Archive for July, 2020

PERSPECTIVE:

Just as schizophrenia is not resolved by getting the multiple personalities to cooperate with one another, the conflicts among races and nations are not resolved by ‘improving relations’ among these self-declared ‘independent entities’.  They are resolved by an awareness that these divisions DO NOT EXIST, or as Schroedinger puts it; ‘Subject and Object are only ONE”

This perspectival overview comes from exploring the clash in what EAST and WEST, respectively, hold to be ‘REALITY’ and how this very basic difference in understanding derives from language and grammar.  At the core the divide is how that which is perceived as GROWTH and DEVELOPMENT in the WEST is understood as TRANSFORMATION in the EAST.  A ‘side-effect’ of the WEST’s casting of dynamics in terms of GROWTH and DEVELOPMENT is the imputing of LOCAL SOURCING which is also the source of EGO, PRAISE and BLAME, whereas the EAST’s understanding in terms of TRANSFORMATION derives from INSPIRATION, the difference having been captured in the adage; “INSPIRATION fills the heart, EGO swells the head’. While these influences shape the social dynamics of both EAST and WEST, there is a question of precedence that informs the difference in EAST and WEST ‘psychology’.

PRIDE associates most strongly with the ‘DOUBLE ERROR’ of language and grammar and it this DOUBLE ERROR that comes into play in, for example, clear-cutting 160 acres of Wilderness land replacing it with biological monoculture such as fields of wheat.  By contrast, there is inspiration in living in a co-sustaining interdependent matrix of biodiversity in which ‘humanigs’ are just one of the interdependent participants. As F. David Peat observes in ‘Blackfoot Physics, ‘indigenous aboriginals’ planted a mix of corn, beans and squash (the ‘Three Sisters’) to sustain harmony within natural biodiversity.

We WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS speak of the GROWTH of LOCAL farmland under monocultural cultivation, but what of the reciprocal LOSS of Wilderness biodiversity that comes with it, the two not really being “two” but being co-included in the overall context of NONLOCAL TRANSFORMATION.

This short PERSPECTIVE entitled WESTERN CULTURE: Psychologically Hijacked by The DOUBLE ERROR, delves into how WESTERN and EASTERN minds differ in their views on how GROWTH and TRANSFORMATION fit into ‘reality’ and how the psychological reality of the ‘The EAST’ accords with the NONLOCAL-TRANSFORMATION based understanding of modern physics, indigenous aboriginal cultures, Taoism/Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta, while the psychological reality of the ‘WEST’ continues to accord with the LOCAL-SOURCING of actions and developments (LOCAL GROWTH) based understanding of pre-modern (Newtonian) physics thinking.

Note that GROWTH is a back-handed way of asserting that FIGURE and GROUND are TWO, while TRANSFORMATION casts FIGURE and GROUND as ONE.  Ambiguity arises where FIGURE and GROUND are TWO as to whether the FIGURE sources change in the ground or whether the GROUND sources change in the FIGURE. This is the BIPOLAR DISORDER that plagues WESTERN CULTURE which is absent in EASTERN CULTURE where the understanding is that FIGURE-and-GROUND-are-ONE.

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As Emerson puts it, ‘the tool has run away with the workman, the human with the divine.

Today’s reality has been deeply shaped by the development of LANGUAGE which is hugely useful in that it allows us to widely share (crude representations) of our experience so that we don’t all have to repeat the same mistakes or repeat the many unsuccessful trials that contribute to the development of valuable action and development approaches.

We don’t all have to be ‘pioneers’ and ‘get arrows up the arse’ in our quest for advancing our understanding.  LAGUAGE-based sharing, while hugely valuable, is no substitute for sensory experience, and the shortfall can and IS the source of psychological confusion that is driving us WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS CRAZY   Why “JUST” WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS and NOT EASTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS?  This is what this note is about, and the ‘short answer’ is that while EASTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS employ the reduction of sensory experience to intellectual language-based abstraction as a ‘Wittgenstein ladder’ to BOOTSTRAP or in other words ‘make an intuitive leap’ to understanding of the INEFFABLE that lies beyond the EXPLICIT reach of language, we WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS are employing language-based abstraction, as if it were a competent REALITY SURROGATE.

