“(Canada) Living next to the U.S. is like sleeping with an elephant” — Pierre Trudeau.

The large neighbour has no bad intention but when it rolls over in its sleep it can crush its smaller neighbour.

Neighbours are like the hexagonal cells in the beehive wherein FIGURE-and-GROUND (inhabitant and habitat, cell and matrix) are ONE.  It is only NAMING and GRAMMAR and the intellect that splits FIGURE-and-GROUND-into-TWO.

The abstract splitting of FIGURE-and-GROUND-into-TWO gives rise to the abstract concept of GROWTH of the FIGURE, commonly without reference to the conjugate SHRINKING of GROUND.

GROWTH implies that THERE IS SOMETHING LOCAL that is GROWING as ‘intellectually enabled’ by the DOUBLE ERROR of NAMING and GRAMMAR.  This LOCAL, one-sided GROWTH is understood as RATIO as in RATIONAL INTELLECTION or REASON (which obscures and SUBSTITUTES for TRANSFORMATION so that our understanding in terms of TRANSFORMATION is ABANDONED and we move forward on the abstract basis of REASON instead.

Instead of the honeybee cell belonging to a FIGURE-and-GROUND-as-ONE dynamic, our NAMING and GRAMMAR based language lets us LIFT OUT the FIGURE as if it were a LOCAL THING-IN-ITSELF (FIGURE-and-GROUND-are then TWO) which opens the way to  abstractly ANIMATING the FIGURE with GRAMMAR; i.e. the NAMING instantiated LOCAL thing-in-itself is, so we say, GROWING larger and more intricate and aesthetic (e.g. the initial circular and independent growing form called the ‘bee cell’ is TRANSFORMING, or more correctly, IS INVOLVED IN TRANSFORMATION since the hexagonal matrix is not LOCALLY SOURCED by ‘ITS’ “INTERNAL” CELLS.  IN FACT, the cell matrix CANNOT BE EXPLAINED by way on ‘ITS CELLS’ since the individual cells DO NOT “KNOW” how to grow into HEXAGONS, … the HEXAGONAL configuration is the manifestation of a FIGURE-and-GROUND-as-ONE dynamic, as is basic in modern physics.

Whether we are orienting our attention to FIGURES such as CELLS or HUMANS, modern physics is informing us that FIGURE-and-GROUND-are-ONE!   (Schroedinger, Bohm, Nietzsche et al)

RATIO is an abstraction that allows us to speak in terms of GROWTH of notional LOCAL-THINGS-IN-THEMSELVES given notional LOCAL EXISTENCE and LOCAL POWERS OF SOURCING ACTIONS and DEVELOPMENT, by, as Nietzsche points out, the DOUBLE ERROR of NAMING and GRAMMAR.   For example, we can … “SAY” …  that ‘the HEXAGONAL CELL IS GROWING LARGER AND MORE PRODUCTIVE AS “ITS CONTENTS” DEVELOP, but this is a DOUBLE ERROR of NAMING (the CELL) and GRAMMAR (using the verb GROW to impute a RATIO-based expansion of the NAMING-instantiated thing-in-itself.  This is a synthetic, DOUBLE ERROR based ‘liberation’ of FIGURE-from-GROUND.

NOTA BENE: In speaking in terms of GROWTH, we make no mention of the conjugate SHRINKAGE or at least warping of the GROUND in which the GROWING FIGURE is included.  In order to acknowledge FIGURE-and-GROUND-as-ONE as is evidently the case of the developing bee-cells.  That is, the bees do not fabricate cells as separate things-in-themselves.  The cell-ing develops in clustering wherein the geometry is a mathematical optimum for  storage which leaves not ‘unused gaps’ between the cells.  This mathematical optimum design did not start with the design of a single cell wherein FIGURE-and-GROUND-are-TWO so that we optimize the shape of the FIGURE that we insert into the GROUND, … but CELL-ING is instead a FIGURE-and-GROUND-as-ONE dynamic.  In other words, the RATIO-based dynamic we know as GROWTH of a LOCAL thing-in-itself (“the CELL”)  is an abstraction and the reality is relational; i.e. it is NONLOCAL TRANSFORMATION.

