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Archive for December, 2018
My Personal Foray Into Western Culture’s ‘Invented Reality’
0December 27, 2018
by ted lumley
in APN
My story is this. I have been undertaking philosophical investigations since my ‘retiring’ from working as a geophysicist’ on my 55th birthday (feb. 28, 1996). I was ‘champing at the bit’ to refocus my ‘philosophical physics’ investigations on understanding natural complexity (‘the way things work in a relative or relational reality). This was partly inspired by my sense that Western culture based ‘organization’ is dysfunctional, and by studies of ‘exceptionally performing teams’ that I had undertaken on behalf of the organization I was working for, and which I was charged with putting into a ‘course’ for ‘managers’ (this was completed and received good reviews but was soon washed away by reorganization as the company was acquired and absorbed into a larger company.
What I was investigating in parallel was the link between Western culture and psychological distress of the type labelled ”bipolar disorder’ and/or ‘schizophrenia’, both of which involve struggles with a ‘split sense of self’.
I have continued these investigations over the past 22 years, and the findings along the way have continued to come into ‘connective confluence’ which, for me, provides a more comprehensive ‘relational coherence based’ understanding; i.e. the relational mode of understanding of modern physics, indigenous aboriginal cultures, Taoism and Advaita Vedanta. This relational understanding is as described in modern physics (Geoffrey Chew, and John Wheeler) in terms of ‘The surprise version of the game of Twenty Questions’. That is, this relational understanding has no dependency on abstract notions of ‘beings’ with notional powers of ‘sourcing’ actions and developments (aka ‘sorcery’).
I have looked for ‘consistency’, in the relational confluence of these ideas, with and ‘across’ the understandings of Nietzsche, Bohm, Wittgenstein, Lao Tzu (Taoism) and Advaita Vedanta. An additional phenomenon that I felt had to be included in ‘solving for reality’ consistent with the relational confluence of these understandings was the notion of R. D. Laing that Western culture’s ‘normal’ is psychopathology in its adherents; i.e.;
“What we call ‘normal’ is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection and other forms of destructive action on experience.” – R. D. Laing, author of ‘The Divided Self’
0
December 7, 2018
by ted lumley
in APN
NAMING: The Psychosis-Brewing Sorcery of Western Culture
Synopsis:
What is evidently missing, for the ‘miner’s canary’ in Western society, is a social environment that is already onboard in supporting the natural primacy of relational experience with its ‘full heart of inspiration’ over a ‘normal’ Western social environment that puts swollen-head ego-based intellection into an unnatural primacy. An environment permeated by the prevalence of ‘the full heart of inspiration’ tends to form in the psychiatric hospitalization phase in the empathic relational dynamic co-cultivated among ‘miner’s canaries’.
However, this revitalizing environment is abruptly removed when the ‘canary’ is seen as having ‘recovered’ [i.e. Western medicine sees the source of psychosis as developing within the ‘miner’s canary’ (‘within the boil’/’inhabitant’) and not within the ‘flow’/’habitat’ as if ‘boil’/’inhabitant’ and ‘flow’ /’habitat’ were a duality). The occluded ‘third’ option (Jantsch level 1 reality) gives an understanding of the problem of chronic psychosis in Western culture as arising from the Western culture ‘splitting’ apart of ‘boil’ and ‘flow’; i.e. suggesting two ambiguously reversible modes of ‘beings’ with the powers of ‘sourcing’ actions and developments, … commonly termed ‘nature’ (reality level 3) and ‘nurture’ (reality level 2). While the individual is seen as the ‘sorceror’ in level 3 (nature), the collective is seen as the ‘sorceror’ in level 2 (nurture).