If the WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENT says that his farm has GROWN from a 2 acre spread to its current 160 acre expanse, the EAST (and here I include modern physics, indigenous aboriginal cultures Taoism/Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta) will object, pointing out that the purported “GROWTH” of the cultivated land area, is in reality associated with the reciprocal “SHRINKAGE” of Wilderness area such that TRANSFORMATION is what is ‘really’ going on.

In other words, there is no such thing as GROWTH since the GROWTH of a ‘thing’ implies that that ‘thing’ is separate and independent of the rest of reality as in the logic of FIGURE-and-GROUND-are-TWO, whereas in the ‘real reality’ of our sensory experience, the world is given only once and FIGURE-and-GROUND-are-ONE so that in the case of the cultivating of the land, what is going on is TRANSFORMATION and the notion of GROWTH is intellectual abstraction that is part of the CRAZY-MAKING belief system of us WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS.  Because we encourage GROWTH of industry, towns, etc. as if such GROWTH were ‘real’, we leave the condition of the Wilderness flapping like a loose sheet in the breeze.

In short, WE BLIND OURSELVES TO THE REALITY OF TRANSFORMATION.

The title of this note; WESTERN CULTURE: Psychologically Hijacked by The DOUBLE ERROR  is to further highlight the point made by Nietzsche, that we use the tool of the DOUBLE ERROR to notionally break up into pieces, the transforming relational continuum (the reality of our sensory experience). This is what makes the INEFFABLE  EFFABLE, by way of substituting something new that appears to be LOCAL, thus seeming to overcome that which is INEFFABLE-BECAUSE-NONLOCAL.

The FIRST ERROR is NAMING which imputes LOCAL thing-in-itself-BEING to a relational form-in-the-flow, and we conflate this with the SECOND ERROR of GRAMMAR to impute to the NAMING-instantiated thing-in-itself, the notional power of SOURCING actions and developments.   In place of an atmosphere that is hurricaning, we beget ‘the hurricane’ which GRAMMAR endows with ‘its own power of SOURCING actions and development.

This DOUBLE ERROR thus serves as to substitute a NEW language and intellection-based REALITY that replaces our INEFFABLE SENSORY-EXPERIENCE REALITY.  What we gain from this is an ability to render EFFABLE-because-LOCAL-and-EXPLICIT, that which is INEFFABLE-because-NOLOCAL-and-IMPLICIT.

What is going on here is NOT simply finding a means to EFFABLE-IZE the INEFFABLE, but fabricating an EFFABLE SUBSTITUTE PSEUDO-REALITY that can serve as INFERENCE of the real INEFFABLE sensory experience reality that lies beyond reach of the limited capabilities of the effable-izing tool of language.

What is a CRAZY-MAKER for us WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS is that we have fallen into the habit, after saying good-bye to poetic expression, of doing a direct substitute of our DOUBLE ERROR language based construction, for ‘reality’; i.e. we have traded out our sensory experience reality which is ineffable-because-nonlocal, for another pseudo-reality that is effable-because-local.  The DOUBLE ERROR of language and grammar is the device we use to condition the intellect into making the jump from the INEFFABLE-because-NONLOCAL to the EFFABLE-because-local.

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INTRODUCTION:

WESTERN CULTURE: DEFINED BY OUR DENIAL of NONLOCALITY

As Nietzsche points out, we inject into the psyche, the concept of LOCAL SOURCING by way of a DOUBLE ERROR of language and grammar.,

“In its origin language belongs in the age of the most rudimentary form of psychology. We enter a realm of crude fetishism when we summon before consciousness the basic presuppositions of the metaphysics of language, in plain talk, the presuppositions of reason. Everywhere it sees a doer and doing; it believes in will as the cause; it believes in the ego, in the ego as being, in the ego as substance, and it projects this faith in the ego-substance upon all things–only thereby does it first create the concept of “thing.” Everywhere “being” is projected by thought, pushed underneath, as the cause; the concept of being follows, and is a derivative of, the concept of ego. In the beginning there is that great calamity of an error that the will is something which is effective, that will is a capacity. Today we know that it is only a word.” – Nietzsche, Chapter 5 (Reason in Philosophy) of Twilight of the Idols.

The DOUBLE ERROR of NAMING and GRAMMAR is used to INVENT the concept of LOCAL BEING and notionally infuse within this invented LOCAL BEING, LOCAL SOURCING POWER, so as to comprise a system of communication that can OVER-RIDE the reality of NONLOCALITY.