NONLOCAL TRANSFORMATION, as is the general case in NATURE according to modern physics and EASTERN understanding of reality is beyond capture in terms of notional LOCAL THINGS-IN-THEMSELVES such as we abstractly FABRICATE with the DOUBLE ERROR combination of NAMING and GRAMMAR.

RATIO, GROWTH and RATIONALITY aka REASON are ABSTRACT CONCEPTS designed to accommodate THINKING in terms of LOCAL SOURCING of actions and developments.   We can say that ‘The TOWN is GROWING’ which allows us to put a PICTURE into our mind of some LOCAL THING-IN-ITSELF with its own POWER of sourcing ACTIONS and DEVELOPMENT, …. WITHOUT having to understand it as included in a TRANSFORMING LANDSCAPE.

BUT ‘TOWNING’ IS A FEATURE WITHIN THE TRANSFORMING LANDSCAPE AND THE APPEARANCE OF GROWTH OF THE TOWNING IS IN CONJUGATE RELATION TO THE SHRINKING OF THE WILDERNESS.   THE “GROWTH OF THE TOWN” AS IF IN ITS OWN RIGHT IS PURE LANGUAGE-AND-GRAMMAR BASED ABSTRACTION, that makes for easy talking (representation) about that which is innately INEFFABLE-because-NONLOCAL as is the nature of a TRANSFORMING LANDSCAPE (TRANSFORMATION is relational and has no LOCAL beginning or ending).

Should we then say that the GROWING ORCHARD is INCLUDED in the TRANSFORMING LANDSCAPE?  That is NOT possible in a FIGURE-and-GROUND-as-TWO sense, but it is possible in a FIGURE-and-GROUND-as-ONE sense.  BUT SINCE FIGURE-and-GROUND-are-ONE, there is no REALITY in the concept of GROWTH of the FIGURE …. AS IF “IN ITS OWN RIGHT”.  ONE WOULD HAVE TO (IN ONE’S IMAGINATIVE MIND’S EYE) NOTIONALLY PLUCK THE ORCHARD OUT OF THE TRANSFORMING LANDSCAPE AND DROP IT INTO A SUBSTITUTE FIXED AND ABSOLUTE REFERENCE SPACE AS IF IT WERE “ON ITS OWN”.  In this case, ITS LOCAL GROWTH would be possible within this overall  FIGURE-and-GROUND-as-TWO ABSTRACTION.

WHAT ARE THE INTUITIVE TAKE-AWAYS OF THIS INTELLECTUAL SITE-SEEING TOUR?

-1- There is no such thing as LOCAL GROWTH in the real world of our sensual experience of inclusion in a reality wherein FIGURE-and-GROUND-are-ONE.  There is only NONLOCAL TRANSFORMATION.

-2- NONLOCAL TRANSFORMATION is INEFFABLE-because-NONLOCAL-and-IMPLICIT (since everything is in flux).  Thus, LANGUAGE, since it is based on NAMING that connote LOCAL THINGS-IN-THEMSELVES, conflated by GRAMMAR that imputes the power of SOURCING ACTIONS AND DEVELOPMENTS to the NAMING-instantiated LOCAL THING-in-ITSELF, is a REPRESENTATIONAL technique that employs abstract ‘LOCAL THINGS-IN-THEMSELVES’ in order to conjure up an IMPRESSION of fluid action as constitutes NONLOCAL TRANSFORMATION.

