There is an intriguing topology in a ‘smile’ or ‘puckering up’ and it is called NONLOCALITY.  Like the ‘whorl’ in river flow, it seems to demand our obedient attention as it says; ‘READ MY LIPS: I AM COMING FROM MY OWN CENTRE!”.    But that is just a lie.   The LOCAL voice has hijacked the NONLOCAL reality.  If we INVERT our gaze and turn it upwards, we see the brilliant sun, and what’s more, we FEEL the radiating warmth that we intuitively know is the REAL SOURCE of the river-whorl.

In spite of the APPEARANCES, the whorl’s egotistical claims of LOCALITY is just self-centered make-believe.   The whorl, like all forms in the flow, is inherently NONLOCAL, like the Buddha’s smile.

How did we WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS reduce the NONLOCAL to the LOCAL?  We did by way of the ‘double error’ of language and grammar, as Nietzsche pointed out.  The first error is NAMING.  We invent a ‘name’ for whorl, and because the name persists without changing, even though the whorl is ‘made of continual change’ (We cannot step into the same river twice for it is not the same river, and we are not the same person stepping into it).

Naming decrees the persisting thing-in-itself being.  This ‘decree’ is an intellectual decree since our sensory experience is clearly informing us that the whorl is relational form in the flow that we cognitively freeze by our intellectual act of naming it.   Which should we believe?  Should we believe our intellect that, having named the flow-form, insists on its persisting thing-in-itself LOCAL BEING, or should we believe in our sensory experience of inclusion in a transforming relational continuum wherein everything is in flux?

Well, it is clear that if we want to use language to share our experience of inclusion within the transforming relational continuum, we need a scheme to refer to forms that shares what we are referring to as we are continuing to discuss it; i.e. hurricane Katrina may, in its basic nature be as NONLOCAL and thus as elusive as Mona Lisa’s smile, a special smile that binds us together as if we are both inclusions in ONE transforming relational continuum, which we are.  This is impossible to capture ‘on its own’, without actually experiencing it, but that is the artists talent to work away at trying the capture that which is impossible to capture; i.e. fixed imagery of our lived experience of inclusion in the Tao.

“The Tao that can be told is not the true Tao” – Lao Tzu

(sound of trumpets announcing the ENTRY OF THE DOUBLE ERROR).

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