INTRODUCTION:

Of the logos, which is as I describe it, people always prove to be uncomprehending both before they have heard it and once they have heard it. For, although all things happen according to the logos, people are like those of no experience, even when they do experience such words and deeds as I explain when I distinguish each thing according to its phusis (nature / constitution) and declare how it is; but others are as ignorant of what they do when awake as they are forgetful of what they do when asleep.

Those who hear and do not understand are like the deaf. Of them the proverb says: “Present, they are absent.”

— Heraclitus

Heraclitus’ above cryptic comment reflects the problem of shifting from the classical Western ‘EITHER/OR logic of the excluded medium’ to the modern physics ‘BOTH/AND logic of the included medium (quantum logic), the latter which is implicit in Heraclitus’ flow-based (Tao-based) understanding of reality.

To understand the phenomenon that Heraclitus is referring to, consider the problem that associates with speaking about ‘duning’ in the ‘desert’.  The Western culture adherent will speak in such terms as ‘the dune is growing larger and shifting to the West across the desert floor’.   The indigenous aboriginal understands this phenomenon in the same way as modern physics; i.e. this is relational transformation as associates with ‘resonance’ (wave-field phenomena).  Western culture is using the ‘double error’ of language and grammar that reduces this resonance phenomenon by ‘naming’ to impute local, independent thing-in-itself being (first error) and conflating this with grammar (second error) to endow the name-instantiated thing-in-itself with powers of sourcing actions and developments.

The duning as resonance based transformation becomes, by way of this language and grammar based double error reduction, the dune that is growing larger and longer and shifting across the desert floor.

In a conversation where several Western culture adherents are joined by an indigenous aboriginal, the indigenous aboriginal will understanding the statement that “the dune is growing larger and longer and is shifting across the desert floor” because this puts together a ‘picture’ that she will understand in her usual ‘mitakuye oyasin’ manner (everything is in flux).  In other words, she will make the leap from the literal meaning of the words to the understanding in terms of being included in a transforming relational continuum.  The mental leap of reduction from the 4D or higher dimensional wave-space to the lower 3D space of local closed form material objects is easy, however, however, for someone who was taught from childhood to understanding reality in double error terms of Western culture adherents, the 4D understanding is not even ‘on their radar screen’, and the 3D reality is ‘all she wrote’.

While the indigenous aboriginal and the Western culture adherent will be able to communicate very effectively on many topics, their respective sense of the nature of the world they live in and their relationship therein will be very different.  For example, while the Western culture adherent will be understanding things according to the EITHER/OR logic of the excluded medium, the indigenous aboriginal will be understanding things according to the BOTH/AND (quantum) logic of the included medium (where the duning is NOT ‘dunes moving across the desert floor, but wave dynamics manifesting through the sandy material (i.e. not coming from the dynamics of the sandy material).  Carlo Rovelli captures this as follows in ‘Quantum Gravity’;

In Newtonian and special relativistic physics, if we take away the dynamical entities – particles and fields – what remains is space and time. In general relativistic physics, if we take away the dynamical entities, nothing remains. The space and time of Newton and Minkowski are reinterpreted as a configuration of one of the fields, the gravitational field. This implies that physical entities – particles and fields – are not all immersed in space, and moving in time. They do not live on spacetime. They live, so to say, on one another. It is as if we had observed in the ocean many animals living on an island: animals ‘on’ the island. Then we discover that the island itself is in fact a great whale. Not anymore animals on the island, just animals on animals. Similarly, the universe is not made by fields on spacetime; it is made by fields on fields.”   — Carlo Rovelli, in ‘Quantum Gravity’

As in Heraclitus complaint, people hear an explanation of flow-based reality (the Tao), which is like hearing an explanation of how the splitting of the figure and the ground (whorl in the flow) where these two things are just ‘appearances’ rather than having ontological separateness.  But Western culture adherent tend to immediately ‘lose their intuitive grasp’ of the purely relational ‘wave view’ and revert to speech that assumes an ontological ‘figure-ground’ splitting since Western culture language and grammar ‘builds this ontological splitting’ in, by way of the ‘double error’  of using ‘naming’ to impute thing-in-itself being to a relational flow-form and conflating this with by using grammar to impute the power of sourcing actions and development to the name-instantiated thing-in-itself.

Since this reductive binary implication is ‘built into’ our Western culture language and grammar, our comments are implicitly ‘laden’ or ‘contaminated’ with it, contaminating everything we say with its binary implication.  This problem comes about from the property of Western language and grammar of reducing the ineffable understanding of inclusion in the Tao (flow) to effable, visual representation; i.e. i.e. understanding reality in the Tao sense requires us to shift our understanding beyond visual representation as-implied by Western language and grammar’ and the ‘double error’.

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

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The following note explores the source of ‘schizophrenia’ in Western culture as in the ‘splitting’ that divides ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ .  This exploration concludes that the root source of ‘schizophrenia’ is ‘reason’ aka ‘logic’ (the Western culture EITHER/OR logic of the excluded medium, as  gives rise to an innate ambiguity exposed in Gestalt psychology as the ‘figure/ground dichotomy’ and in Western culture generally (by way of the double error of language and grammar) as the ‘inhabitant/habitat’ split.  Modern physics, on the other hand, has required a non-binary, ‘inclusive’ logic, the BOTH/AND logic of the included medium (Stephane Lupasco et al), which has been the traditional logic of indigenous aboriginal cultures, Taoism/Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta.  This BOTH/AND logic of the included medium is suggested by the Tai-Chi symbol with its ‘ambiguous non-dual dualism (viewing this symbol elicits questioning in the psyche as to whether there is just one form with the appearance of dual aspects or whether there are two separate forms.).  This opens the way to a bifurcation that seems to be where EASTERN psyches and WESTERN psyches split, and also where modern physics departs from Newtonian physics.