-3- As Emerson, Nietzsche, Bohm, Wittgenstein and others have pointed out, “THE TOOL (of RATIONAL THINKING) HAS RUN AWAY WITH THE WORKMAN, THE HUMAN WITH THE DIVINE”.   These DOUBLE ERROR based (NAMING and GRAMMAR based) notional LOCAL THINGS-IN-THEMSELVES-with-notional powers of SOURCING actions and developments, used as the basics of LANGUAGE, ARE NOT REAL as far as our sensory experience goes, they are instead given an artificial pseudo-reality within the abstract constructions of language.  FOR EXAMPLE, to say that ‘THE TOWN IS GROWING’ cuts out an image of THE TOWN as a thing-in-itself as if in one of those little cartoon bubbles over the thinking head, which shows the town inflating like a balloon being filled with air.  This allows us to picture GROWTH as something that only depends on a local thing-in-itself.  In the view, the TOWN is LIBERATED from the TRANSFORMING LANDSCAPE.  But it does require us to INVENT a NOTIONAL ABSTRACT VERSION of the TOWN as if it were an independently-existing thing-in-itself,  Photography and/or visual sighting can assist us in this BREAK-OUT of the TOWN as if it were a THING-IN-ITSELF capable of GROWTH over “TIME” by taking a time sequence of pictures of the TRANSFORMING LANDSCAPE and IMPOSING the THOUGHT of LOCAL THING-IN-ITSELF-EXISTENCE on a fluid-form-in-the-flow.  By imposing a NAME on a fluid forming in the TRANSFORMATION we can create the impression of GROWTH by way of the DOUBLE ERROR; .e. ‘the TOWN is GROWING’.  Without our imposing of the notional NAMING-instantiated THING-IN-ITSELF with the GRAMMAR-instantiated power of LOCAL GROWING and DEVELOPMENT, we would be left with purely relational and fluid (NONLOCAL) TRANSFORMATION

That is, the DOUBLE ERROR of NAMING and GRAMMAR allows us to REDUCE the INEFFABLE-because-NONLOCAL-and-IMPLICIT reality of TRANSFORMATION to the EFFABLE-because-LOCAL and EXPLICIT.  In modern physics as in indigenous aboriginal cultures, Taoism/Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta, this DOUBLE ERROR reduction remains a TOOL OF INFERENCE aka a WIttgenstein ladder or as described in modern physics, that purely relational non-entity that is INFERRED or BOOTSTRAPPED as in “The surprise version of the game of Twenty Questions’.

The notion of GROWTH is RATIO based (RATIONAL aka REASON-based) ABSTRACTION that can be used to INFER TRANSFORMATION; e.g. the TOWN is GROWING is ABSTRACTION that infers the INEFFABLE-because-NONLOCAL-and-IMPLICIT REALITY of the TRANSFORMING LANDSCAPE (the Wave-field dynamic aka ‘the Tao’).

That is, our ‘mind’s eye’ is able to conjure up an empty containing space with nothing else in it but the imagery we construct with our words, such as ‘the TOWN’ and ‘ITS GROWTH’.  This is all about RATIO that kicks off from a notional LOCAL THING-IN-ITSELF as if in an empty containing space of infinite extent (Euclidian space) without the complexity of its inclusion in a TRANSFORMING LANDSCAPE.

As Wittgenstein observes, the PICTURE of the TOWN … HOLDS US CAPTIVE and in this state we can no longer reground ourselves in the reality of our inclusion in the transforming relational continuum   The PICTURE puts on display a notional LOCAL THING-IN-ITSELF, like a SHIP that we can ‘go inside’ and in so doing, FORGET that we and the SHIP are included in some still larger ‘containiner’ which is in fact a fluid containment.  In this state-of-mind, what happens to us is determined by OUR LOCAL actions and interactions.  In other words, this notion of inclusion in a FIXED REFERENCE SPACE fores on us the status of an INDEPENDENT BEING with our own LOCAL powers of SOURCING actions and developments.  That’s what comes to mind when we see PICTURES of “THINGS” such as a HUMAN or a TOWN.   Our use of GRAMMAR can impute to THEM LOCAL JUMPSTART POWERS OF SOURCING ACTIONS AND DEVELOPMENT.  We CAPTURE ourselves in PICTURES so that we understand ourselves as LOCAL THINGS-IN-THEMSELVES  (and non longer as fluid forms in the transforming relational LANDSCAPE).

A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably. –-Wittgenstein

The TOWN is one such PICTURE which obscures and substitutes for our sensory experience awareness of our, and the TOWNING’s inclusion in the transforming relational continuum aka the Wave-field aka the Tao.  Yet the TOWN could be one of these places where everybody camps for a short duration (e.g. a mountaineer’s camp that people use as a staging ground for climbing a nearby mountain), so that the TOWN “SEEMS LIKE A LOCAL THING-IN-ITSELF” although it is like a slow-down in heavy traffic where the crowd persists in that LOCAL spot even thought there is NOTHING LOCAL other than the FORM of the CLUSTERING in the FLOW.   As Heraclitus would say; One can’t step into the same CLUSTER twice because it is not the same CLUSTER.

