Archive for December, 2009
Author’s Subtext : The Tiger Woods Affair
0Writing this ‘author’s subtext’ didn’t come as easily to me, as it usually does and I have had to ask myself ‘why’?
I never write ‘from planned structure’ but instead I ‘explode a central idea’ that is essential ‘relational’. The ‘exploding’ is guided from the outside-in by certain thoughts that are in my mind at the time which are ‘bigger than’ the ‘idea’ itself; such as ‘why am I writing this particular article’, and a miscellany of thoughts that pertain to the act of writing it, and how it might be interpreted (or not) by the reader etc. etc.
After I have written the article, then I review what all of those ‘outside of the article’ influences were as I was writing. This is kind of like describing the movements of one’s fingers as one fashions a snowball in one’s bare hands. The shape and quality of the ‘content’, the ‘snowball’ is the thing that ‘persists’ but all of those wigglings and bendings of the fingers have disappeared. What were the shaping forces like along the rocky coast where giant arches persist just offshore, their centres having been ‘chewed out’ of them by the violence of the waves? As one regards ‘content’ (the ‘dynamical figure’) and lets the mind move back and away from it into the invisible-because-purely-transient shape-sourcing ‘dynamical ground’, one can only capture a few of the most ‘obvious’ ‘shapers’; e.g, there was the big storm of ’37 or the missing finger or etc.
Out of my early memories I remember my mother (daughter of Italian peasants who emigrated to Canada before she was born) expressing disgust and outrage over the brutal way in which Mussolini and Carla Petacci were ‘taken out’ and while there was no doubt of how firmly she opposed fascism and supported her brothers who had all served in the Canadian military, she could not support such vile vengefulness of those (perhaps all of us) who were in no way ‘innocent’ themselves. (more…)
The Tiger Woods Affair: Understanding Celebrity Worship
0When we give people God-like status, we are, ourselves, ‘playing God’.
We say that certain individuals have ‘command over the masses’ but this is the ‘tail-wagging-the-dog’ world view of western enlightenment society. The masses always have command over the individual; they are a continuing story while the individual is a ‘candle in the wind’.
Aboriginal physics can shed some light on this ‘tail-wagging-the-dog’ ‘illusion’ wherein the individual seems possessed of extraordinary powers.
And its not just ‘the celebrity’ that suffers when the masses who have ‘played God’ and given the individual his power, take it back and ‘bring him back down to earth’ so forcefully that he and those around him may be figuratively in not literally ‘crushed’.
[This article contains one picture and a video that may be offensive to some viewers. It has been included to underscore the ‘darkness’ that can be associated with celebrity worship ‘gone wrong’] (more…)
Author’s Subtext: AFGHANISTAN
0Though it is unlikely to show in the body of writing in these APN pages, I have been drawn to Barack Obama’s innate ‘potentials’. However, my impression from before he ran for president was that he was applying himself in the wrong place. As an ‘American’ in a world leadership position, YES, … but as an ‘American leader’ positioning the world, NO.
‘Wag-the-dog leadership’: If the tail is to the dog as the leader’s baton is to the body public, the job of the natural leader is to capture, articulate, nurture and sustain the resonances/rhythms emerging freely in the body public (the natural leader’s dynamic is the RESULT of the collective dynamic), whereas ‘wag-the-dog’ leadership is to make the body public captive of the leader’s own top-down imposed rhythms , the result of which is a kind of goose-stepping mono-rhythm (in wag-the-dog leadership, the leader is the CAUSE of the collective dynamic). (more…)
An Aboriginal Physics View on AFGHANISTAN
0

But what are the underlying assumptions?
An aboriginal physics viewpoint on Afghanistan is on a level deeper than the mainstream news reporting. It is at the level of our basic understanding of dynamics. Any dynamic situation can be examined from the point of view wherein we no longer look at dynamics in terms of ‘causal agents’, but instead acknowledge that the causal agents are not ‘causal’ but are the ‘result’ rather than the ‘cause’ of the (turbulent) flow they are included in.
The analogy which has been discussed elsewhere in these pages is in medicine, where Pasteur and Béchamp argued that ‘the pathogen is nothing, the terrain is everything’. If we take ‘Al Qaeda’ and ‘the Taliban’ to be the pathogens, we would say that these pathogens are nothing, the global dynamic is everything. Their proliferation is the result of conditions in the terrain being fertile for their proliferation.
What are the implications of this ‘inverted’ view of the situation?
This means that one cannot examine issues starting from what the current ‘cast of players’ (Al Qaeda, the Taliban, the US, the other ISAF countries, the Afghan government and the Pakistan governments) are doing.
The Taliban is the ‘result’ of turbulence in the region, not the cause.
The historical origins of conflict in Afghanistan go back to the so-called ‘Great Game’ (more…)
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