.
john wheeler speaks of ‘what does
happen’ but what does that mean when everything is in flux?
while i don’t deny that something
mysterious is going on at the point where the surprise version game of twenty
questions leads to a flash of enlightenment, i am suspicious of wheeler’s
statement here which makes it look like we can make nature ‘speak’ by ‘making a
measurement’ so that nature ‘commits itself’ and precipitates actu
and i am suspicious of john flach
and
to, me, this is the same thing as
observing a person who lives in an amish community for two years followed by a
hell’s angel gang for two years, and knowing that his behaviour that we actually
observe is mutually shaped by his intended actu
our question is; who is this
person? and what we imply is ‘how does this person behave when he
is not under ‘hostspace-load-conditions’. well, of course, this is
akin to ‘what is the sound of one hand clapping’ since there is no way to think
of a person without the person being under some or other
‘hostspace-load-conditions’, ... a person (human individual) being an innate
inner-outer dynamical balancing act involving the continual balancing of
thermal energy exchanges, gaseous exchanges, fluid exchanges and material
exchanges, ... so what meaning is there in the notion of ‘a person in-their-own-right’,
... is it not true that the inhabitant is included in the habitat in the manner
that the hurricane is included in the atmospheric hostspace, and that it is the
convenience of simplification that has us break the entity out on its own and
in a ritual ceremony, cap it with a name and say, ... rise sir object
such-and-such, ... for hereafter will you be known in the land by the
objecthood we have bestowed upon you.
so, yes, if one starts off thinking
about a ‘control system’ (an object with an implied center from which commands
are issued), then the ‘Principle of Incomplete Knowledge’ problem is
encountered
“ . --- The
Principle of Incomplete Knowledge --- 'The model embodied in a control system
is necessarily incomplete.' ---, a principle derivable from
Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and from our experience that 'a system
cannot represent itself completely, and hence cannot have complete knowledge of
how its own actions may feed back into the perturbations.' “ (Francis Heylighen, 'Principles of Systems and
cybernetics: an evolutionary perspective, http://www.cs.brandeis.edu/~richardw/Systems_Principles.txt)
but there we go, the ‘control
system’ has a center and the twenty questions approach, like the wavefield
imaging (holographic) approach, makes no assumptions about anything which is
other than ‘relative’.
so where do we go to resolve this
‘incomplete knowledge’, ... whether it be that of a ‘local self-centered
control system’ or that of an a-centric inner-outer relational entity which is
nonlocally inferred in the manner of the hurricane in the atmospheric hostspace
flow-dynamic, or the whorl that emerges in your full bathtub when you pull the
plug out (it being a relative form inferred by the nonlocal currents in the
flowspace in which it is included).
where we go to resolve this
‘incomplete knowledge’ is ‘experience’ and ‘history’ as john flach and
We can’t look to a
natural world or to a logical ration
The life of the law
has not been logic; it has been experience… In order to know what it is, we
must know what it has been, and what it tends to become. We must alternately
consult history and existing theories of legislation. But the most difficult
labor will be to understand the combination of the two into new products at
every stage. [Cited from Menand, 1997, p. 137; emphasis added]
as they point out, it happens that
‘history’ is something that ‘looks more deterministic’ in hindsight than it
does in the course of unfolding in the same manner that coming out of a maze
and explaining the path in reverse eliminates a lot of the cul-de-sacs that
were presenting themselves in the forward unfolding, ... a distortion in the
backwards-looking perspective referred to as ‘hindsight bias’.
how we conceive of history must thus
be reflected upon, and an example of such reflection they give is as follows;
Closing or Escaping the
Circle
The point is that the
universe is a grand synthesis, putting itself together all the time as a whole.
Its history is not a history as we usually conceive history. It is not one
thing happening after another after another. It is a tot
what comes to my mind from wheeler’s
comment is ‘spatial-relational transformation’ of the solar system variety
wherein many entities move under one another’s simultaneous mutual influence
(raising the ‘three-body-problem that demands an understanding beyond that of
caus
but this two-body self-other
conflict implied by ‘control-system’ – ‘environment’ engagement of john flach,
sidney dekker and jan pieter stapper’s, whether by circular caus
this two body representation reminds me
of the story of brere rabbit and the tarbaby, used by psychologists to
illustrate ‘projection’ (see A NOTE ON THE TAR BABY AND PROJECTIVE IDENTIFICATION, by Robert M. Young at http://www.human-nature.com/rmyoung/papers/tar1.html
brer rabbit punches tarbaby for not
responding to his ‘good mahnin’ greeting, and resistance offered by tarbaby is
interpreted by brer rabbit as ret
perhaps the reverse is also possible
wherein ‘self’ and ‘other’ are a dynamical ‘unum’ and ‘self’ is in denial of
the self-other dynamical unum.
this takes me back to the ‘my dinner
with andre’ zestiness wherein all inspection of what’s out there is, at the
same time, ‘introspection’ in the same sense that, for a native american
(pantheist believer in inclusion in nature and in mitakuye oyasin, we are all
related) that ‘all wars are civil wars’.
this ‘inclusion’ geometry implies
that andre, in setting out on an external journey of exploration to ‘find himself’
was demonstrating that introspection on the self-other relationship equates to
extropection (exploration) as to how the otherness pushes back when you assert
into it.
the place you are setting out from
on this journey of introspection-extropection is the same place you are
arriving at and the only difference is that the otherness has informed you and
you have exformed the otherness, as the following graphic aims to imply;
holding on to this relational
thinking, ... without having to totally ‘get it’, ... it is worth reflecting on
the problem with the notion of ‘history’; i.e. there are two notions, one of
which, the popular western one, is an ‘exclusional view’ which separates past
from present in a linear-sequential-temporal progression of ‘events’, ...
‘events’ being logical-conceptual entities that are spoken of as ‘real’ and
that precipitate as possibilities collapse into ‘actu
these different views of history
have interested anthropologists, and mircea eliade wrote a book on this
particular topic and referred to it as his ‘most important work’. he says
in the Preface to The Myth of the Eternal Return;
“The essential theme of
my investigation bears on the image of himself formed by the man of the archaic
societies and on the place that he assumes in the Cosmos. The chief
difference between the man of the modern societies with their strong imprint of
Judeo-Christianity lies in the fact that the former feels himself indissolubly
connected with the Cosmos and the cosmic rhythms, whereas the latter insists
that he is connected only with History. Of course, for the man of the
archaic societies, the Cosmos too has a ‘history,’ if only because it is the
creation of the gods and is held to have been organized by supernatural beings
or mythical heroes. But this ‘history’ of the Cosmos and of human society
is a ‘sacred history’, preserved and transmitted through myths. More than
that, it is a ‘history’ that can be repeated indefinitely, in the sense that
the myths serve as models, for all the responsible activities in which men
engage. By virtue of these paradigmatic models revealed to men in
mythical times, the Cosmos and society are periodically regenerated.
Later on in this book I discuss the effects that this faithful
reproduction of paradigms and this ritual repetition of mythical events will
have on the religious ideology of the archaic peoples. It is not
difficult to understand why such an ideology makes it impossible that what we
today call a ‘historical consciousness’ should develop.”
a reviewer captures the essence of
this book as follows;
“A luminous,
profound, and extremely stimulating work. . . . Eliade’s thesis is that ancient
man envisaged events not as constituting a linear, progressive history,
but simply as so many creative repetitions of primordial archetypes [note:
eliade clarifies that he intends NOT ‘Jungian’ archetypes that float in a
notional ‘collective unconscious’ but simply ‘exemplary models’] ... This is an
essay which everyone interested in the history of religion and in the ment
clearly these issues are not
unrelated to our problem at hand in exploring quantum behaviour vis a vis man’s
quest for self-other understanding. certain comments of eliade
speak further to some of the relevant issues and his notion that western
history has become too ‘provincial’, ignoring its eastern influences smacks of
the ‘hindsight bias’ mentioned by john flach, sidney dekkers and jan pieter
stappers, ... the reverse engineering by way of the path coming out of the maze
which ignores the cul-de-sacs in the forward path and their inevitable influence
in shaping the shaping the continuously unfolding present.
“Had we not feared to
appear overambitious, we should have given this book a subtitle: Introduction
to a Philosophy of History. For such, after all, is the purport of the
present essay; but with the distinction that, instead of proceeding to a
speculative analysis of the historical phenomenon, it examines the fundamental
concepts of archaic societies --- which, although they are conscious of a
certain form of ‘history’, make every effort to disregard it. In studying
these traditional societies, one characteristic has especially struck us: it is
their revolt against concrete, historical time, their nostalgia for a
periodical return to the mythical time of the beginning of things, to the
‘Great Time’. The meaning and function of what we have called
‘archetypes’ and ‘repetition’ disclosed themselves to us only after we had
perceived these societies’ will to refuse concrete time, their hostility toward
every attempt at autonomous ‘history’, that is, at history not regulated by
archetypes. This dismissal, this opposition, are not merely the effect of
the conservative tendencies of primitive societies, as this book proves.
