Archive for year 2016

The World as ‘all context, no content’

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hurricane

The hurricane as a figure-and-ground non-duality

My feeling is that the popular habit in Western society, the society I grew up in, is to confuse ‘appearances’ for reality and in using this ‘pseudo-reality’ to guide our individual and collective actions, to make a real mess of things.  David Bohm calls this ‘incoherence’. (more…)

Solstice: to celebrate as an ‘experience’ or as a calendar ‘event-in-itself’?

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solstice-mysticism

 

INTRODUCTION:

 

Interrogating the phenomenon of ‘Solstice’ is a means of sharing a personal understanding of how Western society has become ‘disconnected’ from the natural harmonies of the world and how this is sourcing ‘incoherence’ [Bohm] and dysfunction  in the global social dynamic. (more…)

Western Dysfunctional Belief in the ‘Existence’ of Material Objects/Organisms

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epigenetic possibility inductively actualizes genetic expression

the key to knowing what a thing is, is to enter into a relationship with it, so that it can become what it is

Western science promotes ‘belief’ in the ‘existence’ of material objects and material organisms as ‘things-in-themselves’ that reside, operate and interact in a notional absolute space and absolute time ‘container’ which serves as a  measuring/reference frame or ‘coordinate system’.

 

Western scientists (some of them, like Mach, Poincaré, Bohm, Schroedinger) claim that the notional existence of material objects and material organisms [local, independently-existing material systems] is just ‘pragmatic idealization’ [Poincaré] that we tend to ‘confuse’ for ‘reality’.   Material objects have no place in the physical reality of our actual experience.   This is also the view of linguists such as Whorf and Sapir and philosophers such as Nietzsche. (more…)

Worldviews and Words

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Words that construct semantic realities that are not physical reality

Words construct semantic realities that are not the physical reality of our experience.

 

“The fact of the matter is that the ‘real world’ is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group . . . We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation.” – Edward Sapir

 

 

Since what Sapir is calling ‘the real world’ differs depending on the language we are using to construct it, it might better be termed ‘semantic reality’ to distinguish it from the physical reality of our actual experience which is independent of which language we are using to construct our ‘semantic reality’ that we use to share our observations and experiences.

 

Right now I am using words to share views [my own and citations of others] and I want to go into why my words, and words in general, are inherently inadequate for sharing physical experience.  In other words, I want to take the reader on a guided tour of why our ‘semantic realities’ must necessarily fall short of the physical reality of our actual experience. (more…)

Rediscovering the Spiritual (4th) Dimension

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People-stand-around-fire

as they block the draft, so does ‘the fire dance’

 

There is a major ‘obfuscation’ issue with the use of noun-and-verb Indo-European/scientific languages in that they are commonly used to construct ‘semantic realities’ in the dualist terms of ‘independent things’ [nouns, subjects] and ‘what independent things do’ [subject-verb-predicate grammatical constructs].   In other words, noun and verb languages have a built-in-prejudice that has us assume the local independent existence of material forms and the local authorial sourcing of the development and behaviour of those independent material forms [objects, organisms, systems]. (more…)

Sharing a non-dualist message with a dualist recipient

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making the two into the one

understanding the two as one

 

There are two themes in this series of essays in the Aboriginal Physics Newsletter; one addresses the flaw in the foundational philosophical/ethical premises of Western colonial society, and the other is that there are longstanding, inherent difficulties in sharing a view of the flaw that have not yet been popularly overcome.

 

The flaw is that while the physical reality of our actual, natural experience is non-dualist, … the semantic reality of Western culture is dualist.   The essence of the communications challenge is that while observers in a non-dualist reality can look in on the inherently less complex dualist reality and see its shortfalls relative to the non-dualist reality, observers in a dualist reality cannot ‘share in a viewing of this view’ without ‘lifting themselves up’ from the dualist reality to the non-dualist reality.  The challenge is therefore, that the message delivered from non-dualist to dualist realms must include within the message, the wherewithal to lift the dualist recipient up into the non-dualist reality so that he will be ‘enabled’ for ‘hearing’ the message. (more…)

What do National Political Leaders have in common with Terrorists?

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fountainhead or vent?

fountainhead or vent?

As Emerson says, we humans are ‘vents’ that transmit influences from the vast and universal to the point on which our genius can act.

 

Indigenous aboriginals describe terrorists in the same way.  As tensions build in the relational social dynamics between Euro-American colonizers and the colonized peoples of the Middle East, there is a violent ‘venting’ of pent-up energies.  The people we call ‘terrorists’ are the vents through which relational tensions are dispersed, but they are not the jumpstart source of the violence; i.e. “it takes a whole community to raise a terrorist”.

 

The politician is like a sailboater who may initially, and at various times, be ‘becalmed’ for his power derives from having his sails filled with the influence of others.  He, too, is a vent that transmits influences from the relational continuum to the points on which these influences may act.

 

In general, people are vents that can focus and direct influence that derives from elsewhere; i.e. from a transforming relational continuum. (more…)

Western civilizational-dysfunction: How language distorts reality

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Pender Island, January 2, 2016

“I want us to be very clear. You will not defeat us.”

 

paranoid-schizophrenia

 

The following is a commentary by a national political leader manifesting the symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia. That person is David Cameron, Prime Minister of the U.K. who says, in his January 1, 2016 New Year’s address to the nation;

“And we will take on another social problem too. When our national security is threatened by a seething hatred of the West, …one that turns people against their country and can even turn them into murderous extremists. I want us to be very clear. You will not defeat us. And we will not just confront the violence and the terror, we will take on the underlying poisonous narrative of grievance and resentment. We will come down hard on those who create the conditions for that narrative to flourish. And we will have greater confidence in, … indeed we will revel in, our way of life because if you walk our streets, learn in our schools, benefit from our society, you sign up to our values; freedom, tolerance, responsibility, loyalty. These are the big challenges of our age; some of the biggest our nation ever faced. And this year is a test of our metal.” – David Cameron

David Cameron is speaking to others with a grievance against the actions of the colonial powers, as if they were an independent body of people, an independent body of ‘evil people’ who had divided themselves from the relational social collective, and were on the attack against another independent body of people, the independent body of ‘good people’ that he represents. He is confused as to the physical reality of the world dynamic wherein ‘relations are all there is’, where conflict is a coincidence of opposites rather than two separate, independent factions. Where the world is only given once, as a transforming relational continuum. (more…)

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