Archive for September 6, 2020
Recovering from Western Culture Visualizing Madness
0Western languages are strongly VISUAL image dependent. Our rhetoric constructs cartoon-like depictions explaining, praising or mocking VISUALLY familiar figures and forms. A person is something relationally complex, a ‘flow-feature’ that is continually transforming that is far too complex to be summoned to mind by a fixed symbol such as a NAME or a VISUAL ICON aka PICTURE. In fact, how could we explain a humaning in this world without acknowledging innumerable webs of relational influence that end up ‘making the individual’ ‘one with everything’?
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 – Philosophical Investigations.
That’s right, draw a picture or take a photograph and then we can trap that individual inside his own picture. Language is what we use to make ‘word pictures’ which LOCALIZE and humaning in the manner that the word ‘hurricane’ localizes an inherently NONLOCAL relational fluidity. Our actual experiencing of the world is sensory-relations based but our intellectual understanding of the world is highly picture-based since language presents us with word-pictures, whether of the fairy princess or the big bad wolf, and the complexities of real people, as in Bob Dylan’s lyrics, … ‘ain’t never been photographed’.
This essay explores the role of VISUALIZATION in our WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENT social collective and points out how VISUALIZATION such as reduces TRANSFORMATION to GROWTH is a WESTERN CULTURE CRAZY-MAKER.
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This note is a brief assessment of why WESTERN CULTURE is a CRAZY-MAKER and how one may extract oneself from the grips of WESTERN CULTURE CRAZY-MAKING even while one is immersed within it.
The single point that one may remember NOT to forget that encapsulates the essence of WESTERN CULTURE CRAZY-MAKING is the LUNACY of belief in GROWTH. This LUNACY derives from our given a foundational role to VISION which isolates instead of FEELING which includes. Innate in our sensing experience is our ‘inertial guidance’ where we don’t need VISION to inform us of our inclusion in the transforming relational continuum. Blindfold us and give us a ride on the back of a motorcycle, up town and down town and all around the town and the likelihood is that, blind-folded or not, our sensory experience will be informing us in terms of our relative spatial relational sense. Is this an embellishment that ‘adds to’ our visual sensing? NO! Our visual sensing is an embellishment that adds to our gravity-informed sense of inclusion in the transforming relational continuum.
Gravity gives rise to ‘inertial guidance’, a kind of ‘gut feeling’ or ‘intuition’ that is implicit and less deceptive than visual sensing. It would be more ‘telling’ to weigh visitors to the gold mine before and after their visit then doing a visual body search.
VISUAL observation of the GROWTH of a volcano is something we will talk about as if it is a ‘reality in itself’ but extrusion over here is implies ‘intrusion’ elsewhere and thus the reality of TRANSFORMATION and illusion (delusion) of VISUALLY perceived GROWTH.
There is no such thing as GROWTH, not of children, not of towns, not of corporations, not of populations, not of the incidence of COVID 19, because GROWTH, as Nietzsche has quite rightly pointed out, is a DOUBLE ERROR of NAMING and GRAMMAR.
The first thing we need to support the abstraction of GROWTH is a notional LOCAL THING-IN-ITSELF which we can say is ‘undergoing GROWTH’. THis ‘thing’ could be a person (a notional LOCAL thing-in-itself), a town (a notional LOCAL thing-in-itself), or a business (a notional LOCAL thing-in-itself). These notional (NAMING-instantiated) things-in-themselves are said to GROW, but this is only a WESTERN CULTURE abstraction based on the notion that FIGURE-and-GROUND-are-TWO which means, for example, that the TOWN can grow larger and take up more space in the countryside; i.e. we say that THE TOWN ACTIVELY GROWS while the countryside plays the role of a PASSIVE-SUBMISSIVE ‘holding tank’. In modern physics as in the indigenous aboriginal culture, we would instead speak of TRANSFORMATION wherein the Wilderness SHRINKS in reciprocal relation to the GROWTH of the TOWN (cultivated area).
This choice of how we interpret APPEARANCE, in the very different terms of GROWTH or TRANSFORMATION pivots the cultures of EAST (belief in TRANSFORMATION which is purely RELATIONAL) and WEST (BELIEF IN GROWTH as in CREATION of ‘something not previously existing’ and DESTRUCTION of something ‘previsously EXISTING’: e.g. the GROWTH of a FOREST or the GROWTH of area burned by a forest fire).
While the EAST opts for TRANSFORMATION as ‘the dynamic of reality’, the WEST opts for CREATION and DESTRUCTION as ‘the dynamics of reality’.
For a brief discussion on the difference between GROWTH and TRANSFORMATION see the following;
https://goodshare.org/wp/the-usurping-of-transformation-by-growth-topology-by-geometry/
The simple TWO PART THESIS being advanced here is that;
-A- There is no such thing as GROWTH since there FIGURE and GROUND are ONE and the DOUBLE ERROR of NAMING and GRAMMAR does not liberate the FIGURE from the GROUND, allowing the FIGURE to GROW in its own right. When the town is said to GROW, the Wilderness reciprocally shrinks and what we have instead of GROWTH is TRANSFORMATION.
-B- THERE IS ONLY TRANSFORMATION (that is the nature of the transforming relational continuum aka the Wave-field aka the Tao.
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