It would be wrong to apply the DOUBLE ERROR of NAMING and GRAMMAR where we impute to the CLUSTERING “LOCAL BEING’ with the LOCAL power of SOURCING GROWTH and DEVELOPMENT: e.g. ‘the CLUSTER is growing larger and is lengthening.  BUT THERE IS NO LOCAL THING-IN-ITSELF (the “CLUSTER”) which is SOURCING such actions and development, there is only CLUSTERING within the TRANSFORMING LANDSCAPE.

The ERROR is RATIO-NAL THINKING aka “REASON” which uses abstraction (the DOUBLE ERROR of NAMING and GRAMMAR) to impute LOCAL-THING-IN-ITSELF-EXISTENCE with GRAMMAR-given LOCAL POWER of SOURCING ACTIONS AND DEVELOPMENT; e.g. “THE CLUSTER” is growing larger and is lengthening.  HEY, this is just a typical slowdown and speedup in traffic flow, there is no CLUSTER with its own local power of GROWTH and DEVELOPMENT.  THERE NEVER IS, neither in the case of TOWNING (the TOWN”) or HUMANING (“the HUMAN”).  The pictures we take of ‘the TOWN’ and/or ‘the HUMAN’ chop out a closed form geometric image like that of the flaming candle.  The FLAME is like the TOWN, it is a SNAP-SHOT PICTURE of relational forms within the TRANSFORMATION. that serves us WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS as a PICTURE-BASE for concocting DOUBLE ERROR based REPRESENTATIONS.

YES, this substituting of NAMING and GRAMMAR based constructions DOES allow us to construct SUBSTITUTE REPRESENTATION of reality that is no longer the FLUID REALITY of our sensory experience but is an abstract pseudo-reality featuring empty space populated LOCALLY (in our psyches) by NAMING-triggered notional LOCAL things-in-themselves with GRAMMAR-given (notional) powers of SOURCING ‘their own’ actions and developments, as in the above case where CLUSTERING is RECAST in the DOUBLE ERROR based terms of CLUSTERS that grow larger and longer and have their own (GRAMMAR-given) powers of SOURCING actions and development.   Can you see the Town as it GROWS larger and as its ‘production’ of goods and services ‘GROW’?  We could do a ‘PHOTO-OP’ could we not, in support of such GROWTH and development.     And when the indigenous aboriginal elder comes over to talk to us about the TRANSFORMING LANDSCAPE in which the TOWNING is included, would we modify our praise of GROWTH as associates with RATIO-NAL thinking aka REASON which gives us a long list of beneficial developments coming from GROWTH?;

That is; … should we concede that GROWTH is ABSTRACTION based on RATIO aka REASON , all of which inform us in terms of LOCAL SOURCING, when the REALITY of our sensory experience is of our inclusion in TRANSFORMATION?     Just because it is INEFFABLE-because-NONLOCAL-and-IMPLICIT (relational since everything is in flux), it does NOT MAKE SENSE to continue to do what we WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS are currently, popularly doing, and use an abstract reality based on GROWTH and REASON as our OPERATIVE REALITY.   HEY!  it is one thing to use the abstract concepts of GROWTH and REASON as tools of INFERENCE or Wittgenstein Ladders to BOOTSTRAP allusions to the NONLOCAL-and-IMPLICIT Wave-field reality, … but to continue to use the abstractions of GROWTH and REASON to construct representations to be employed as OUR OPERATIVE REALITY is a CRAZY-MAKER.

 

-4- While some cultures acknowledge that such language-based substitute REPRESENTATIONS of reality are only good for tickling the imagination into making a leap of inference to the INEFFABLE-because-NONLOCAL dynamic of TRANSFORMATION (which is ‘everywhere at the same time’), we WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS are in the habit of employing language-based substitute REPRESENTATIONS as the OPERATIVE REALITY.  This is a CRAZY-MAKER.    We say that ‘the TOWN IS GROWING’ when the reality is that ‘the LANDSCAPE IS TRANSFORMING’ which implicitly includes the TOWNING within it, but which would have us understanding THAT THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS ‘THE TOWN THAT IS GROWING’, that being only an APPEARANCE or APPARITION.

