Archive for May, 2019

This essay explores how, to put it bluntly, Western culture ‘normality’ is driving us crazy by having us believe in a ‘double error’ based ‘reality’ which is essentially the repackaging in respectable attire [Newtonian scientific legitimizing] of middle ages superstitious belief in sorcery.  Because this aberrant belief in ‘sorcery’ has become the Western culture behavioral ‘norm’, the non-complying ‘dissidents’ [including indigenous aboriginals] who remain grounded in natural relational experience and who thus reject ‘sorcery’ and/or those who are manifestly confused by being pressured to conform to this Western culture ‘aberrant sorcery-based normality’, are themselves judged ‘abnormal’ and subjected to programs of remediation that increasingly include anti-psychotic medicating, psychotherapy, confinement in psychiatric hospitals and simple social devaluation on the basis of their poor record in the sorcery department.  Those who accept Western culture sorcery-based ‘aberrant normality’ as the ‘operative norm’ and do well within it, tend to be generously rewarded and given positions of influence and authority that locks the system in place [“lock-in by high switching costs”].  The expression ‘the ‘tools run away with the workman, the human with the divine’ alludes to how the tools of language and grammar REDUCE relational forms in the transforming relational continuum, such as ourselves, to (notional) name-instantiated things-in-themselves with their own incipient powers of sourcing actions and developments [the ‘double error‘].

INTRODUCTION:

The tools run away with the workman, the human with the divine – Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Method of Nature

It is impossible to capture, in explicit language, the reality of our experience of inclusion as relational forms in a transforming relational continuum.    Some cultures accept this and never try to go beyond regarding language as ‘poetic expression’ of our innately ‘fluid’ experiential reality.  The tool of language as employed by our intellectualizing faculty is nevertheless capable of using relational forms as the basis for constructing an INVENTED REALITY featuring relational forms as name-instantiated things-in-themselves with powers of sourcing actions and developments. This is something we could use as a rough but useful ‘go-by’ to aid our navigating within the transforming relational continuum, …OR, we could fall into the trap, as we do in Western cultural generally, of confusing our language and grammar based INVENTED REALITY, for our actual operative reality.

But Western culture over the past few centuries has been defining itself by falling into this trap.  GONE from our intellectualizing mind is the relational understanding that continues to come to us through our relational experience as relational forms in a transforming relational continuum.  That is, our explicitizing tools of intellectual abstraction have ‘run away with us’, so that we recast ourselves in our abstracting intellect as name-instantiated things-in-themselves with our own powers of sourcing actions and developments.

This ‘double error’, as Nietzsche refers to it, is the selfsame aberration as Emerson is referring to as  The tools run away with the workman, the human with the divine .  That is, the ‘double error’ is the use of language and grammar to ‘invent’, by the name-instantiating abstracting power of language, a notional ‘thing-in-itself’ that can, by means of the second conflating error, be notionally endowed with the powers of sourcing actions and developments.

The source of the animating dynamic termed ‘reality’, instead of being understood as ‘immanent’ in the transforming relational continuum, is, thanks to Western language and grammar, pushed down and inside the name-instantiated things-in-themselves created with the ‘double error’ and, the root sourcing of reality is thus relocated to the interior of notional (naming and grammar instantiated) ‘independently-existing things-in-themselves with their own powers of sourcing actions and developments.   This is the basis for Western culture’s intellectually contrived INVENTED REALITY which has, over the past few centuries, hijacked the behaviour animating helm formerly (naturally) manned by sensation-informed intuition.

That is, in our infancy, as with other (non-language-utilizing) forms in nature, our sensations inform us of our inclusion within the all-inclusive world-continuum.  This topological understanding of inclusion in the relational continuum never abandons us, but, in the case of humans, such awareness is exposed to being ‘covered over and buried’ by layers of intellectual abstraction which effectively ‘hijack’ reality constructing operations (eclipsing/burying our sensation based experience of relational inclusion).

This problem of the innate shortfall of language-stimulated intellection in capturing the ‘reality’ of our sensory experience of inclusion in the transforming relational continuum leads to further problematic complications in Western culture where is employed as if it were the ‘operative reality’.  For example;

The tools run away with the workman, the human with the divine – Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Method of Nature

“Our judgement has us conclude that every change must have an author”;–but this conclusion is already mythology: it separates that which effects from the effecting. If I say “lightning flashes,” I have posited the flash once as an activity and a second time as a subject, and thus added to the event a being that is not one with the event but is rather fixed, “is” and does not “become.”–To regard an event as an “effecting,” and this as being, that is the double error, or interpretation, of which we are guilty.” – Nietzsche, ‘Will to Power’, 531

 “I am afraid we are not rid of God because we continue to believe in grammar” — Nietzsche

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.

The point is that the reality of our inclusion, as relational forms in the transforming relational continuum, is not EXPLICITLY expressible in language and can only be obliquely inferred as in poetic expression and/or ‘the Surprise version of the game of Twenty Questions’.  If we can ‘picture it’, it is not ‘reality’ (the all-including transforming relational continuum is not picturable; i.e. it cannot be visualized as something ‘out there in front of us’.)

THE DOUBLE ERROR IS THE EMBODIMENT OF EGO, THE BELIEF THAT ‘WE HAVE THE POWERS OF SOURCING ACTIONS AND DEVELOPMENTS’.  THIS IS CRAZINESS; I.E. IT IS ABERRANT THINKING THAT IS EQUATED WITH WESTERN CULTURE ‘NORMALITY’, as has been pointed out not only by philosophers such as Nietzsche and physicists such as Bohm but also by psychiatrists such as R.D. Laing.

AVOIDING THE EXPOSURE TO ASSIMILATING OF WESTERN CULTURE CRAZINESS WHILE ONE IS LIVING WITHIN A WESTERN CULTURE SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT REQUIRES ONE TO ‘REGROUND’ IN RELATIONAL UNDERSTANDING, AS IS DEMONSTRATED BY INDIGENOUS ABORIGINALS, BUDDHISTS/TAOISTS AND ADVAITA VEDANTA ADHERENTS IN THIS SITUATION.

* * * END OF INTRODUCTION * * *

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