In our opinion, it is justifiable to read in this depreciation of history
(that is, of events without transhistorical models), and in this
rejection of profane, continuous time, a certain metaphysical ‘valorization’ of
human existence. But this valorization is emphatically not that
which certain post-Hegelian philosophical currents --- notably Marxism,
historicism, and existenti
one can read in this distinguishing
between the transhistorical notion of history of aboriginal man, the same
distinguishing as implied between newtonian physics and relativity,
...wherein in the former the flow is along a linear time-line, ... and
this continues to be the model in the case of the notion of possibilities
precipitating actu
“All things are an equal
exchange for fire and fire for all things, as goods are for gold and gold are
for goods.”
this view is one of continuing
‘flow’ or ‘spatial-relational transformation’ which has no need of ‘profane
continuous time’ and which does not separate the past from the present but
continuously enfolds the past into the present.. as heraclitus also
says;
“The unity of things lies
beneath the surface; it depends upon a balanced reaction between opposites.”
this, to me, recalls the situation
mentioned earlier, where the confusing of the punching and fending of self and
other (seen in the two-body self-centered object sense of control system and
environment) needs to be jacked from this logical basis to real world
inner-outer experiential re
“to, me, this is the same
thing as observing a person who lives in an amish community for two years
followed by a hell’s angel gang for two years, and knowing that his behaviour
that we actually observe is mutually shaped by his intended actu
the outside observer cannot see this
balanced reaction between opposites but must FEEL IT by the empathic process of
‘feeling his pain or his joy or the hostspace suppressing him or the hostspace
over-accommodating and inflating what he would rather not inflate.
science always wants to be on the
outside looking in, and this is what gives rise to the external measuring rod
and reference clock, ... and thus it is a ‘scientific’ version of history that
gets outside of society in order document ‘what happens’ as a linear time
progression, ... and this same attempt seems to associate with the
‘precipitation of possibility into actu
but so long as we hold on to that
scientific voyeurism, which is necessary for us to formulate an explicit
‘scientific theory’ or ‘scientific interpretation’, ... we are splitting
ourselves out from our own experience.
throwing away our measuring rod and
reference clock and thus ‘outside-looking-in’ scientific voyeurism equates to
including ourselves in our own experience, ... allowing extrospection (science)
and introspection (spiritu
where these inside-outward and
outside-inward explorations come together into one, are we not talking about
‘pure experience’ or ‘pure understanding’? and is this not what excites us in
‘my dinner with andre’, .. the awareness on some level that extrospection and
introspection are ‘one dynamic’ and that, as t.s. eliot says;
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
is this kind of understanding not
where ‘self’ and ‘other’ merge?... and we understand and accept our innate
inclusion in the evolutionary dynamic, the self-enfolding space of the
continuing present?
anyhow, these are my musings, sent
to myself with copies to you, ... on my various ‘dinners with andre’ where i
have played the ‘straight man’ with y’all and enjoyed it.
mitakuye oyasin,
ted
Weblog: April 28, 2006
I
have just had an interesting email exchange with a friend (website designer and
worldly deep thinker) on ‘what is a blog’.
she was the one that had alerted me to the
the baghdad blog was very interesting to me in light of my having experienced and written about ‘sharing circles’ wherein multiple individuals, one-by-one, share their heartfelt subjective views of their unique situational inclusion in our common hostspace, without discussion (i.e. without trying to make ‘objective sense’ of what they are saying so as to reconcile it with one’s own ‘objective world view). as one gets the sense of the (multiple) individual’s evolving relationship with our common hostspace, made unique to them by their unique situational inclusion within it, ... one also infers, by bringing the multiplicity of subjective inclusional experiences into connection in the mind, ... the evolving hostspace dynamic.
there can be no avoiding the parallels of this form of inferential ‘imaging’ with the ‘holographic’ process which, instead of trying to use the images of the objects in the scenarizing, one backed off instead to the dynamic ‘spatial-relationships’ (phase information, as it is called in holography).
in both cases, the ‘sharing circle’ and ‘holography’, an overall view of the hostspace with dynamical forms included in it, is ‘imaged’ spatial-relationally, without dependence on the objects per se. this presentation, in holography (e.g. disneyworld holograms of spirits in the ‘haunted house’) gives it a ghostly appearance since the ‘objects’ are no longer ‘invariable bodies’, but are free to ‘morph’ relative to the space they are included in, ... in the manner of whorls in fluid flow.
that is, the dance of sub-marine sea-grass in the tides informs us EXPLICITLY about the flexibility and dynamical behaviour of the ‘sea-grass objects’ but at the same time informs us INFERENTIALLY (implicitly) about the dynamics of the hostspace the sea-grass is included in, ... all the way out to the celestial dynamics (lunar, solar, planetary) of the universe we are included in, which sources the cyclicities embodied in the tidal currents. the ‘sourcery’ of the hostspace dynamic would in fact seem to be more fundamental and persisting than the objects and object behaviours which emerge and subduct as inclusions within it.
this brings out the fact that there are two different ways of ‘perceiving’ the world; (a) EXPLICITLY in terms of invariable bodies or ‘objects’ and ‘what they do’,... and (b) IMPLICITLY in terms of spatial-relational transformation.
a ‘sharing circle’ is designed to ‘image’ the common hostspace dynamic we are included in the ‘holographical’ manner wherein we ‘see’ the human forms without have to ‘objectify them’ by seeing them in their spatial relationship with the evolving common hostspace itself (as in the ghostly holograms in the disneyworld ‘haunted house’ where the human forms, being purely relative [spatial relational] are free to morph relative to the world-hostspace they are included in).
in this ‘holodynamical’ imagery, the sourcing of behaviour no longer appears to be emanating from the interior of the object-forms; i.e. we do not, in this holodynamical view, think of the objects as ‘independent’ entities whose behaviour pushes out from the center of themselves, driven by their ‘inner-purpose’. instead, we see them as having forms and behaviours that are inductively shaped by the dynamical hostspace they are included in.
here we have the same ‘trade-offs’ in understanding as in the imagery of the men in a cart being taken to the guillotine. if we ‘objectify’ the men in the cart, and if they ‘objectify themselves’, we and they will ‘see them’ as ‘independent’ objects with ‘free will’ whose behaviours push out from their self-centers driven by their ‘inner purpose’. they can ‘prove’ their free will and their control over their own behaviour to us and to themselves, by declaring that they will get up and sing a song and dance a jig of their own choosing, ... and they can certainly do this. but at the same time, they are inextricably bound up in the (spatial-relational) flow of an evolving hostspace and they are in no way in control of where this is taking them and how it is inductively shaping them and their behaviour.
do they ‘really’ possess ‘free will’ and are they ‘really’ ‘in control of their own behaviour’? ... or is all of this secondary to the inductive shaping of their form and behaviour in the evolving flow-dynamic of their hostspace?
what the western mind is in denial of (we like the abstract notions of ‘independence’ and ‘being in control’) is that ‘the objective world’ characterized in our minds by ‘objects’ and ‘what they do’ is not ‘the real world’, but a mental re-construction of our spatial-relational experience within an inclusional flow-space.
as mentioned in my april 18th blog, ... ‘objects’ are abstract mental contrivances that ‘we fabricate’ from the spatial-relational field-flow-forms of the evolving space of the continuing present, as both ‘relativity’ and ‘quantum theory’ attest. that is, once we approximate the spatial-relational flow-forms of our included-in-field-flow-space-experience as ‘objects’, then we are forced to give those objects a ‘location’ in space and to resort to describing their ‘behaviour’ in terms of temporal displacements (we are forced to invent ‘time’ as a linear progression of past, present, future) and their transactions and interactions in terms of ‘cause-and-effect’. all of these are contrivances forced upon us by approximating the continously co-evolving spatial-relational flow-forms in terms of ‘invariable bodies’ aka ‘objects’;
[N.B. Henri Poincaré
pointed out that this causal model is too simple for delivering an
understanding of ‘natural dynamics’ since it ignores the influence of the
remote evolutionary past on the present and assumes that the future is being
constructed from the immediate past, such a model gaining favour because of our
proclivity for ‘understanding’ dynamics in terms of objects rather than in
terms of ‘fluid-flows’;
"First,
with respect to time [the first ‘approximation of convenience’ of mainstream
mathematical physics]. Instead of
embracing in its entirety the progressive development of a phenomenon, we
simply try to connect each moment with the one immediately preceding. We admit that the present state of the world
only depends on the immediate past, without being directly influenced, so to
speak, by the recollection of a more distant past. Thanks to this postulate, instead of studying
directly the whole succession of phenomena, we may confine ourselves to writing
down its differential equation ; for the laws of Kepler, we substitute
the laws of
“Since the word understand has several meanings, the definitions that will be best
understood by some are not those that will be best suited to others. We
have those who seek to create an [object] image, and those who restrict
themselves to combining empty forms, perfectly intelligible, but purely
intelligible and deprived by extraction of all matter.” --- Henri Poincaré
“Poincaré argued that the axioms of
geometry implicitly rely on assumptions about the nature of objects which they
are supposed to “define,” thus giving us a vicious circle that defines nothing
(“objects” are implicitly assumed to be invariable bodies). . ...
Therefore the axioms of geometry already contain an irreducible assumption
which does not follow from the axioms themselves. Axiomatic systems provide us
with “faulty definitions” of objects, definitions that are grounded not in
formal logic but in a hypothesis — a “prejudice” as Hans-Georg Gadamer might
say — that is prior to logic. As a corollary, our logic of identity
cannot be said to be necessary and universally v
in our pre-lingual condition, we suspend our objectification of the hostspace dynamic (world-dynamic) and we use ‘inference’ as in the ‘sea-grass’ behaviour example, that infers ‘the dynamics of the hostspace the sea-grass is included in’ (such inference is unbounded, extending to the immediate celestial dynamics and beyond).
if, every time we observe objects behaving, we take the inferential insight from it, ... after we have observed a multiplicity of object behaviours, we will have sufficient inferential information for bringing it into coherent connective confluence in our minds, the product of which is an outside-in based view of the hostspace dynamic in which there is no dependency on ‘invariable bodies’ or ‘objects’ and their ‘object-behaviours’. instead, it is now the ‘objects’ and their ‘object-behaviours’ that are ‘inferred’ from the hostspace flow-dynamic; i.e. they now appear to be inclusional flow-forms within the hostspace flow-dynamic, consistent with ‘relativity’ and ‘quantum theory’, and consistent with our experience since we know that our lives persist by our inner-outer balance-seeking dynamics.
that is, we seek to sustain balance in inner-outer thermal energy flow (we sweat, perspire, respire in attunement with the ambient hostspace conditions), oxygen and carbon-dioxide vapour pressures, water/liquid inner-outer flows, and inner-outer material flows. we do this continually, when we are unaware (when we sleep, if we are in a coma) and if our inclusional situation with the hostspace changes so that the ambient hostspace vapour pressure drops too low (the atmosphere thins) our blood will boil in an attempt to sustain inner-outer balance (we will be out of range of being able to sustain inner-outer dynamical balance), and similarly if our inclusional situation in the hostspace becomes one wherein the richness of thermal energy supply is too great for us to sustain inner-outer thermal energy flow balance.
our life experience (as well as modern physics and ‘complexity’ of ‘nolinear dynamics’) encourages us to conclude that our relationship with our common hostspace is akin to that of the hurricane’s relationship with its atmospheric hostspace; i.e. that we are ‘flow-forms’ in a fluid field-flow-space and that we sustain ourselves by inner-outer balance-seeking, and are re-assimilated (reformed) into the common hostspace when such inner-outer balance sustaining is not longer possible.