The findings of inquiry into this ambiguity, by Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Bohm and others suggest that Western culture adoption of the EITHER/OR logic of the excluded medium is the source of general ‘schizophrenia’ (i.e. schizophrenia as the ‘norm’) in Western culture, making it very difficult for those ‘miner’s canaries’ living within a Western culture adherent social collective, who ‘smell a rat‘ that unsettles their psyche, an unsettling that is treated by the Western culture at large as THEIR problem, and thus administering drugs and psychiatric treatments designed to return the miner’s canaries to thinking that is firmly grounded in the EITHER/OR logic of the included medium, the Western culture way of reasoning deemed ‘normal’.

The suggestion here, supported by the works of Bohm, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Emerson and others is that EITHER/OR LOGIC IS A CRAZY-MAKER since it is inherently ambiguous and it aeads to the polarizing of views in the social collective as manifests in the conservative and liberal factionalizing, and manifests WITHIN the Western culture acculturated individual that eschews ‘taking sides’ within a split social collective, by the individual’s having to throw their own bodily self into the ‘keeping things together’, an exercise akin to having one’s opposite-side limbs tied respectively to two teams of horses pulling in opposite directions.  That is, the sensitive ‘miner’s canary’ throws their very ‘self’ into the gap the heal the polarizing split in the Western culture schizophrenic social collective they are included in.

Modern physics shows that an understanding of physical reality requires the BOTH/AND logic of the included medium, wherein the separateness of the boil and the flow is understood as ‘appearance’ and THERE IS NO BINARY, ONTOLOGICAL SPLITTING in the reality of our experience of inclusion in the Tao, aka the transforming relational continuum, aka the wave-field.

It is the Western culture ‘lock-in’ to EITHER/OR logic of the excluded medium as the default tool for trying to make sense out of reality hat is the crazy-maker impacting Western culture social collectives, via a ‘splitting’ (schizophrenia) which manifests at the level of the social collective (as the conservative-liberal polar splitting), and if this splitting is resisted by the individual, at the level of the individual (rather than the splitting OF INDIVIDUALS WITHIN THE COLLECTIVE, since the individual self becomes the ‘buffer’ for splitting in the social collective, this can give rise to huge pull-apart tensions in the individual who then seeks relief by cultivating an internal psychologically buffering self-other splitting within herself, which can become very disorienting and lead to behavioral instability diagnosed as ‘disorder presumed to be ‘root-source-arising’ within her’ (e.g. HER ‘bipolar disorder’ or HER ‘schizophrenia’).

In short, the problem begins with the general Western culture social collective’s embrace of classical EITHER/OR logic of the excluded medium as the basis for intellectual constructions of reality, a logic that NOTIONALLY/PSYCHOLOGICALLY splits apart the ‘inhabitant’ from the ‘habitat’, the ‘figure’ from the ‘ground’  (by contrast with the ‘quantum logic’ of modern physics which understands the distinction between ‘inhabitant’ and ‘habitat’ or ‘figure’ and ‘ground’ as ‘appearance, as with a boil in flow (e.g. a dynamic relational equilibrium) rather than a split into two thing-in-itself ONTOLOGICAL ENTITIES.  EITHER/OR LOGIC IS A CRAZY-MAKER  WHICH SPLITS THE WESTERN CULTURE SOCIAL COLLECTIVE INTO CONSERVATIVE AND LIBERAL, WHILE THOSE ‘NOT TAKING SIDES’  ACCOMMODATE THE SYNTHETIC LANGUAGE AND GRAMMAR PROVOKED SPLITTING, WITHIN THEIR SELF, which can get very confusing. The Western culture majority, having ‘split’  on a whole-self basis into conservative or liberal camps and thus seen as a ‘normal’, become the embodied definers of ‘normality’  and thus the adjudicators of what is ‘not normal’  (those not embracing one or the other of the social split into conservatives and liberals but try to buffer the split within their own ‘self’ fall into the category of ‘abnormals’  (bipolars, schizophrenics) for whom the ‘cure’  or  those the schizophrenic normals see as ‘abnormals’ lies in restoring the ‘abnormals’ the schizophrenic ‘normal’.

The problem with language is the problem with using language to ‘reason’  where we invoke the EITHER/OR logic of the excluded medium.  ‘Poetry’ on the other hand, serves us well (it employs relational inference as a means of sharing experience of inclusion in the Tao). ‘Reason’ based on the EITHER/OR logic of the excluded medium, on the other hand, is a ‘crazy-maker’!

“Nothing indeed has exercised a more simple power of persuasion than the error of Being, as it was formulated by the Eleatics for instance: in its favour are every word and every sentence that we utter! — Even the opponents of the Eleatics succumbed to the seductive powers of their concept of Being.  Among others there was Democritus in his discovery  of the atom. “Reason”  in language!  (... wherein …  Being is thought into and insinuated into everything as ‘cause’; from the concept ‘ego,’ alone, can the concept ‘Being’ proceed..…)  ….. Reason” in language! …  oh what a deceptive old witch it has been!  I fear we shall never be rid of God, so long as we still believe in grammar.” – Nietzsche, ‘Twilight of the Idols’

 

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