Understanding the Deception Whereby ‘Western Culture’ Appears More ‘Advanced and Competent’ than Indigenous Aboriginal and Buddhist Cultures.

 

Introduction: How can it be that David Bohm, Erwin Schroedinger and others have endorsed the indigenous aboriginal and Buddhist cultures as embodying a deeper and more true-to-experience understanding of the world that is validated by modern physics while the popular and dominant ‘Western culture’ seems so much more ‘advanced’ than indigenous aboriginal and Buddhist cultures?

Experiencing a ‘Stroke of Insight’ opens up one’s ‘understanding’ to the answer to this question through it’s effect of ‘attenuating’ ‘being-based cognition’ which, in modern Western culture, has established a ‘locked-in’ dysfunctional precedence over ‘relational’ cognition.

The cognitive deception of ‘being’ comes to us through ‘language and grammar’, undermining our naturally evolved ‘animal’ capacity for ‘non-being’ relational cognition as in ‘the Tao’ of Buddhist understanding which parallels the ‘everything is related’ “Mitakuye Oyasin’) of indigenous aboriginal culture.

The source of the deceptive ‘superiority’ of Western ‘being’-based culture can be seen by considering the systems sciences ‘attack’ on ‘suboptimization’

(e.g. ‘The Name of the Devil is Suboptimization’

“The above aphorism, attributed to Kenneth Boulding, points to the inherent weakness characterizing the mindset and socio‐economic, political, educational and managerial practices of Western Industrial society as it developed over the past 300 years. It has its basis in the analytic‐reductionistic scientific paradigm, which, despite the remarkable technological applications it spawned, is inappropriate, conflict‐generating and dysfunctional in a world characterized by global interconnectedness and mutual interdependence …” — György Jaros and Martine Dodds-Taljaard

That is, Western society, in orienting to improving the living conditions of humans seen as ‘independent beings’ is ‘suboptimizing’ the health of humans understood as relational forms in the transforming relational continuum as is the understanding of modern physics.  That is, in indigenous aboriginal culture, the human is understood NOT AS AN INDEPENDENTLY-EXISTING BEING’, but as a complex of relations within the relational continuum, hence ‘mitakuye oyasin’, (‘all my relations’ or ‘everything is related’).

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