‘objectification’
is thus a degenerate simplification of our natural re
‘objectification’
is the game of rational reasoning in terms of objects and object-behaviours we
play in ‘discussion forums’, and it is game that is inevitably won in a
political world such as our western acculturated world, by the principle of
LaFontaine; ‘La raison du plus fort est toujours la meilleure’ (The ration
the
as a society, we are struggling to understand one another and the world we live in, in terms other than politicized objectifications, as is the currency of the mainstream media. were everyone to have a blog in which to express in a heartfelt manner their subjective experience of their unique situational inclusion in our common hostspace, then we could extend the advantages of the ‘sharing circle’ to the status of ‘sharing sphere’ and by taking away the spatial-relational inference from all of these heartfelt sharing, in the manner that we take away the inference from the sea-grass motion that alludes to the common hostspace dynamic in which it/we are included, ... we could come to understand the common hostspace dynamic we are included in, ... in a manner that does not depend upon ‘objects’ and their ‘object behaviours’, ... in the manner of a timeless spatial-relational evolution that includes us as it includes our ancestors and the little ones that have not yet emerged.
this,
i believe, was the ‘electric world’ dream of
i suspect that, had he lived to see the internet, he would have tuned right in to the community harmony sustaining potentials of the ‘blog’ with its ability to deliver to us an intuited understanding of our common hostspace, without dependency on politicized world views based on synthetic ‘causal’ understandings in terms of objects and their ‘good’ and’evil’ object behaviours.
Weblog: April 22, 2006 Earth Day
‘Earth Day’ is a reminder to me of the non-environmental orientation of our western culture and its current ‘waking up’.
The western religions of Christianity, Islam and Judaism, ... God bless ‘em, ... all regard the Earth as some place to put God’s chosen creatures, ‘men’ (and their Biblical lesser halves, ‘women’). one would have thought that Darwinian evolutionary theory would have restored top status for the Earth (nature) but the Dawkinsian’s got hold of it and cast the whole thing as a mechanical process wherein man was seen as being ‘constructed’ by ‘genetic determinism’ involving the recombination of little ‘genetic atoms’ in what is the equivalent of an ‘atomic theory of evolution’.
A
growing minority of modern biologists don’t believe this, of course, but it has
become so entrenched that it is quite literally ‘heresy’ to suggest that rather
than each individual ‘species evolving’
it is more re
What is wrong with the notion that ‘individual species evolve’? Seems pretty sensible, ... or maybe it seems pretty sensible because we have been taught it as if it were ‘the truth’ and because ‘everyone else seems to believe it’.
The problem with any theory that breaks things down into parts (e.g. ‘genes’, ‘DNA’) and explains the development of the system in the constructivist terms of ‘what the parts do’ is that this ignores the inductive behaviour and form-shaping influence of the hostspace the system/organism is included in. that is, ... standard darwinian evolutionary theory starts from the gene, the elemental bits that purportedly shape the appearance, properties and behaviours of the organism in an inside-outward ‘constructivist’ manner. there is no suggestion that there is any simultaneous interdependence between the inside-outward genetically determined behaviour and the outside-inward spatial-relational constraining of behaviour. for example, does it matter if the organism is situated within a liquid (hydrospheric) environment or within a gaseous (atmospheric) environment, ... because there is nothing in genetic determinism per se that handles the outside-inward hostspace-inducing influence on evolution.
As Stephen Jay Gould observes, ... it doesn’t make sense to consider ‘hitting’ out of the context of ‘fielding’. the two processes; individual asserting and spatial constraining/accommodating, are SIMULTANEOUSLY mutually shaping (dual aspects of a dynamical one-ness).
Psychologists studying behavioural dynamics and cognition have recognized, like Gould, that they were ‘forgetting something’ when they used a ‘causal’ model of ‘stimulus’ and ‘response’ which was all inside-outward (the environment influence was handled temporally/sequentially with ‘feedback’ and ‘adaptation’). today, they have added into their models ‘physical constraints’ and they give the example (Flach & Stappers) of a person trying to point at a target while someone else is continually pushing their hand away. this leads to a difference between the intended behaviour and actual behaviour which the intention is always trying to correct (thus we can never say that the actual behaviour we are seeing is an expression of the intent). what we see is the actual behaviour which is a melding of the intended behaviour and the spatial-relational constraining (more general than the pushing by an other’s hand, it could be that the organism is being physically constrained by being caught in a turbulentflow (a river or tsunami or etc.).
This
changes a whole lot of things when you consider that ‘what we see’ is not ‘an
expression of what was intended’ so that the ‘response’ to a ‘stimulus’ is not
coming from the inside of the organism but is SIMULTANEOUSLY mutually shaped
by; (a) the inside-outward asserting intent and (b) the outside-inward spatial
constraining (recall Newton’s third law of action and reaction). Furthermore, since dynamics are ongoing, it
is inherently ambiguous whether the inside-outward ‘individual asserting’ is
‘causing’ the outside-inward ‘spatial constraining’ or vice versa, ... leading
the cognition research psychologists to speak of ‘circular caus
this
would appear to be simply a gener
to recap where we have just ‘been’, we started off by noting that the western religions saw the earth as a support system for God’s chosen creature (here, man’s identity comes simply from man expressing his intention). but along came Darwinian evolution which said that man ‘evolved’ out of the earthly environment by gene combinations etc. but this ALSO was a one-sided linear-causal inside-outwards effect producing model that didn’t take into account that what we actually do is inductively shaped by ‘spatial constraining influences’ that shape and ‘train’ our behaviour.
adding
into our models the spatial constraining aspect and taking it together with the
actu
that is, there is a philosophical problem with ‘identity’ when we acknowledge that the behaviour we see is not the simple expression of intent but is mutually shaped by the spatial constraining/accommodating. the individual cannot, therefore, identify himself on the basis of ‘what he does’ (his behaviour is not ‘fully his’ but is co-owned by the hostspace he is uniquely situationally included in).
psychologically, we see this ‘identity’ problem taking shape in today’s world of commoditized ‘labour’ (‘labour’ in the general sense that includes trades, professions etc.) where a person ‘becomes their job’; i.e. they see themselves in terms of ‘what they do’, but in fact their behaviour is mutually shaped by the spatial-accommodating/constraining associated with the workspace, and when a person is suddenly laid off, the sense of their own identity is undercut by the removal of the spatial constraining/accommodating of the workplace (hostspace).
to
the aboriginal, man is included in nature in the manner that the hurricane is
included in the atmospheric hostspace, ... so there is no question of going out
on a limb and thinking of one’s personal ‘identity’ in terms of ‘what one
does’. how could ‘what one does’ make sense,
out of the context of the spatial-constraining/accommodating that one is
pushing into and that is mutually shaping the actu
since ‘nature’ is rarely pulled out like a carpet from beneath the feet of the asserting individual (except in times of drought or floods etc.), man’s ‘identity’ rarely suffers the undercutting that it increasingly does in the commoditized workforce.
here
we can see a comparison between the ‘identity’ traditions of the three western
religions (christianity, islam, judaism) which encourage seeing our ‘identity’
in terms of ‘what we do’, ... and the ‘du
meanwhile, the myth of man being simply placed on earth by God implies an ‘identity’ for man based strictly on ‘what man does’ as if ‘what he does’ equates to ‘an assertive expression of his intent’. but in fact what we see him doing is mutually shaped and there is also the spatial-accommodating/constraining side. thus, in the case of a woman who is spatially constrained/prevented from doing most lines of work needed to provide for herself and her self-development with the exception of giving of sexual favours to men, ... it can hardly be said that what she does is ‘an expression of her intent’ as in the linear, causal model though we nevertheless impose on her an ‘identity’ based on ‘what we see her do’, such an ‘identity’ ignores the inductive shaping role of spatial-constraining/accommodating.
this ‘philosophical error’ in the establishing of ‘identity’ is built into the old notions, in the western religions, that God placed man on earth since that suggests that man’s behaviour is an expression of man’s (God-guided) intent. this view continues to be supported by Darwinian evolutionary theory, the reductionist version thereof, where the development of the individual organism, and its behaviour, is seen as pushing out from its interior in a linear-causal way (e.g. as in ‘genetic determinism’).
in
re
one way to celebrate Earth Day, therefore, is in reflecting on how solidly our ‘identity’ is ‘grounded’ in acknowledging that we are ‘included’ in nature’s hostspace and in the social hostspace that nests inclusionally within nature, and that our ‘identity’ does not come solely out of our interior and ‘what we do’; i.e. our behaviour cannot be taken to be the simple expression of our intent (it is mutually shaped by spatial constraining/accommodating associated with our unique situational inclusion in our shared hostspace.)
to
think in this manner means that we cannot objectify people on the basis of
‘what they do’ but must accept that ‘spatial constraining/accommodating’
together with the ‘attempted actu
Weblog: April 18, 2006
Yesterday i wrote a letter to the editor in regard to how we are split in our view of ‘what central government is for’ and it occurred to me (an ‘occurrence’ stimulated by offline dialogues) that the split in ideas exactly parallels the split in our impressions of ‘what the brain is for’ in the human body.
many
people think that the brain is a ‘central control unit’ or a ‘central
processing unit’ as if ‘it’ (the brain) is the lightbulb-turning-on
sourcing-author of ideas, ... ideas that it subsequently operation
“Well,
it turns out a lot of processing occurs at the level of the organs. Human
behavior is determined in many places. The control of our behavior is not
located in our brains. It’s all over our bodies. So you could argue that “swarm
intelligence” rules human beings, too. Balance is controlled by the cerebellar
swarm, and rarely comes to consciousness. Other processing occurs in the spinal
cord, the stomach, the intestine. A lot of vision takes place in the eyeballs,
long before the brain is involved. And for that matter, a lot of sophisticated brain processing occurs beneath awareness,
too. An easy proof is object avoidance. A mobile robot has to devote a
tremendous amount of processing time simply to avoid obstacles in the
environment. Human beings do, too, but they’re never aware of it – until the
lights go out. Then they learn painfully just how much processing is really
required. So there’s an argument that the whole structure of consciousness, and
the human sense of self-control and purposefulness, is a user illusion. We
don’t have conscious control over ourselves at all. We just think we do.”
