Author’s Prologue:

 

Ok, all I really need to say to capture the psychosis built into Western culture is to point to the ‘double error’ which sets up the abstract (aberrant) concept of ‘naming-instantiated being’ as the stem for notional powers of sourcing actions and developments’.

 

If one believes in this ‘double error’, one is a Western culture adherent, who believes in the ‘reality’ of name-instantiated ‘things-in-themselves’ (beings) with powers of sourcing actions and developments.  This psychological ‘double error’ comes in the form of ‘humans’, ‘nations’, ‘corporations’.

 

I understand that most of the people I know and have ‘grown up with’, including most of my immediate and extended family, ‘buy into’ this Western culture psychosis inducing belief system, as I too, have formerly done.   Ok, nothing new as far as the world social dynamic goes, other than I now find myself in the position of a Mahavit as the Advaita Vedanta adherents call it.   What may be different in my case is that the psychosis-inducing influence of Western culture hits very close to home, and that makes me more sensitive to the overall damage being done and more in resonance with efforts such as those of ‘Mad in America’ to pick up where R. D. Laing left off in pointing out that what is called ‘normal’ in Western culture is the source of psychosis.

 

I personally believe that anyone who takes a serious experience-grounded look at the Western culture beliefs in name-instantiated ‘humans’, ‘nations’ and ‘corporations’ with the powers of sourcing actions and developments will have to call ‘bullshit’!   Meanwhile, I can also see that the ‘lock-in’ due to ‘high switching costs’ is phenomenally large.  The ‘big lie’ as written about by Hitler and used by him has nothing on the ‘humongous lie’ of Western culture’s being-based ‘sorcery’.

 

So, where did this ‘humongous lie’ giving us humans and our nations and our corporations the powers of sorcery come from?

Wherever it came from, it seems to me that Benjamin Whorf is correct in pointing out that Newton put it into physics and physics became the quasi-religious basis for understanding ‘reality’.  That is, Newton, by way of (matter-sourced) gravity, invented ‘material bodies’ or ‘things-in-themselves’ with the powers of sourcing actions and developments.  Modern physics ‘backs out of such beings-with-powers-of-sorcery’ ‘reality’, dissolving it within the larger understanding of ‘field’ as energy-based relational influence. The ‘field’ based reality with its relational forms in the flow, is a reality WITHOUT any binary ‘inhabitant’ – ‘habitat’ split which thus avoids the dichotomous ambiguity as to whether ‘the inhabitant dynamics are sourcing transformation of the habitat, … or whether the habitat dynamic is sourcing transformation of the inhabitants (or, whether the binary splitting into ‘inhabitant and habitat’ is the psychological artifact of language and grammar as associates with the ‘double error’).

 

Today, we remain hung up on the Western culture belief in ‘beings’ with the powers of sourcing actions and developments.   This got ‘locked in’ via language and grammar that has us speaking in terms of name-instantiated ‘things-in-themselves’ with the powers of sorcery such as humans, nations, and corporations.  As Nietzsche shows, we incorporated this concept into our intellectual conceptualizing of ‘reality’ by way of a ‘double error’, so now, when we speak and write in English and similar languages, we slip this ‘double error’ into our language-based conditioning of the intellect.

 

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

 

What we actually experience is relational transformation but we use language to articulate this in the abstract terms of ‘beings’ with powers of sourcing actions and developments.  ‘Lightning flashes’ is a case in point as is ‘Katrina is growing larger and stronger, … Katrina is ravaging New Orleans, … Katrina is weakening and dissipating’…. This is a language based reduction of purely relational phenomena to depictions in terms of name-instantiated ‘things-in-themselves’, notionally with powers of sourcing actions and developments.  This is the double error.  The lightning and the hurricane are relational forms that are appearance/apparition as associates with the transforming relational continuum.  In physical-experiential reality, there is no ‘thing-in-itself’ (a notional independent inhabitant that forces the intellect into a house-of-cards game-play of inventing a separate ‘habitat’ to give the ‘inhabitant’ a place to exist); i.e. there is no ‘thing-in-itself that ‘sources actions and developments’.  The same applies to all such language-based abstractions of ‘independent things-in-themselves’ such as human, the nation, the corporation, but language and grammar facilitate our making a ‘double error’ (circular reasoning aka petitio principii) and that’s the basis of the ‘Invented Reality’ that we (Western culture adherents) build into our intellectual reality-inventing rhetoric.  It is an ego-driven Invented Reality since ego is the psychological belief in locally incipient powers of sorcery.

 

In Western culture, there is no ‘mitakuye oyasin’ (relationall understanding) thus no matter how extreme the non-locally developing relational tensions may become, a violent elastic-band snapping rebalancing (as in Nietzsche’s lightning example), will be captured as Western language-and-grammar based ‘double error’ and brought into play to intellectualize purely relational phenomena in terms of name-instantiated ‘things-in-themselves’ notionally endowed with powers of sourcing actions and developments, thus giving rise to a sorcery oriented culture that celebrates and rewards ‘the sorcerers of good’ and punishes ‘the sorcerers of bad’ .

Note: ‘Sorcery’ (abstraction) based concepts give rise to the ‘double error’  innate ambiguity as in the ‘nature’ – ‘nurture’ dichotomy; i.e. ‘attenuating ‘the sorcery of bad’ is equivalent to ‘amplifying ‘the sorcery of good’. (arguing over which approach is best makes no sense since ‘sorcery’ is an unreal artifact of the intellectualizing imagination)  That is, what is ‘missed’ in both cases is the non-reality of ‘sorcery’ in the real (relational) world of our actual experience. (‘sorcery’ is the abstract product of language and grammar which is not found in our experience of inclusion in a transforming relational continuum).

 

 * * * end of Prologue * * *

 

Why Western culture language-based Invented Reality ‘appears to work’ and how its psychosis inducing influence is concealed.

 

“English compared to Hopi is like a bludgeon compared to a rapier.” – Benjamin Whorf

 

Language seeks to capture and report on our experience of inclusion in a transforming relational continuum.  However, its ability to do this constrains it to ‘voyeur’ views from the outside.

 

Our real-life experience is not constrained in this manner since we are relational forms within the transforming relational continuum.   This constraint of logical language was formally affirmed in Goedel’s Theorem of Incompleteness (of systems of logic) in 1931.

 

In ‘topological terms’, this is a problem akin to not being able to bite one’s own nose.  Nietzsche warns us of the ‘dodge’ that we use to ‘try to’ get around it which incurs a ‘double error’ which is what is infusing psychosis into the Western culture-adhering mind, since Western culture has put language-based intellection into an unnatural precedence over relational experience.  An example of this is the public panic over Orson Wells radio dramatization (1949) of ‘War of the Worlds’ which listeners mistakenly took for ‘reality’.  That is, the reality that was coming to people by way of language and intellect was over-riding their own natural relational experience of inclusion in the transforming relational continuum.  This language-based ‘reality’ is ‘Invented’ as we put together our own impressions, based on our translating the language into ‘psycho-visual imagery’.

 

In other words, it is not only possible, but it has become ‘routine’ for Western culture adherents to put language-based ‘Invented Reality’ into an unnatural precedence over their natural relational experience.  Of course, the ‘Imagined Reality’ of what it’s like to be in Bergen, Norway or etc, on the basis of film imagery etc. is no substitute for the experience of being there.  The difference can be compared to the difference in giving one’s child ‘sex education’ and ‘sex lessons’ (sex experience).  The film imagery, and visual imagery in generally, is understood by the intellect.   It is ‘perspectival’ while experience is ‘inclusional’.

(more…)