-5- LANGUAGE AND GRAMMAR equip us for ‘putting together’ language-based WORD-PICTURE IMAGERY of ‘THE TOWN’; e.g. ‘there is the CHURCH over there and the CITY HALL over there and the BAKERY and BUTCHER SHOP over there, and the new construction over there which is extending the size of this GROWING LOCAL THING-IN-ITSELF we have NAMED ‘THE TOWN’.   All of this word-thing-based talk makes us forgetful of our inclusion in the transforming relational continuum and our participation in this TOWNING exercise which is TRANSFORMING the LANDSCAPE at the expense of the conjugate SHRINKING of the Wilderness.   Once we flip out of understanding in terms of TOWNING as TRANSFORMATION of the Wilderness to language based (DOUBLE ERROR BASED) abstraction such as ‘the TOWN is GROWING larger and more productive’, … we imaginatively lift ourselves and our TOWN into an absolute space of infinite extent so that we are free to talk about and understand TOWNING out of the context of the TRANSFORMING LANDSCAPE and in the ABSTRACT RATIO-CINATIVE aka RATIONAL, aka REASON-BASED terms (DOUBLE ERROR BASED TERMS) of ‘the TOWN that is GROWING LARGER AND MORE PRODUCTIVE.  *** GOOD BYE TRANSFORMING LANDSCAPE, … HELLO GIANT PSEUDO-REALITY CON FEATURING A LOCAL THING-IN-ITSELF-“TOWN”-THAT GRAMMAR SAYS “IS GROWING LARGER and INCREASING ITS PRODUCTION OF GOODS and SERVICES”.

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For us WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS, the concept of the LOCAL TOWN and “its GROWTH” continues to hijack and substitute for the reality of our sensory experience of INCLUSION IN TRANSFORMATION.

HEY, I KNOW IT IS A USEFUL CONCEPTUALIZATION that opens the way to NOT OVERCOMING but SIDESTEPPING the INEFFABLE-because-NONLOCAL-and IMPLICIT REALITY of the ALL-INCLUDING TRANSFORMING RELATIONAL CONTINUUM AKA THE WAVE-FIELD AKA THE TAO.

BUT ITS USEFULNESS IS AS A “TOOL OF INFERENCE” OF THE INEFFABLE-BECAUSE-NONLOCAL-AND-IMPLICIT REALITY OF OUR SENSORY EXPERIENCE OF INCLUSION IN THE TRANSFORMING RELATIONAL CONTINUUM.

IT IS NOT ONLY “NOT USEFUL” BUT CRAZY-MAKING TO, … INSTEAD OF USING THE DOUBLE ERROR REDUCTION AS A TOOL OF INFERENCE, … USING IT IS A SUBSTITUTE ‘OPERATIVE REALITY’.

THAT IS WHERE OUR WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENT SOCIAL COLLECTIVE IS COMMONLY AT RIGHT NOW.  SYMPTOMS INCLUDE THE CULTURE-INGRAINED BELIEF IN LOCAL THINGS-IN-THEMSELVES IMPUTED TO EXIST BY THE DOUBLE ERROR OF NAMING AND GRAMMAR, AND GIVING RISE TO THE NOTION OF LOCAL SOURCING OF GOOD ACTIONS AND DEVELOPMENTS AND BAD ACTIONS AND DEVELOPMENTS (THE REDUCTION TO LOCAL SOURCING OF GOOD AND BAD ACTIONS AND DEVELOPMENTS IS A SUBSTITUTE FOR THE TRANSFORMING LANDSCAPE).

WESTERN CULTURE CURRENT CONDITION:

The current condition of our WESTERN CULTURE is that the belief in LOCAL things-in-themselves like TOWNS, and HUMANS and CORPORATIONS, notionally with their own LOCAL powers of SOURCING actions and development is serving as the basis for CONSTRUCTION OF REALITY which is not simply an agreed upon SURROGATE REALITY for communications purposes (to stimulate an intuitive leap to the reality of our inclusion in the transforming relational continuum).  Instead, we are using the SURROGATE REALITY DIRECTLY as our OPERATIVE REALITY whereupon the RATIO-NAL concept of GROWTH becomes accepted as something REAL, so that our intuitive experiential awareness of inclusion in TRANSFORMATION is set aside.  This is dysfunctional as we continue to pursue GROWTH to garner the benefits that we understand GROWTH as delivering to us, while WHAT IS REALLY GOING ON IS TRANSFORMATION.   And, TRANSFORMATION it not out there on the horizon as if in an architectural rendering of the construction projects which we assume to be REAL and which we will REAL-IZE over the coming years according to our planners.