--- Crichton, M. (2002). Prey
[N.B. Michael Crichton has an
anthropology degree from Harvard, taught physical anthropology at Cambriduge
(UK) and later obtained his M.D. from
ok, the example of this ‘lack of control’ i am using in these april blogs is ‘adult-john’ who insists (his logic is in control) on keeping his jacket on in the midday heat, ... but his body doesn’t obey and cannot obey since his body behaviour is inner-outer balance-seeking behaviour over which his logical manipulations have no control (and putting a bullet through own his head is ‘control’ only in the degenerate sense of stopping behaviour rather than orchestrating it). child-john, meanwhile, attunes to his inner-outer balancing and takes his clothes off and puts his clothes on when his inner-outer balancing suggests it, ... he does not ‘fight’ the dynamical hostspace he is situationally included in, but puts his behaviour in the service of sustaining harmony and balance within it.
if one reflects on the implications of ‘relativity’, one comes around to conceiving of the ‘individual human’ as a sustaining dynamical balancing of the same sort as that which sustains the identity of the hurricane within the dynamical atmospheric hostspace. the concept of ‘absolute behaviour’ that is sourced from a local point (in the interior of some absolute ‘closed form’ geometric object) dissolves with relativity, and everything must be dealt with in terms of inner-outer fluid dynamics.
the brain’s job, in this case, would have to be the sustaining of dynamical balance, rather than ‘control’ since the individual no longer exists as an ‘independent unit’ but instead as an inner-outer balancing act within the overall hostspace dynamic.
here’s where the comparison crops up with central government in the ‘nation-state’. once again, the nation state is not an absolute independent ‘thing’, we only impose that notion by inventing some imaginary line boundaries. the nation-state is included in the overall global hostspace dynamic and it differentiates via its internal cooperative dynamics (coherent spatial-relational dynamics) which are, at the same time INCLUDED within the overall global hostspace ‘traffic-flow’ dynamic.
when you proxy in your personal ‘power’ and your personal ‘resources’ to the central government of your nation-state, do you see the central government as ‘central controller’? ... or do you see the central government as something you and your fellows have developed in order to strengthen and give greater resilience to, the balance act that sustains the persisting identity of the nation-state?
here’s where there is a split
in views. many people, myself included,
do not elect a head-of-state so that he can originate ‘genius ideas’ in his own
head and then use the proxied powers of the central government to operation
this ‘split’ in views of the ‘central administration’ of both the individual body and the individual nation-state have their roots in common soil, ‘monotheism’ or ‘the causal model’ wherein behaviour is explained in terms of the behaviours that immediately preceded it, the ‘final answer’ being supposedly given if we follow the ‘smoking-gun-trail’ backwards-in-time far enough to its ‘ultimate source’. since this is beyond our cogntive capacities, the monotheist God (a supra-nature divinity rather than an intra-nature divinity) provides a ‘virtual source’ in lieu of our completing the full ‘back-tracking’; i.e. He is the Ultimate Causal Agent.
meanwhile, the whole notion of
‘caus
[N.B. Henri Poincaré
pointed out that this causal model is too simple for delivering an
understanding of ‘natural dynamics’ since it ignores the influence of the
remote evolutionary past on the present and assumes that the future is being constructed
from the immediate past, such a model gaining favour because of our proclivity
for ‘understanding’ dynamics in terms of objects rather than in terms of
‘fluid-flows’;
"First,
with respect to time [the first ‘approximation of convenience’ of mainstream
mathematical physics]. Instead of
embracing in its entirety the progressive development of a phenomenon, we
simply try to connect each moment with the one immediately preceding. We admit that the present state of the world
only depends on the immediate past, without being directly influenced, so to
speak, by the recollection of a more distant past. Thanks to this postulate, instead of studying
directly the whole succession of phenomena, we may confine ourselves to writing
down its differential equation ; for the laws of Kepler, we substitute
the laws of
“Since the word understand has several meanings, the definitions that will be best
understood by some are not those that will be best suited to others. We
have those who seek to create an [object] image, and those who restrict
themselves to combining empty forms, perfectly intelligible, but purely
intelligible and deprived by extraction of all matter.” --- Henri Poincaré
“Poincaré argued that the axioms of
geometry implicitly rely on assumptions about the nature of objects which they
are supposed to “define,” thus giving us a vicious circle that defines nothing
(“objects” are implicitly assumed to be invariable bodies). . ... Therefore
the axioms of geometry already contain an irreducible assumption which does not
follow from the axioms themselves. Axiomatic systems provide us with “faulty
definitions” of objects, definitions that are grounded not in formal logic but
in a hypothesis — a “prejudice” as Hans-Georg Gadamer might say — that is prior
to logic. As a corollary, our logic of identity cannot be said to be
necessary and universally v
ok, if you don’t like technical jargon as in the ‘nota bene’,... i will simply requote the short version of my letter to the editor here, which suggests that central government for some, is a buffering system to increase the balance-seeking resilience of the non-absolute nation-state organism, while for others, it is a central control system in which the ‘head-of-state’ is authorized, like adult-john, to come up with his own absolutist genius ideas and to inflict them not only on ‘his own people’ but the rest of the world as well (since there is no discrete boundary between the individual nation-state dynamic and the global dynamic, only a mutual balance-sustaining dynamic);
Letter to the Editor:
* * *
The ‘Unholy (Common) Ground’ of Stephen Harper and George Bush
The discomfort many people are feeling and
voicing over Stephen Harper’s frequent use of ‘God Bless
On the one hand, we have the philosophy
common to the fundament
On the other hand, we have the philosophy common to eastern Buddhism, Taoism, aboriginal (First Nations) traditions, as well as the Christian heresies of Gnosticism and the ‘relativity’ of Giordano Bruno, wherein ‘divinity’ is immanent in nature and man is just one of the interdependent creature-brotherhood.
In the former instance, central authority is there to ‘make the correct things happen’ and the ‘Head-of-State’ sees himself in the direct ‘chain-of-command’ of the ‘Ultimate Central Authority’ and thus guided by the ‘universal knowledge of good’. Such is the ‘drive’ behind the deployment of powers and resources proxied to the central authority.
In
the latter instance, centr
The button, knobs and levers attached to the seat of proxied central authority and resources in our national government are available to whatever Head-of-State we put into this seat, regardless of the philosophy he will bring to bear (it is up to us to question the philosophy he will use to drive his deployment of proxied powers and resources before we put him into this position of central authority).
Those
who would see our nation as a “kingdom of priests and
a holy nation” will be taking comfort from Stephen Harper’s
frequent use of ‘God Bless Canada” and ‘God Bless our Troops’ and his
corresponding decisions, as in Afghanistan, driven by his ‘universal knowledge
of the good’, while those of us who would see our nation in the natur
* * *
to summarize today’s blog, ... our acculturated notion of absolute motion based on the absolutist notion of ‘independent objects’ forces us to invent absolute behaviour-sourcing mechanisms within the organism to make our notion of ‘independent object’ hang together; i.e. where else could the behaviour of an independent organism come from? (heaven forbid that we think of our individual behaviour as being relative to the hostspace dynamic we are situationally included in, since if we did, we could no longer sustain the notion of our ‘independence’ and ‘free-will’). thus we re-invent ‘the brain’ as a notional ‘central controller’ and ‘absolute originator of ideas on how to behave’ (in order to keep the ‘independent’assumption hanging together, we have to say that ‘consciousness’ emerges from the biophysics and/or biochemistry of ‘the brain’, which makes the brain into a ‘stand-alone information processor’).
anyhow,
all of this bullshit about absolute authoring of ideas and behaviours lurking
in the interior of absolutely ‘independent’ objects is something that carries
over, in our culture, to our ideas on central government, and the newly-elected
head-of-state (some of them, at least) believes that his job is to ‘information
process’ what others are telling him and to be the ‘originator’ of ‘ideas on
how our ‘independent’ nation should behave’ and thus to use the
proxied-to-the-center powers and resources of the nation to operation
the alternative is to go beyond the realm of rational ideas as child-john does and attune to the dynamic of the hostspace one is situationally included in and put one’s (nation’s) behaviour in the service of sustaining dynamical balance and harmony with/in the hostspace dynamic. when three or more participants (individuals, nations) are doing this at the same time, they move under one another’s simultaneous mutual influence, self-orchestrated as a collective by the resonances they are co-evolving. this complex dynamic is not soluble in terms of ‘which individual did what’ and thus, while it is natural behaviour, is too complex to be resolved in terms of the rational/causal model (based as it is on the behaviours of individual objects).
this
balance-and-harmony-sustaining is something we can achieve when we use our
‘feeling experience’, as child-john did, to attune to and sustain balance and
harmony with the collective hostspace dynamic in which we are each uniquely,
situationally included. that is, this
natural self-organization is beyond any individual-resident rational models (as
swarm behaviours also attest). centr
Weblog: April 16, 2006 (Easter Sunday)
Well, today is the day that christians celebrate the resurrection of jesus, ... but there are some signs that this representation is giving way to something a bit, ... ‘more natural’.
it is worth noting that ‘up’ and ‘down’ as in ‘heaven’ and ‘hell’ are absolute directions that mathematicians associate with absolute space; i.e. ‘euclidian space’ (euclidian space is the simplest possible concept of space and cannot accommodate relativity theory even).
meanwhile,
in the buddhist and aboriginal traditions, and in the heresy of giordano bruno
(and
if God is in nature (or if ‘God is nature’, as pantheists represent it) and we too are included in nature, then we are ‘permeated’ with divinity. so the issue is not really a question of the ‘divinity of jesus’ (contested by islam, gnostic beliefs etc.), but instead with the nature of divinity, ... er, ... with the divinity of nature. the ‘revised view’ would be that jesus iconized the divinity in nature and thus it was not necessary for him to be ‘resurrected’ to some remote place beyond nature.
imagine if we ranked people in general in terms of how well their behaviours ‘iconized’ or ‘resonated with’ all that is beautiful and aesthetic and loving in nature. this does not require the aristotelian hierarchy of gradations between the mutually exclusive opposites of ‘best’ (pure good) and ‘worst’ (pure evil). this aesthetic resonance rating is instead something that is spatial-relational (inner-outer). you can’t be aesthetic without being in harmony with the hostspace dynamic you are included in. each of us, from time to time, glows with this aesthetic resonance (aka love?) and, from time to time, is out of joint (in behavioural dissonance) with the hostspace we are situated in.
jesus
would have to be seen, in the heresy of giordano bruno, not as an ‘
but bruno’s views did not prevail while others did, but on what basis? was it on the same basis as the doctors of the church preferred to believe that the earth was the stationary center of the universe?
once one proposes an absolute center to the universe, there is going to be a pecking order, a hierarchy of importance, and those ‘farthest from the center’ are going to be seen as ‘less important’ than those closest to it. obviously, if one believes that God created the universe and put made earthly man and the planet earth the centerpiece of his creation, ... the rest of the celestial entourage is going to shrink in importance in proportion to distance from the center.
western religious beliefs have always had this ‘value hierarchy’ implicit in them. in fact, the original idea in the historical development of monotheism from polytheism, pantheism and mythopoeic thought was that God ‘chose’ man as superior to the rest of creation and that God ‘chose’ a particular people (those that first came up with ‘monotheism’) as the ‘interpreters’ and ‘implementers’ of ‘God’s Will’.
monotheist religious man, then, was charged with making the unfolding of world history a Godly history. ring any bells with current world political goings on?