For those cultures wherein language is acknowledged to be a poetic device, limited to INFERENCE that is useful for IMPLYING the NONLOCAL reality that lies beyond its EXPLICIT reach, we could keep our sanity, but our WESTERN CULTURE approach has been to abandon the use of the EXPLICIT-because-LOCAL in its role of INFERENCE of the IMPLICIT-because-NONLOCAL, and simply deploy the EXPLICIT as the basis for an OPERATIVE REALITY, ignoring and substituting the EXPLICIT and LOCAL for the IMPLICIT and NONLOCAL.  For example, it is one thing to invent ‘the DUNE’ for the manifesting of resonance based DUNING since resonance is NONLOCAL and we would be talking forever to capture the full story of the transforming relational continuum that such resonance belongs to, … but it is quite another thing to use ‘the DUNE’ as a reality substitute and, having thus ‘broken the NONLOCAL’ down into local pieces, reconstitute the dynamics of reality with GRAMMAR so that within a NEW, ABSTRACT (synthetic) pseudo-REALITY, we invent GRAMMAR to re-animate the pieces we have linguistically (and psychologically, by the impression that language induces in the psyche) BROKEN OUT.

Thus ‘the DUNE’ becomes a manageable, in the sense of EFFABLE, ‘piece’ of the INEFFABLE ‘DUNING’ that we can manipulate with GRAMMAR, imputing to it, its own LOCAL action and development SOURCING power.; e.g. “the DUNE is growing higher and longer and is shifting across the desert floor.   Voila, the reduction of the INEFFABLE-because-NONLOCAL ‘DUNING’ to the EFFABLE-because-LOCAL ‘DUNE’.

Nietzsche spends more time in exposing this DOUBLE ERROR than in addressing the problematic ramifications of this synthetic reduction of the INEFFABLE-because-NONLOCAL to the EFFABLE-because-LOCAL, … than BOHM, since BOHM is in the business of formulating mathematical models which hope to capture ‘reality’ in an ‘unreduced’ manner, if there is a mathematical language that would allow it.  It would have to be a mathematical language that was capable of handling both relativity physics and quantum physics.

In terms of a language that could deal with REALITY AS FLOW, Bohm had proposed (but not developed) ‘RHEOMODE’  but discovered that such a language had already been invented and was in use by indigenous aboriginals (e.g. Algonquin).  But one might say that a language is not ‘the whole story’ because the indigenous aboriginal languages have a design that facilitates the bringing into connective confluence, a multiplicity of perspectives wherein the ‘interference pattern’ constituting the OMNI-PERSPECTIVAL view which is no longer a subject-object splitting ‘view out there’ but is a holographic UNDERSTANDING in which one is included.

Excerpt from; https://goodshare.org/wp/from-lao-tzu-to-modern-physics/

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The reductive tool of language and grammar, however useful, in its raw state, for ‘sharing’ reasoned perspectives on ‘reality’ is innately ambiguous and incomplete;

“La raison du plus fort est toujours la meilleure’ – Lafontaine.

The individual reason-based perspective is innately incomplete (Goedel’s Theorem of Incompleteness).  This is the shortfall in visual perspectives such as Jean Valjean ‘stealing a loaf of bread’.  It fails to expose the larger ‘relational transformation’ dynamic wherein Jean Valjean was moving bread from regions of surplus to regions of deficiency, by giving the bread to a starving child.  The single perspectives of Western rational judgements, backed up by DNA tracing and super-scientific crime-scene-investigation (CSI) constrains itself to single perspectives and thus blinds itself to relational transformation, which requires the omni-perspectival view.

There is only a perspectival seeing, only a perspectival ‘knowing’; the more affects we are able to put into words about a thing, the more eyes, various eyes we are able to use for the same thing, the more complete will be our ‘concept’ of the thing, our ‘objectivity’.– Nietzsche

But in the WEST, the tool DOES run away with the workman, the human with the divine, and that is the PROMINENT feature THAT DISTINGUISHES THE CULTURES OF THE EAST FROM THE CULTURES OF THE WEST.