This Western social polarization (conservative versus liberal) over the question of ‘which (level 3 reality or level 2 reality) is in a natural primacy over which?’ obscures the level 1 option wherein the ‘boil’ is not separate from the ”flow’ but is ‘appearance’ (i.e. there is no ‘sorcery’ in level 1 reality.). Thus there is a psychological split between (a) ego-based belief where one sees oneself (named singular entities such as one’s nation, corporation or other name-anointed ‘thing-in-itself) as the ”boil’ that has the power of sourcing the flow of actions and developments, and (b) ego-based belief that sees one’s collective (family, nation, corporation) as having the power of inductively sourcing the actions and developments of one’s individual self. This schizophrenic division of ‘reality’ seen as either level 3 (nature) or level 2 (nurture) obscures (‘eclipses’) level 1 reality and this ‘eclipsing’ of level 1 reality is the source of Western culture psychopathology.
In other words, the ‘miner’s canary’ is on the right track in seeking to heal the split, but it can’t ‘heal the split’ within itself since ‘the self’ is not a ‘thing-in-itself’ that is split; i.e. the relational form in the flow is an ‘appearance’ and not a ‘thing-in-itself’ so the ‘healing’ must occur in the collective wherein the collective understands that there is no habitat-inhabitant split. In other words, psychosis derives from the ego based belief in the ‘self’ as an ‘independent thing-in-itself’ with its own powers of sourcing actions and developments and the associated confusing of whether (a) the sourcing is by way of the inside-outward asserting of individuals to ‘source’ the dynamic of the collective, or whether it is by way of (b), outside-inward inductive sourcing from the collective that shapes the dynamic of the individual. [This innately ‘un-resolvable, self-dividing’ (schizophrenia inducing) ambiguity derives from the abstract language-concocted abstraction of ‘sorcery’].
Healing of the ‘divided self’ is therefore NOT the healing of a ‘sick self’, as Western culture would have it, but the healing of the ego’s notion of the self as a ‘thing-in-itself’ hence ‘a divided self’. ‘Healing’ is therefore to be found by way of ‘putting the divided self back together’, but by ‘letting go’ of the impression of the ‘divided self’, as in ‘mitakuye oyasin’ (all my relations) and as in ‘The surprise version of the game of Twenty Questions’ and as in ‘the indigenous aboriginal learning circle’ where the participants can come to understand themselves as inclusions in something greater than themselves that they can come to know and embrace by way of inspiration that fills the heart, … rather than by the ‘divided self’ way of … ego that swells the head.
Meanwhile, we continue to navigate within a Western culture that promotes ‘sorcery’ based ‘psychosis’ as ‘normality’.
He who blames the sorcery of harmful actions on others and credits himself with the sorcery of helpful actions has a long way to go on his journey.
He who blames the sorcery of harmful actions on both himself and others and credits both himself and others with sorcery of helpful actions is halfway there.
He who blames or credits no-one with the sorcery of actions, harmful or helpful (i.e. he who sees through the ego-based illusion of sorcery) has arrived. —
NAMING: The Psychosis-Brewing Sorcery of Western Culture
Author’s Prologue:
We live in a world that is strongly influenced by ‘Western culture’, and Western culture, as this essay suggests, is the brewer of psychosis through its unnatural promotion of belief that the individual relational form is a ‘being’, with notional ‘independent thing-in-itself’ existence, which ‘leads in’ to the construction of an intellectually ‘Invented Reality’ conjured up by ‘naming’ wherein ‘the being’ is deemed (by the intellect) to be the SOURCE of ‘its own’ actions and developments.
The impression that comes with this belief in ‘sorcery’ is ‘ego‘; i.e. – the (language and intellect supported) impression of ‘thing-in-itself being’ that is the full and sole source of ‘one’s own’ actions and accomplishments. The ‘ego’ is this misguided (psychosis inducing) conceptualizing of oneself as a ‘sorcerer’. Western culture cultivates this psychosis-en-masse by collectively honoring and rewarding the (notional) ‘sorcerers’ of ‘good acts and developments’ and by collectively defiling and punishing the (notional) ‘sorcerors’ of ‘bad acts and developments’. The relational essence of ‘reality’ is eclipsed and ‘locked out’ by this Western culture induced mass psychosis.
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