“This [monotheist] conception of God represents so high a
degree of abstraction that, in reaching it, the Hebrews seem to have left the
realm of mythopoeic thought. The impression that they did so is
strengthened when we observe that the Old Testament is remarkably poor in
mythology of the type we have encountered in
“But thou,
Thus God’s will was felt to be focused on one particular and
concrete group of human beings; it was asserted to have manifested itself at
one decisive moment in their history and ceaselessly and relentlessly to have
urged, rewarded, or chastised the people of its choice. For in Sinai, God
had said, “Ye shall be unto me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation”
(Exod. 19:6)
In a poignant myth, this Hebrew myth of a chosen people, of
a divine promise made, of a terrifying moral burden imposed --- a prelude to
the later myth of the Kingdom of God, that more remote and more spiritual
‘promised land’ For in the myth of the chosen people the ineffable
majesty of God and the worthlessness of man are correlated in a dramatic
situation that is to unfold in time and is moving toward a future where the
distant yet related parallels of human and divine existence are to meet in
infinity.
Not cosmic phenomena, but history itself, had here become
pregnant with meaning; history had become a revelation of the dynamic will of
God. ... Man, according to Hebrew thought, was the interpreter and the
servant of God; he was even honored with the task of bringing about the re
now, is not hard to envisage here, the radical difference in behaviour that is going to be induced by a jewish, christian or islamic believer whose belief orients to this ‘i am God’s judge-on-earth and ‘policeman-on-earth’ to make sure that the history of the world plays out the way that God would want it to, ... and the pantheist (bruno, buddhists, aboriginals) who believe that the divinity is in nature and thus that the person who is most deeply attuned to the harmonies in nature is most in touch with the divine (‘closest to Go’). this latter behavioural orientation would have the individual, rather than ‘judging-and-imposing-good-[God-Willed]behaviour, seek to attune to and bring out the harmonies in even the ‘evil ones’, as this excerpt from the Kaienerokowa (Great Peace of the six Iroquois Nations) articulates;
"You shall be a good person, and, you shall be kind to all of
the people, not differentiating among them, the people who are wealthy, and the
poor ones, and the good natured ones, and the evil ones who sin readily; all of
them you shall treat kindly and you shall not differentiate among them. As to
your own fireside, never consider only yourself, you must always remember them,
the old people, and the younger people, and the children, and those still in
the earth, yet unborn, and always you will take into account everyone's
well-being, that of the on-going families, so that they may continue to
survive, your grandchildren."
this way, the way of bruno and other pantheist believers is the way of inductive transformation of social behaviour, not the way of ‘sitting in for God’ and imposing what one personally interprets to be ‘God’s Will’ on the rest of creation. it is not the way of ‘pacifism’ but can associate with whatever level of aggressive action is needed IN ORDER TO RESTORE SPATIAL-RELATIONAL HARMONY during such times as the hostspace dynamic has become disjointed, unstable, dissonant. the mother bear may kill you if you disrupt the aesthetic of her romp with her cubs but she doesn’t need to ‘judge you’ nor analytically indict you in a 36 page legal document.
as the jesuit priest george maloney writes in Mysticism and the New Age in speaking of the emergence of a ‘new age’ the relationship between God and man is being reconceived in terms of creation being ‘ongoing’ (as in pantheism, where ‘nature’, meaning the ‘evolutionary dynamic’ is ‘sacred’, the ‘Great Mystery’);
“Creation is reconceived by Teilhard out of God's revelation
in the light of evolution as an unfinished process. Salvation history and
creation history go together. This means that redemption and salvation take
place only in our role as co-creators with God in a world that is continuously
becoming as we human beings respond in loving obedience to co-create according
to God's Logos, His Divine Word in whom all things come into being.
A new global spiritu
now, i am not a religious person (in the sense of subscribing to religious doctrines etc.) but one has to acknowledge that this latter view of the man’s relationship with God is far from being in the linear chain-of-command, charged with judging what God deems to be the correct thing to do and making sure that that is what happens. no, ... the latter view is one that calls for attunement to the ‘continuing unfolding’ which is very much like aboriginal and buddhist pantheism and the pantheist heresy of bruno.
so, on this remembrance of jesus’ ‘resurrection’, the very notion of which depends upon the Aristotelian (logic of mutual exclusion) concepts of ‘up’ versus ‘down’. what if jesus were included in God as in nature? ... as the gnostics interpreted it? then ‘God’ is not an ‘object’ but an ‘influence’, ... the ‘Great Mystery’ of the ongoing creation that, in its balance-and-harmony-sustaining-seeking quest, gives rise to endless innovative beauty.
as Nietzsche said; “I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.”, implying that grammar employs ‘nouns’ and nouns ‘name objects’; e.g. making the whorling influence in atmospheric hostspace (hurricane) into an object (‘Katrina’) and thenceforth speaking of it as if it as asserting ‘causal’ agent in-its-own-right.
when
we conceptu
“For in the myth of the chosen people the ineffable majesty
of God and the worthlessness of man are correlated in a dramatic situation that
is to unfold in time and is moving toward a future where the distant yet
related parallels of human and divine existence are to meet in infinity.”
[Armageddon]
this error in ‘grammar’ or, in other words, our poor choice for a geometry of space ‘could cost us’, ... to put it mildly.
giordano bruno had a better idea as did teilhard de chardin and george maloney. nevertheless, the prevalent ‘force’ in today’s world comes from those who are ‘interpreting God’s will’ in the constructing of world history and who feel obliged to impose God’s will on the lower forms of creation, ... including unrepentant heretics such as giordano bruno and yours truly.
Weblog: April 14, 2006
Today is a day selected for the remembrance of the suffering and death of jesus through his commitment to transforming the social order. though there is agreement amongst the three western religions that jesus lived, islamic belief suggests that while jesus was miraculously born of a virgin, mary, that he himself was not ‘divine’ (a blasphemous idea in islamic belief) but that he was deliberately given life in the same manner that god deliberately gave adam life. more interesting still in the different views of jesus is that of jesus as a buddhist ‘bodhisattva’;
“According to the Sata-sáhasriká Prajñapáramitá, a bodhisattva desires Enlightenment first for
all beings and not for himself. He is consumed with grief on account of the
sufferings of others, and does not care for his own happiness. He desires the
good and welfare of the world.”
how different is this from the self-center based orientation of christian enlightenment-seeking?
and by the way, what has this got to do with the writings on this web-page that reference foundational ideas in mathematics and physics?
the difference between east and west in philosophy, in the foundational means by which we represent the world in our minds, ties back to these religious differences. giordano bruno was burnt at the stake for heresies in 1600 which were ‘mathematical’ in the sense that they interpreted ‘infinity’ in a different way, and ‘infinity’ is very much tied together with the theistic foundations of religious belief.
for example, the ‘causal model’ which continues to be the default in today’s popular scientific manner of thinking is consistent with a certain view of god in relation to the world since ‘god’ is seen to be the ultimate sourcing force, the force that ‘makes the universe go’. it is ‘heresy’ to conceive of the ‘divinity’, the divine source of the world dynamic, in the ‘mundane’ terms of being immanent in nature, though that is indeed what bruno reasoned to be the case with a compelling reasoning that has been supported in the modern era by relativity and quantum theory;
“For the Catholic orthodoxy based on Aristotelian and
Thomistic metaphysics, God is first cause, immovable motor and absolute
perfection. Since Bruno conceived God as immanent in the universe and identical
to it, Bruno was accused of pantheism and animism. God was considered not as
the creator of the universe, but as the world itself.” (Marcos Cesar Danhoni Neves in De Imenso,
De Minimo and De Infinito: Giordano
Bruno’s Micro and Infinite Universe and the “A-centric Labyrinth” of
Modern Cosmology and its Philosophical Constraints in Apeiron,
Vol. 8, No. 1, January 2001, at http://redshift.vif.com/JournalFiles/V08N1/V08N1DAN.PDF
)
bruno’s view (consistent with relativity and quantum theory) of the natural universe as ‘self-organizing’, where the ‘divinity’ is immanent rather than external and ‘supra-natural’ obsoletizes the ‘causal model’ (wherein behaviour is seen as being constructed from ‘independent’ ‘objects’ with ‘independent behaviours that push out from their self-centers driven by an ‘inner purpose’) makes an immense difference to how one sees oneself in relation to the otherness of the world.
in bruno’s view and in the buddhist view, there is no such thing as ‘independence’. individual beings are unique and authentic but they are no more ‘independent’ of the world-hostspace in which they are uniquely, inclusionally situated, than is the hurricane from its atmospheric flow-space. and there is a very good reason for individuals to think of others before oneself and for those that can’t see any connection between mathematics and issues of soul, spirit, ethics and divinity, ... the mathematics that show SPATIAL-RELATIONAL-INTERDEPENDENCE would suggest otherwise.
for
example, when we experience inclusion within a crowd dynamic or a traffic
dynamic, we are aware that these collective dynamics have the
spatial-relational qu
this curious fact is shown by nonlinear mathematics and physics. it is responsible for the fact that the wildgeese can fly farther and faster for 20% less expenditure of energy than they could ever do in solo mode. it goes like this;
as
we stir action amongst ourselves, we transform the spatial relationships that
accommodate the actu
it thus makes mathematical and physical sense to employ the bodhisattva ethic, and we have no need for inventing such notions as ‘altruism’, a corrective device that ‘fixes’ the unnatural abstraction of the assumption of ‘independence’ of the individual. that is, by assuming we are all interdependent (mitakuye oyasin) it makes sense to attune to our collective dynamic and seek to sustain resonances between one another and the collective behaviour. to shut down our attunement to the collective dynamic (the common hostspace dynamic) we are included in and seek to optimize our individual assertive objectives on our own is not only unnatural but highly dysfunctional.