The language-based reduction of the ineffable Tao enables an effable reduction that opens the way to sharing a reduced but effable semblance; e.g. non-local resonance (wave-field dynamic) that manifests as ‘duning’ is ineffable in that it is inextricably included in the Tao (it is a nonlocal phenomenon).  Language can reduce it from a NONLOCAL to a LOCAL phenomenon; i.e. to a ‘dune’ which grammar can notionally re-animate in a local sense (‘the dune is growing larger and moving south).  Now we can get down to sharing understanding of ‘reality’ (or some crude reduction of it) by talking about local, explicit things-themselves and their explicit actions and developments via the ‘double error’ of language and grammar.  This will be an abstract constructed reality good enough for sharing some crude reduced sense of reality, but certainly not qualified as a substitute for the Tao.

The WESTERN culture craziness lies in SUBSTITUTING LANGUAGE BASED (DOUBLE ERROR) REDUCTION OF THE TAO FOR THE TAO, THE EFFABLE FOR THE INEFFABLE.  THE EAST USES THE REDUCTION MERELY FOR INFERENCE AND NOT AS A SUBSTITUTE REALITY; I.E. IN THE EAST, THE TAO REMAINS THE PRIMARY REALITY

We WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS are thus DEFINED BY OUR DENIAL of NONLOCALITY

* * *  end of introduction * * *

The EXPLICIT and the IMPLICIT: vis a vis The WEST and the EAST

David Bohm’s exploration of the EXPLICATE ORDER vis a vis the IMPLICATE ORDER is not just an exploration of the ORDER OUT THERE IN THE WORLD, but it is at the same time and exploration of how we come to understand the world, and how language influences our understanding.

For example, in understanding reality as an all-including Wave-field as suggested by modern physics, and by the philosophical impression reality of Heraclitus, indigenous aboriginal cultures, Taoism/Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta, there is no “I” as a LOCAL thing-in-itself with its own powers of SOURCING actions and developments.  We are included relational forms in the NONLOCAL flow (the ineffable Wave-field aka the transforming relational continuum aka the Tao).  Schroedinger comments on how this understanding has remained largely in the EAST and has been ignored in the WEST.  My view is that this difference in understanding reality DEFINES WEST and EAST.  In Shroedinger’s words;

… In Christian terminology to say: ‘Hence I am God Almighty’ sounds both blasphemous and lunatic. But please disregard these connotations for the moment and consider whether the above inference is not the closest a biologist can get to proving God and immortality at one stroke.

In itself, the insight is not new. The earliest records to my knowledge date back some 2,500 years or more. From the early great Upanishads the recognition ATHMAN = BRAHMAN (the personal self equals the omnipresent, all-comprehending eternal self) was in Indian thought considered, far from being blasphemous, to represent the quintessence of deepest insight into the happenings of the world. The striving of all the scholars of Vedanta was, after having learnt to pronounce with their lips, really to assimilate in their minds this grandest of all thoughts.

 Again, the mystics of many centuries, independently, yet in perfect harmony with each other (somewhat like the particles in an ideal gas) have described, each of them, the unique experience of his or her life in terms that can be condensed in the phrase: DEUS FACTUS SUM (I have become God).

To Western ideology the thought has remained a stranger.  – Erwin Schroedinger, ‘What is LIfe’, ‘Epilogue: On Determinism and Free Will’

This ‘modern physics’ view, which coincides with the EASTERN view, is where we are ONE-WITH-EVERYTHING; i.e. wherein FIGURE-and-GROUND-are-ONE as in the BOTH/AND logic of the INCLUDED medium which has been termed Quantum Logic.

This ‘quantum logic’ is not a logic that delivers understanding in terms of “things-and-their-dynamics’, but rather a logic that delivers understanding in terms of “dynamics and their things”.

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INTRODUCTION:  In the Wave-field reality, everything is in flux and thus reality is the IMPLICIT order in the world while the EXPLICIT comes only by way of REPRESENTATIONS as in language and pictures.  The pictures of a child ‘growing up’ is a language based Trojan Horse that fools us into thinking that “GROWTH” is something ‘real’ and that NAMING-instantiated ‘things-in-themselves’ such ‘the child’ are also ‘real’, however, the statement ‘the CHILD GROWS’ is a DOUBLE ERROR of NAMING and GRAMMAR that imposes a substitute reality in the psyche that we employ IN PLACE OF the sensory experience reality of inclusion in relational TRANSFORMATION.  This substitute reality based on the LOCAL and EXPLICIT gives us a means of INFERRING the “real reality” of the NONLOCAL and IMPLICIT.   In the EAST, as in modern physics, it is not forgotten that the IMPLICIT-and-NONLOCAL is the natural but INEFFABLE reality while the EXPLICIT-and-LOCAL is the abstract but EFFABLE intellectual surrogate reality.