BUT, ALL THE WHILE, we are included in TRANSFORMATION and that is the greater reality and it is IN THE CONTINUING NOW.

We can show a sequence of pictures of the LOGGER and his GROWING pile of logs.  We are not obliged to show or to speak of, at the same time, the conjugate REDUCTION of FOREST as would complete the understanding in the REAL sense of TRANSFORMATION of the LANDSCAPE.  That’s what RATIO-NALITY aka REASON is all about.  REASON liberates us from the complexity of TRANSFORMATION; i.e. REASON is RATIO-CINATIVE INTELLECTUAL ABSTRACTION that liberates us from REALITY while delivering up a means of EFFABLE-izing-the INEFFABLE by substituting GROWTH in place of TRANSFORMATION.

THE TOWN “IS NOT GROWNG”, the LANDSCAPE IS TRANSFORMING and we are TRANSFORMING WITHIN THE OVERALL TRANSFORMATION.  WE ARE NOT THE SOURCE OF THE CONSTRUCTION AND GROWTH OF THE TOWN BECAUSE ALL OF THAT IS ILLUSION DERIVING FROM THE DOUBLE ERROR OF NAMING AND GRAMMAR.  REALITY IS THE ALL-INCLUDING RELATIONAL TRANSFORMATION AKA THE WAVE-FIELD AKA THE TAO.

OUR SUBSTITUTING OF ‘GROWTH (AS IN RATIO-CINATIVE INTELLECTION AKA REASON) …. FOR TRANSFORMATION….  IS A CRAZY MAKER IN THAT IT SUBSTITUTES RATIONALITY FOR INTELLIGENCE/INTUITION, AS BOHM HAS POINTED OUT.  It is not that REASON as in GROWTH is NOT a useful tool.  It is an extremely useful tool when employed as INFERENCE of TRANSFORMATION, however, when REASON and GROWTH are used in the DOUBLE ERROR of NAMING and GRAMMAR to construct a SUBSTITUTE OPERATIVE REALITY, this is a CRAZY-MAKER.

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‘SLEEPING WITH ELEPHANTS’ alludes to what happens when social collectives organize on the basis of RATIO and GROWTH rather than by sustaining harmony within TRANSFORMATION.  The  DOUBLE ERROR of NAMING and GRAMMAR serves up the concept of RATIO based GROWTH as implies LOCAL SOURCING.   This serves up a PSEUDO-REALITY constituted by a MULTIPLICITY of DISCONNECTED THINGS-IN-THEMSELVES with their own notional (GRAMMAR-given) powers of LOCAL SOURCING of actions and development and action, constituting constituting an EFFABLE-because-LOCAL-and-EXPLICIT SUBSTITUTE for the THINGLESS-CONNECTEDNESS of NONLOCAL relational TRANSFORMATION.   This is the TOOL that, in our WESTERN CULTURE, Emerson notes has ‘RUN AWAY with the WORKMAN, the HUMAN with the DIVINE.

While RATIONALIZING aka REASON can be employed to TRIGGER an understanding of NONLOCAL TRANSFORMATION, it can also be ACTED ON LITERALLY as in the example, The TOWN is GROWING larger and more productive’.  When we focus on LOCAL GROWTH, we can lose sight of the reality of  NONLOCAL TRANSFORMATION which is the REALITY.  Our actions that we say are contributory to GROWTH as in ‘enlarging the TOWN or the DEVELOPMENT’, are IN REALITY contributory to NONLOCAL TRANSFORMATION.  No amount of detailed accounting of WHAT WE ARE DOING in the course of our DEVELOPMENT of the TOWN will inform us of what the Wilderness is losing in the NONLOCAL TRANSFORMATION.  The logging and milling of trees may deliver building materials for construction, which are fully accounted for, however, the loss of trees as lungs that oxygenate and keep the living ecosystem in healthy balance, fails to show up on a materials based inventory system.

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