but it is what we continue to do and it is indeed ‘unnatural’ because it is supra-natural and comes with the causal model of the universe wherein individual species and individual men were taken to be ‘independent’ entities created and implanted into ‘nature’, a containing garden or operating theatre for man, by GOD.
the notion of ‘independence’ and even of ‘objects’ (i.e. of ‘independent objects’) is mathematical and physics based, and that was giordano bruno’s point in defending his heresy; i.e. he maintained that the ‘doctors of the church’ had pushed their own limited mathematical and physical principles into the articulated belief system of the church (the earth-centric view being one case in point). history shows that the church had indeed interpreted the scriptures using mathematical-astronomical assumptions, such as the immobility of the earth at the center of the universe and that there was a great reluctance to allow changes in mathematical and physical concepts that would require alterations to the articulations of scriptural interpretation that had used them in a foundational way.
this
binding together of science and religion (in religious doctrine) by way of a
common aristotelian philosophical foundation is
‘infinity’ is a mathematical concept that underpins the notion of ‘independence’ and it was the basis for bruno’s different notion of divinity, as already mentioned. in our modern western thinking, we retain a consistency with the thinking of the church in the year 1600 and before (the church embraced and continues to embrace aristotelian mathematical and physical models). that is, we regard ‘space’ as absolute and ‘objects’ as absolute entities within this absolute (euclidian) space. this ‘absoluteness’ implies a particular mathematical form of infinity, a ‘countable infinity’ wherein we can divide things up (a line down into segments, or solids down into atoms) so that it will take an infinity of elemental line segments or atoms to build back and reconstruct the immenseness of the universe we live in.
this is not the only way of conceiving infinity and it was not bruno’s way of conceiving it. bruno’s idea was that ‘smallness’ would not be ‘smallness’ out of the relative context of the ‘vastness’ within which it is ‘smallness’. for example, we speak of ‘continents’ as if they are real things (independent objects) but they are in fact ‘forms’ that our minds produce because we cannot see through the ocean waters and thus we see forms that are produced by the intersection of the ocean surface and the topography of the lithosphere. their existence is therefore NOT ‘absolute’, nor ‘independent’ and if the ocean level were to continue to rise, there would at some point be only one continent, ‘everest’ and it would be a lone island, perhaps one hundred meters in diameter. it would be a tiny island in a vast ocean and its tinyness would be a REFLECTION of the vastness of the oceanic hostspace in which it was included.
mathematically
and physically and in terms of ‘divinity’ (the ultimate sourcing of our
dynamical world), the maximum can be seen in the minimum, and this kind of
relative opposition, known to mathematicians and philosophers of bruno’s era as
‘coincidentia oppositorum’ provided a different way of handling ‘infinity’,
that has been reinforced as more re
“Bruno’s idea of the Universe comes from the Nicholas de
Cusa’s hermetism: “Unde erit machina mundi quasi habens ubique centrum et
nullibi circumferentiam” [“The world’s machine has its center in the all and
its circumference nowhere”] (Cusa, Bk. II, Ch. XII, 1942:134). . . . “Bruno writes about “an infinite
sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere” (Bruno,
Bk. II Ch. IX, 1980:493). On the other hand, in Bruno’s discourse, the infinity
of the Universe and divine infinity are linked, albeit differentiated. “Deum
esse infinitum in infinito, ubique in omnibus, non supra, non extra, sed
praesentissimum” [God is infinite in infinity, everywhere in everything,
neither above nor beyond, but absolutely present] (Bruno, Bk. VIII Ch. X,
1980:804). Divine unity and cosmic immensity are the basis of Bruno’s doctrine
on infinity.”
the interpretation of ‘the individual’ in this philosophy differs radically from the aristotelian interpretation of ‘the individual’ as an independent object/organism whose behaviour is internally sourced from its notional ‘self-center’ driven by its notional ‘inner purpose’. in bruno’s philosophy, the individual is a reflection of the hostspace it is situationally included in.
how would this make a difference in today’s world if bruno’s heresy had succeeded? a few examples follow;
the
self-image of an individual nation and/or person;
the US, for example (an example which can be applied to all nation-states), rather than seeing itself as an ‘independent entity’ with ‘independent behaviour’ that is the full and sole source of ‘its’ assertive accomplishments, these being the product of its pushing out from ‘its own’ self-center driven by its ‘inner purpose’, ... the US would instead see the world behavioural dynamic as a dynamical one-ness that is in a natural ‘primacy’ and would see itself as ‘included’ in the world dynamic in the manner that a hurricane is included within the atmospheric space dynamic; i.e. the dynamical behaviour of the US is nonlocally sourced and a-centric in the manner that the whorl from pulling the plug out of the filled bathtub is inferred by the nonlocal currents in the common including fluid hostspace. it is by the aristotelian logic of mutual exclusion that we mentally ‘excise’ the whorl, give it a name and consider it to have an ‘independent existence’ and an ‘independent behaviour’ (as with named hurricanes) that we delusionally interpret its behaviour as being sourced from its ‘self-center’ and guided by some ‘inner purpose’ of its own, as if the common hostspace dynamic it is included in is a ‘secondary’ phenomena that we can safely ignore as we shift our pursuit of understanding to this ‘object-i-fiction’.
the
same applies at the level of an individual person. we write our resumés as if our assertive
accomplishments ‘speak for themselves’ i.e. as if our behaviour is independent
and fully internally sourced. but our
real-life experience is that individuals with ‘similar assertive potentials’
achieve very differently depending upon how they are situationally included in
the common hostspace dynamic. in spite
of what the resumé says, we know from experience that the actu
bruno’s treatment of infinity, however, leads to the same point as was often made by the late evolutionary biologist stephen jay gould, that one cannot consider ‘hitting’ in its own right (as an independent behaviour); i.e. hitting has no meaning out of the context of ‘fielding’ (asserting has no meaning out of the context of spatial-relational accommodating).
in
bruno’s philosophy, the bodhisattva ethic emerges naturally since if we relax
our private agendas and put our movements in the service of cultivating a
harmonious community dynamic; i.e. by cultivating a highly accommodating
spatial-relational backpressure (which corresponds with inner-outer ‘resonance’
as in the wildgeese example), each and every one of us benefits in terms of the
actu
the
self-centered view of ‘one’s borders’
in bruno’s philosophy, there is no tangible and discrete border between the individual entity and the hostspace it is included in. in our aristotelian philosophy, however, we simply ‘make up some imaginary lines and surfaces’ and decree (in conjunction with ‘naming’ the object) an absolute separation necessary to fit with our notion of the ‘independence’ of the entity.
as we know from the histories of nations, the imaginary line boundaries can change and they are only sustainable by everyone agreeing to believe in them (often through force and coercion), and if that belief in them stops, or if they are challenged by a superior force, then they dissolve since they ‘never really existed’ in the first place (many north american natives continue to refuse to agree to believing in them);
WE DIDN'T CROSS THE BORDER: THE BORDER CROSSED
US!
What are borders? What is the
when
we share a common space as we do, the outside of one property is the inside of
a neighbouring property; i.e. the notion of ‘property’ is a western
ARISTOTELIAN PHILOSOPHY based abstraction.
it stems from ‘one way of handling ‘infinity’’. borders are abstraction (imaginary lines and
surfaces) whose pseudo-re
to
speak self-centeredly (one-sidedly) of
‘our borders’ as mentioned in my april 10th blog (that the [US]
congress has passed a law de
this
kind of aristotelian philosophy-based unilater
the
rising ‘have’ versus ‘have-not’ split
based on our continuing rejection of the ‘infinity’ of giordano bruno’s philosophy wherein the reflection of the vastness is in the tiny and vice versa, ... and the continuing embrace of the aristotelian ‘infinity’ wherein the tiny parts are independent and there is a countable infinity of them needed to reconstruct the universe, ... we continue to believe, religiously, in the notion that we can optimize our world dynamic by optimizing the behaviours of the independent parts; i.e. optimizing the behaviours of individual persons and optimizing the behaviour of individual corporations and optimizing the behaviour of individual nation-states.
this
is the antithesis of the bodhisattva ethic and the wildgeese ethic, and our own
‘friendly freeway-traffic-driving ethic’, all of those ethics understanding
that by the way we behave RELATIVE to one another (as we move under one
another’s simultaneous mutual influence), we set up the accommodating qu
how is it that we continue to cling so ‘religiously’ to our belief in such destructive insanity?
we might also ask; how is it we can watch the nonlocal, a-centric flow of the weather map, until our eye is attracted by the birth of a ‘whorl’ within the flow, ... and then proceed to ‘objectify’ the whorl, giving it a name, and then speaking of it as if it were an ‘independent entity’ with ‘its own’ behaviour; e.g. ‘hurricane katrina is now heading north by northwest and she promises to wreak a great deal of destruction on the alabama, mississipi and louisana gulf coasts’.
at
what point did ‘katrina’ gain her independence from the hostspace dynamic in
which she ‘was’ included? at what point
did the
they
never did! it was simply a case of
people agreeing to talk about them as if they had become independent
entities. on the basis of the
aristotelian philosophy then, we build entire pseudo-re
and
that may help to explain why we continue to optimize the assertive behaviour of
abstractions; i.e. ‘independent individuals’ (persons, corporations, nations)
as unre
* * *
well
it’s good friday and we continue to remember the suffering of jesus, though as
‘independent beings’ and only rarely in the bodhisattva manner; “a bodhisattva desires
Enlightenment first for all beings and not for himself. He is consumed with
grief on account of the sufferings of others, and does not care for his own
happiness. He desires the good and welfare of the world.”
what a difference, different ways of reconciling ‘infinity’ make!
good
friday means others things to people too.
my friend who is a ‘public employee’ is not being paid for the week off
she gets over the ‘easter holiday’ though she is a single parent living in a
small basement suite, below ‘the poverty line’ and near-to-bankruptcy who
struggles to stay off welfare and to give her child what she feels is important
to him in this formative stage of his life.
she is not being paid for ‘good friday’ and the rest of her ‘easter
break’ because, in order to optimize the performance of the independent
(privatized) public corporations, these corporations have sought to commoditize
their ‘non-professional’ labour resources (she has a B.Sc degree, a teaching
certificate from the university of quebec (not v
the efficiencies gained by ‘independent’ corporations (privatization of government agencies is a popular local trend) are something that governments with ‘limited budgets’ (many politicians being ‘business people’) are very attracted to, and the commoditization of labour, first at the non-professional level and then at the professional level are ongoing world-wide trends (viz. the recent student riots in france where legislation was passed to allow employers to fire any employee under 26 yrs of age within two years of his employment, without having to give any reason/justification).
we
live in a world where the re
people
like my C.U.P.E contract-employed single-parent friend who has little choice
but to accept the imposed status of ‘workplace commodity’ are having to
interface with an increasingly stern and mechanical social administration in
lieu of an empathic supportive community.
the community that ‘used to be’ has proxied off its powers and resources
formerly used for helping one another out, to the central governing authority
which is turning towards strictly logical machinery for responding to its ‘have
nots’. the philosophy is to invest most
heavily in the ‘most productive’ elements within our society so as to create
great abundance that will ‘trickle down’ to the ‘have-nots’. of course, the trickle-down plumbing and the
theory of ‘the more performant and less performant’ as a whole is not performing
exactly according to plan. as the
ongoing ‘glob
“As great wealth has accumulated at the top, the rest of
society has not been benefiting proportionally. In 1960 the gap between
the top 20% and the bottom 20% was thirty-fold. Now it is seventy-five
fold. Thirty years ago the average annual compensation of the top 100
chief executives in the country was 30 times the pay of the average
worker. Today it is 1000 times the pay of the average worker.