While the EAST and modern physics employs the EXPLICIT-LOCAL abstract reduction of reality merely as a tool of INFERENCE of the IMPLICIT-NONLOCAL relational reality, the WEST employs the EXPLICIT-LOCAL abstract reduction as the intellectual ‘operative reality’.  This article explores how and why our WESTERN ‘reality’, because it INVERTS the natural order by putting the EXPLICIT in an unnatural precedence over the IMPLICIT, is a CRAZY-MAKER.

* * *  end of introduction * * *    * * * see also FOOTNOTE * * *

As Kipling opined;– EAST is EAST and WEST is WEST and never the twain shall meet.

This is true in a certain sense; e.g. I am now an EAST thinker whereas I was raised as a WEST thinker and this is to share that sense.

It is easy to point to the difference, but not as easy to ‘embody’ the difference within one’s behaviour.  It concerns how we understand ‘reality’ and it is easy to intellectually specify the difference; i.e. if we are raised in the EAST’s tradition (modern physics, indigenous aboriginal cultures, Taoism/Buddhism, Advaita Vedanta we will understand FIGURE-and-GROUND-as-ONE (which is the understanding that I have come to embrace’), whereas our WESTERN upbringing has us ‘construct reality’ on the basis of FIGURE-and-GROUND-as-TWO.

FIGURE-and-GROUND-as-ONE is where our distinguishing of form is IMPLICIT whereas FIGURE-and-GROUND-as-TWO is where our distinguishing of form is EXPLICIT.  If we, for example, experience inclusion in a windblown sandy landscape AND IF we can suspend the NAMING and GRAMMAR that we have trained ourselves to reduce our experience to, we will experience inclusion in the resonance field of the duning phenomenon wherein TRANSFORMATION is in precedence over ‘things’ and ‘what things do’.  That is, TRANSFORMATION is NONLOCAL and IMPLICIT and it is the stuff of our prelingual sensory experience and it is only when we invoke intellectual talk in terms of LOCAL and EXPLICIT DUNES and THEIR GROWTH and DEVELOPMENT and MOVEMENT, and cast this as the PRIMARY reality, that we WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS part ways with the EAST. The EAST never lets go of the understanding that the NONLOCAL and IMPLICIT (and thus INEFFABLE) is the primary reality.

That’s it in a nutshell!  While the EAST preserves the natural primacy of the IMPLICIT and NONLOCAL over the EXPLICIT and LOCAL, the WEST elevates the EXPLICIT and LOCAL into an unnatural primacy over the IMPLICIT and NONLOCAL.  Of course, the ramifications of which of those very different understandings of reality serve as the ‘operative reality’ can be many and varied.

For example, in the indigenous aboriginal tradition, as in modern physics, ‘everything is related’ (mitakuye oyasin) so if ‘someone misbehaves’, this is understood as an emergent ‘relational dissonance’ that develops within the web of social and physical relations.   The required action is thus the restoring of relational harmony and there is no assumption that the individual through whom the relational dissonance ‘channelled’ is the SOURCE of the dissonance.

But as we well know, our WESTERN CULTURE tradition is to assume LOCAL SOURCING of the ‘relational dissonance’ which means that the action required to attenuate or eliminate the dissonance will ADDRESS the LOCAL SOURCE.

Note that in an indigenous aboriginal culture, even though the person is simply a conduit for the emergence of conflict that derives from relational dissonance, and even though the community may understand the problem in terms of a relational dissonance that is innately NONLOCAL, a person who is a habitual ‘lightning rod’ may be ‘taken out’ NOT because he is assumed to be the SOURCE of the violence/dissonance but as an emergency measure while the community seeks to resolve the deeper, relational source.

There may even be an ‘apology’ to the ‘lightning rod’ by those ‘taking him out’, acknowledging that while he is NOT the SOURCE of the dissonance, he is a persistent channeler of the dissonance.  In other words, shutting down the channel is an expedient, short-term solution, pending the addressing of a deeper and more endemic ‘sourcing’.

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