A recent article in The Financial Times reports on a study by the American
economist Robert J. Gordon, who finds “little long-term change in workers’
share of
the debacle that is continuing to unfold from the continuing embrace of aristotelian philosophy is not confined to the insides of our ‘independent’ nation-states’. while we used to use our military in support of helping others during periods of unrest to help open up some ‘safe-space’ for them to ‘get themselves back on their feet’ (to restore local dynamical balance and community harmony), we are busy instead exploiting ‘failed states’ to export this same system that is running out-of-control for ourselves. those who are aggressively resisting the exporting of our culture are lumped together under the labels ‘terrorist’ or ‘insurgents’.
last week canadian forces proudly killed thirty-two of ‘them’ (termed murderers and scumbags by the canadian military’s chief of staff rick hillier) in afghanistan, the residue of the insurgent forces disappearing into the community, making the imaginary line that separates ‘us’ (the good foreign powers and the good afghanis) from ‘them’ (the bad afghanis) very blurry indeed as one might expect with imaginary line boundaries. meanwhile, this fact that the dividing boundary line between ‘us’ and ‘them’ could actually be shifting due to our manner of engaging with ‘them’ does not seem to occur to the military whose job has historical tradition has been “not to question why, but to do or die’, and which, like a pointer dog, can be trained to distinguish between ‘black’ and ‘white’ and to go after the current version of ‘black’ with a vengeance (this is not to demean the courage and sacrifice of individual soldiers but to acknowledge the innately POLITICAL design of military missions);
“Col Ian Hope, the commander in charge of Canadian forces in
if the canadian military is trusted by the locals, why do the locals not inform on who in their community is participating in the insurgency, by providing their sons to the ‘insurgency’ and/or by the concealed harbouring of ‘insurgents’?
bruno’s philosophy would have an answer for this that our western aristotelian philosophy lacks. it is that there is no line that can be drawn between ‘black’ and ‘white’ since ‘white’ includes within it the reflection of black (and would be meaningless without it) and ‘black’ includes within it a reflection of ‘white’ (and would be meaningless without it). the minimum IS the maximum and there are no ‘straight lines’ in nature, but there are ‘cycles’ and ‘circles’ and when the radius of the circle approaches infinity, the length of a circumferential line is at a maximum at the same time as the curvature is at a minimum.
if this reasoning seems abstract and hard to ‘make sense of’, ... we might ask ourselves whether it is then easier to buy into the aristotelian reasoning that is built into our notion of the ‘independence’ of entities wherein space is purported to be an absolutely empty container that serves as a passive operating theatre for a collective of ‘independent’ ‘objects’ whose temporal-sequential actions, transactions and interactions determine ‘the world as we know it’; i.e. ‘the world of our experience’.
in any case, the notion of ‘independence’ of objects/organisms is foundational to our notion that optimizing the performance of our individual selves and our individual corporations and our individual nation-states is consistent with respect for the model established by jesus; i.e. our optimizing our independent selves first, a procedure wherein we ‘superior performers’ undertake (with ‘more performant’ others like ourselves) to generate such abundance as will provide trickle-down charity to those ‘less performant’ ‘beneath us’.
on
the other hand, we could take a leaf from bruno’s philosophy that acknowledges
the accommodative qu
only
in the game of hockey do we give points (assists) for setting up the
accommodative conditions for our fellows to score. in the mainstream of our western re
Weblog: April 10, 2006
Rarely have i seen such a great example of the chronic ‘foundational’ split in views that the world is currently experiencing as on the television news last night as evan solomon (CBC) interviewed tom tancredo (colorado republican) on tancredo’s (and others) proposal to erect fences along the US-mexican and US-canadian borders to ‘regain control of the borders’ and stop illegal immigration.
evan’s line of questioning was; ‘is this the way we want to evolve our neighbourly relationship’ while tom’s point was; ‘we do not want the legal flow of people across our boundaries to be impeded, we simply want to deal with the illegal flow, to regain control of our borders’, commenting that ‘good fences make good neighbours’.
the
same sort of difference in view had previously been seen in comments coming
from mexican president vicente fox last december, after tancredo’s efforts to
get a bill passed to build security fences along the
if we leave aside political allegiances
and examine this difference in views from a ‘systems’ perspective, we are once
again returned to the basic geometry of ‘adult-john’ who claims to be able to
‘control his behaviour’ (by keeping his jacket on in spite of the warmth of a
spring day) and ‘child-john’ who simply responds to his inner-outer
balance-seeking and gets naked and wet.
when we are asleep or in a coma, there is none of the brainwave activity associated with logical problem-solving yet our body continues to sustain inner-outer balances in regard to thermal energy flow, pressure balancing, oxygen and CO2 concentration balancing etc. just as the hurricane forms out of the need to balance thermal energy distribution (becoming the ‘robin hood’ balancing agent that steals from thermal energy rich equatorial regions and gives to thermal energy poor polar regions), so it is with our selves when we are not ‘calculating’.
so what exactly is the ‘anatomy’ of this shift from ‘balance-seeking’ (as in nature) to ‘calculating’?
to be in balance-seeking mode is to be ‘in the moment’, letting one’s behaviours serve the sustaining of inner-outer (inhabitant-habitat, individual-hostspace) harmony.
when one is in this condition, one is non-judgemental and there is no sense therefore that anything is wrong, ... things ‘just are as they are’ and there is no sense that ‘there is a problem that has to be fixed.’ this is the ‘child-john’ condition.
the ‘adult-john’ condition is ‘analytical’ and ‘analytics’ are about ‘what things do’, the behaviour of ‘independent objects’ that relate to other ‘independent objects’ by temporal sequential actions/transactions/interactions.
analytics;
the conscious-state object-identifying that mentally splits ‘inner’ from
‘outer’ (individual behaviour from hostspace behaviour)
in our ‘awake state’ where our logical calculating is done, we have the faculties of vision and tactility that allow us to ‘grasp’ and ‘identify’ the ‘objects’ out there. as psychological research has shown (vygotsky et al), this process of ‘self-other object identity determination’ is two-sided and three-phased; i.e. we determine the identity of objects in the following three phases, ‘the object for me’ (what it means to me as in ‘i want my bottle’), ‘the object for you’ (what meaning it has for you when i refer to it, such as when i reach for my bottle and find that you fetch it for me), and, ‘the object in itself’, when we begin to abstract the object as ‘a thing in its own right’ and refer to it by an object by name as if i, you , we and everyone have the same understanding of ‘what it is’.
that the developing of ‘identity’ for objects is at the same time developing ‘my own identity’ is apparent. for example, in the case of gender, species, race, culture etc. related i-thou relationships. if a person is in the presence of naked women and spontaneously desires to know where one of the women gets her hair done, we can assume that ‘the person’ asking the question is a woman. thus a woman’s identity forms together with the identity of the objects that she is identifying. we identify objects relative to ourselves, and thus the identity of a man whose primary interest in that same situation was with finding the name of someone’s coiffeur, would at the same time by part of his own ‘identity’.
when we talk about objects on the basis of ‘what they do’ as if we all ‘grasp’ what they are, we are leaving out the fact that ‘self-other’ object identities are mutually-shaping. we can describe ‘a woman-object’ in any amount of detail as if the ‘identity’ of a woman is something that exists in its own right (objectively) but this will say nothing about how my own identity (e.g. as a man rather than another woman) is ‘entangled’ with the identity of the woman-object.
since this kind of object-identity based analytics is unavailable to the ‘sleeping’ individual, the individual’s sustaining of inner-outer dynamical balancing (harmony/resonance) is not dependent upon it, though scientific observers looking into the body from the outside will objectify and analyze it and DESCRIBE its behaviour in a ‘what identified-object-things-do’ basis. and so it is with our description of the hurricane as an identified object, yet the hurricane is not an object. if i say ‘take cover, the hurricane is coming’ my identity is tied up with that of the hurricane, but at the same time, there are others who the hurricane is moving away from for which this statement makes no sense.
the point is that ‘objectification’ is a device for simplifying the description of our complex spatial-relational hostspace that is ‘not real’, but as wittgenstein and other philosophers have noted, is a kind of object and logic based ‘grid’ that we construct that emulates the RELATIVE dynamics of nature.
returning to child-john (whose behaviour issues forth from his inner-outer balance-seeking) and adult-john (who bases his behaviour on his ‘grasping’ of object-identities and his logical calculations), by what methodology is adult-john thinking of his inner-outer thermal imbalance? it is known as ‘single-loop learning’ and is described by the SIDA sequence; sense, interpret, decide, act. this replaces inner-outer relative dynamics with dynamics based on the independent behaviour of objects. thus adult-john asks;
- the sensing: - how does my current local condition; e.g. surface temperature compare with my desired local condition; e.g. desired temperature?
- the interpretation: - the desired versus actual temperature difference is too great. there is a ‘problem’.
- the decision: - i must take action to close the gap between my desired and actual temperature
- the action: - i will build a hermetically sealed box around myself and invent ‘air conditioning’ to ‘fix the problem’.
- the single loop learning: - i will return to step one and continue my temporal-sequential cycling through this SIDA loop to identify and fix problems.
in this manner, adult-john can compensate for the conflict between his claim that he is in charge of his own behaviour, as he demonstrates by not taking his jacket off, and the rising heat of his body-behaviour, a body-behaviour that is not ‘under his control’ because it is NOT independent of the spatial-relational hostspace dynamic he is included in.
instead
of accepting the natural re
of course, this artificial immediate habitat is necessarily ‘inclusionally nesting’ within nature so that at some point logical-behaviour-versus-natural-behaviour conflict that he has set up between himself and his habitat (an interdependence that is beyond his control) has in no way ‘gone away’ but is simply pushed out beyond his newly established interface, ... in the same manner that the colonial power, in establishing a puppet government in a colonized nation-state, pushes the interface between its own (the colonial power’s) control over behaviour, versus the local colony’s inner-outer balance-seeking, ... to a new location somewhere between the puppet government and the people of the region and their interdependent local relationship with the land and one another.
of course, adult-john and the colonial power could, alternatively, allow their own identity to ‘flex’ and be mutually shaped by the ‘objective world’ out there (to accept subject-object, inhabitant-habitat relativity), but given that they are insisting on their independence as individuals with free will whose independent behaviours push out from their self-centers driven by their (often purportedly divinely guided) inner-purpose (their habitat-independent identity), they may psychologically lack the flexibility to enter into a mutual inner-outer identity coevolution.
thus does this problem of ‘identity’ (the ‘self-other’, ‘inhabitant-habitat’ split) play itself out, by reaching the third psychological phase of ‘identity of the object in-itself’ that ‘forgets’ that identities are mutually shaped, the meaning we put into the identity of objects ‘out there’ at the same time giving meaning to our own identity.
we are all capable of operating in balance-seeking mode, as our body knows how to do even when we are asleep, but we have come to prefer the analytical approach of our ‘conscious’ mode with its ‘grasp of things’ (objects) that is both ‘visual’ and ‘tactile’, where we develop a view of the world based on ‘objects’ and their ‘identities’ and represent ourselves to ourselves as ‘independent objects’ with ‘independent object behaviours that push out from the center of ourselves driven by our ‘inner purpose’.
within
this synthetic re
adult-john first demonstrates what he calls his ‘control over his own behaviour’ by keeping his jacket on, on a warm summers day. his analtyical single loop learning then tells him that there is a gap between his desired state and his actual state (he is hot) and he sees this as a problem that he must fix; i.e. though he is resisting his balance-seeking behavioural intuitions by applying his logical control over his object-self behaviour, ... rather than him flexing as the child-john spontaneously does, he identifes the problem as being the condition of the habitat and proceeds, holding his own behaviour constant, to fix the problem of the faulty environment by redesigning it as a hermetically sealed box with an air conditioning unit in it.
he thus uses the technology of his analytical sciences to go to war against, and ‘tame’ the environment that he sees himself ‘contained in’, NOT like the hurricane-in-the-hostspace of the atmospher, but in the manner of an absolute independent object within an absolute euclidian space.
this delusional approach he applies, not only at the level of the individual self, but also at the level of the ‘nation-state self’, ... and this is the origin of plan to ‘wall in’ the US by erecting 15 foot, razor wire fences along the US-Canada and US-Mexico borders.
thus
the incredulity gap between evan solomon (CBC journ
also, yesterday, was the following relevant verse by Osho passed to me by a friend, on the issue of our capacity to put ourselves in there service of inner-outer balancing rather than interpreting the negative difference between our desired state and our actual state in terms of ‘something wrong with the environment’ and proceeding to re-engineer our environment to resolve the difference;
On War
by Osho, from "Zen: The Path of Paradox, vol II"
A man of peace is not a pacifist, a man of peace is simply a
pool of silence.
He pulsates a new kind of energy into the world, he sings a
new kind of song.
He lives in a totally new way, his very way of life is that
of grace, that of prayer, that of compassion.
Whomever he touches, he creates more love-energy.
The man of peace is creative.
He is not against war, because to be against any thing is to
be at war.
He is not against war, he simply understands why war exists.
And out of that understanding he becomes peaceful.
Only when there are many people who are pools of peace,
silence, and understanding, will war disappear.
Weblog: April 8, 2006
Today’s
NY Times report on investigation into the leaking of the identity of a CIA
operative, Valerie Plame, to undermine her husband’s public criticism of the
Iraq war is entitled ‘Leak-Hating President (Bush) as Leaker-in-Chief’. this is yet another reminder that all is not
as it appears to be ‘on the surface’ and that our western cultural orientation
to ‘the ends justifies the means’ is
we
euro-americans pretend that ‘what we see’ is the re
clearly,
we put the child-john and the adult john into conflict with themselves on the
basis of which re
the
one is a re
it is no surprise that the aboriginal peoples (the ‘in dios’ people who regarded themselves as ‘included’ in the sacred hostspace of the land), spoke of the ‘forked tongue’ of the white presidents.
really,
when you come to reflect on it, how can anyone regard ‘what is visible’ as ‘re
as
western logic would have it, of course, we are each ‘independent’ individuals
and thus our behaviour is fully and solely internally sourced. that’s what adult-john claims and he can
prove it by pretending that his inner-outer dynamical re
well,
if we are ‘independent’ and fully in control of, and responsible for our own
behaviour, then that must mean that the imposing, by threat of massive military
violence, of this visible facade of western-style politically correct
behaviour, has nothing to do with the behaviour of the afghani teenager; i.e.
we can then regard ‘re
so,
... the western way is to treat ‘visible behaviour’, minus feelings of inner
tension, as re
the
visual objects and their behaviours are, as erwin schroedinger suggests,
‘schaumkommen’, ... mere ‘appearances’ that obscure the ‘real stuff’ of our
evolutionary dynamics i.e. inner-outer balance-seeking resonances. that is, visual objects are ‘forms’ in the
evolutionary flow, in the manner that hurricanes are forms in the evolutionary
flow-dynamic of atmospheric space. we
can objectify them, name-label them and speak of THEM as ‘having behaviours’
(‘independent’ behaviours even), but that is a simplification of convenience
since the real-stuff is invisible because it purely inner-outer
spatial-relational. the ‘real stuff’ is
what we ‘feel’ but cannot see, like the child-john inside of the
behaviour-controlling adult-john, that attunes to his inner-outer coupled
dynamical re
visual perception is the faculty by which these dynamical-flow-forms come to our awareness, but as poincaré says, citing the example of how we use apples or tartes to illustrate fractions, ... we are not obliged to anchor our understanding of relationships to mental models that depend upon ‘objects’. our use of ‘objects’ is a convenience but in no way a necessity, and it is a convenience that can severely constrain understanding. ‘objects’ with their persisting identity are an absolute abstraction that, as poincaré notes, ‘would be utterly meaningless to a being living in a world in which there are only fluids.” (e.g. to a person living in a world wherein the gravitational field-flow transcended any dependence on ‘material objects’, these being simply local regions of complex concentration of energy’).
let’s
be real, here. ‘seeing without feeling’,
enabled by our mental imposing of ‘objects’ into the dynamics of our
experience, splits us off from the basic re
there
is also the invisible inner-outer spatial-relational potentials that are
accessible to us through ‘feeling’, thus, what is ‘visible’ is simply the
tangible component of our complex holodynamical experience. we are all capable
of feeling the inner-outer tensions within a social hostspace and thus we are
aware of a re
going
back to the first of poincaré’s arguments in the text box above, if we ‘let
visual perception FLOAT’ (without anchoring it as we usually do to the
center-driven asserting of objects) then
it is able to support and complement our felt experience within a complex holodynamical
experience. where we are screwing up
is, not only in anchoring the meaning that is coming to us from visual
perception, to an abstract ‘object’ base, but in coming to believe that this
visible re
in nature, as each grain is added to the pile, individual grains reach out to cling to their neighbours and to buffer the jolts that are incident on their neighbours. as the pile builds, this inner-outer dynamical balancing ‘networks’ until the tensions build so high that the smallest of incidents may unleash the accrued energies stored in the tensions in an avalanche of great violence. social tensions are also transpersonal and it is not easy for aboriginals to go against the imposed governance of the colonial powers, nor german citizens to go against the imposed governance of hitler’s nazis. enforcing moral and ethical rules based on the visible behaviour of the individual is thus a powerful means of ‘keeping the lid on’ and perpetuating a politically correct surficial behaviour at the expense of huge invisible-but-felt transpersonal tensions. those tensions, like the inner outer thermal balancing tensions on the warm spring day, cannot be controlled. without expansion joints as buffers, the concrete road by pushing against itself will implode and crumble.
the
myth of the ‘independent individual’ is only sustained by regarding what we
visibly perceive, minus our feeling experience of the invisible potentials
beneath, as ‘re
this
forked-tongue hypocrisy whereby those that cultivate the transpersonal webs of
oppressive high voltage tension insist on firm enforcement of moral and ethical
principles applied to the individual, stems from ‘seeing without feeling’, from
accepting visually perceivable behaviour as ‘re
our
western culture’s ‘technological advancement’, which does not appear to have
the relevant ‘wisdom’ of utilization bundled in with it, orients to
‘making visible things happen’ without regard to the invisible internal
tensions that are being induced. visual
perception is the assessment tool we use in constructing a ‘LOGICAL means to an
end’ in ignore-ance of transformative impact on inner-outer spatial-relational
dynamical balancing. going to war to ‘forcibly make peace
happen’ is perhaps the ultimate in our displacing of felt experience by our
preference of orienting to visual perception. world war ii was waged to
relieve the invisible tensions that underlay the superficial ‘visible re
to
regard ‘seeing without feeling’ as ‘re
how
far can we go in enforcing logical (politically correct) visible behaviours
that simply put a surficial cover over our continuing invisible inner-outer
balance-seeking behaviours? to what
degree will the west-installed-and-protected governments of
without acknowledge ‘feelings’ that inform us of our inner-outer internal tensions, as individuals and as communities, the premise that ‘seeing is believing’ becomes delusionary.
‘seeing’
in complex complementarity with ‘feeling’ are the makings of ‘holodynamical’ re
Weblog: April 6, 2006
Returning to the question, is it true that the hostspace dynamic we are situationally included in inductively shapes our behaviour, as the child-john would readily concede in the ‘taking off his jacket’ example, and/or is it (more/less) true, as the adult-john claims, that his behaviour is fully and solely internally-sourced by his independent self?