-***- begin AUTHORS PREFACE to draw ATTENTION to a key WEST/EAST dividing subtlety hidden in language.- ***-

We WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS have built into our language architecture the binary logical abstraction of THE PICTURE;

 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.

By having a PICTURE “IN MIND”, our psyche shifts from FIGURE-and-GROUND-as-ONE as in our INTUITION of TOWNING as something APPEARING in the TRANSFORMING LANDSCAPE to the RATIO-based (rational) THINKING in terms of the GROWTH of a notional LOCAL THING-IN-ITSELF with “its own” (GRAMMAR-given) powers of AUTHORING actions and developments.  Instead of the TOWNING belonging to the TRANSFORMING which invokes our INTUITIVE ‘quantum logic’; the BOTH/AND logic of the INCLUDED medium, … we FALL BACK on the BINARY EITHER/OR logic of the EXCLUDED medium wherein the FIGURE-and-GROUND-are-TWO and the FIGURE is psychologically perceived as being SEPARATE and INDEPENDENT of the GROUND and thus free to AUTHOR ITS OWN GROWTH AND DEVELOPMENT.

INSTEAD OF TOWNING IN THE TRANSFORMING LANDSCAPE (figure-and-ground-as-one) we invoke a SUBSTITUTE REALITY wherein we imagine a series of PICTURES of the TOWN that imply that the TOWN is AUTHORING its own GROWTH and DEVELOPMENT over “TIME” as if the FIGURE were contained with an EMPTY CONTAINING SPACE and thus free to AUTHOR its own GROWTH and DEVELOPMENT in a ‘figure-and-grround-as-two’ SUBSTITUTE REALITY. 

The reduction of TOWNING in the TRANSFORMING LANDSCAPE to ‘the TOWN that is AUTHORING its own GROWTH and PRODUCTION of PEOPLE, GOODS and SERVICES is “thanks to the abstract DOUBLE ERROR of NAMING and GRAMMAR wherein we invent an absolute empty and infinite ‘containing space” in which a notional independent FIGURE can move around in, within a FIGURE-and-GROUND-into TWO based SUBSTITUTE REALITY.

The abstraction of FIGURE-and-GROUND-as-TWO is supported by the equally abstract BINARY LOGIC; the EITHER/OR logic of the EXCLUDED medium which brings with ambiguity such as ‘does the HURRICANE AUTHOR the stirring up of the ATMOSPHERE or does the ATMOSPHERE AUTHOR the stirring up of the HURRICANE?  NEITHER!  FIGURE-and-GROUND-are-only ONE, as Schroedinger, Bohm, Nietzsche and other philosophers have noted, and the DOUBLE ERROR of NAMING and GRAMMAR does not REALLY liberate FIGURE-from-GROUND.

Insofar as language-based sharing of sensory experience is concerned, without introducing a FIGURE-and-GROUND-as-TWO based SUBSTITUTE REALITY as we WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS are doing, the INEFFABLE-because-NONLOCAL REAL REALITY presents an obvious challenge to the architecting of language.  The EAST’s solution has been sussed out by Wittgenstein and expressed as follows in his final two propositions in TRACTATUS LOGICO-PHILOSOPHICUS.  These propositions outline the ‘ploy’ or ‘work-around’ of first using figure-and-ground-as-two language as an expedient for constructing a web of relations so that the RELATIONAL ASPECT, once achieved, can be employed as the new THINGLESS-CONNECTEDNESS figure-and-ground-as-one reality.  As Wittgenstein describes this ‘work-around’ provides an indirect means of expressing figure-and-ground as one (e.g. we can speak NOT ONLY of the GROWTH of the TOWN but also of the conjugate SHRINKING of the Wilderness (both of which are ‘figure-and-ground-as-TWO representations, … so that our INTUITIVE MIND can shift to the TOWNING in the TRANSFORMING LANDSCAPE) reality of our sensory experience of inclusion in TRANSFORMATION.

6.54 My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)

He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly.

 7.0 Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. (“Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen”),

–Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

 

NOTA BENE: Our sensory experience of inclusion in TOWNING in the TRANSFORMING LANDSCAPE is INEFFABLE-because-NONLOCAL but it is nevertheless our experiencing of REALITY.  Our voyeur rational constructions of ‘the TOWN that we say is a LOCAL THING-in-ITSELF that is AUTHORING its own GROWTH and PRODUCTION of goods and services is a FIGURE-and-GROUND-as-TWO ABSTRACTION that is given rational-mind legitimacy through our intellectual-linguistic construction of an entire SUBSTITUTE REALITY to support it.  The SUBSTITUTE REALITY that we construct with the DOUBLE ERROR or NAMING and GRAMMAR introduces ABSOLUTE EMPTY AND INFINITE SPACE as a CONTAINING GROUND to notionally (in the psyche) LIBERATE the FIGURE from the GROUND, employing GRAMMAR to animate the FIGURE as if in its own ‘independent’ right’.

WEST remains divided from EAST by the WEST’s practice of employing the figure-and-ground-as-two SUBSTITUTE REALITY as the OPERATIVE REALITY, while EAST, as also Modern physics, is using the intellectual abstraction of the figure-and-ground-as-two SUBSTITUTE REALITY … ONLY AS INFERENCE (a Wittgenstein ladder) for INFERRING the figure-and-ground-as-one REAL REALITY of our sensory experience of inclusion therein.

We WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS employ a LITERAL interpretation of DOUBLE ERROR based language that features LOCAL AUTHORING of ACTIONS AND DEVELOPMENTS as in the figure-and-ground-as-two terms; ‘the TOWN is GROWING’.   By constrast, EASTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS employ a FIGURATIVE interpretation of DOUBLE ERROR based language where the conceptualizing is figure-and-ground-as-one based; ‘THERE IS TOWNING IN THE TRANSFORMING LANDSCAPE’.

When we start to see PICTURES in our mind of, for example, A TOWN THAT IS GROWING, … WATCH OUT!   Because it may become difficult to ESCAPE from being haunted by (having the psyche hijacked by) that very limiting PICTURE of a LOCAL and EXPLICIT BEING with GRAMMAR given powers of LOCAL AUTHORING of GROWTH and PRODUCTION, eclipsing the NON-PICTURE-CONSTRAINED “TOWNING in the TRANSFORMING relational continuum, which cannot be ‘pointed to’ and ‘name-labelled’ since it is NONLOCAL-and-INEFFABLE.

WE ARE FREE TO UNDERSTAND —“THERE IS TOWNING IN THE TRANSFORMING LANDSCAPE” as accords with inclusion in the transforming relational continuum (the Wave-field aka the Tao) when we hear the trigger words ‘The TOWN is AUTHORING its own continuing GROWTH and PRODUCTION’  (i.e. we understand that such ostensibly LOCAL AUTHORSHIP leaves holes and tree stumps all over the NONLOCAL landscape, thus supporting the understanding that THERE IS TOWNING IN THE TRANSFORMING LANDSCAPE’ in spite of the linguistic reduction to notional LOCAL AUTHORING of GROWTH and PRODUCTION attributed to ‘THE TOWN’.  As Poincaré observes, ‘it is more convenient to suppose the earth turns round’ or in other other words, “it is more convenient to suppose that FIGURE-and-GROUND-are-TWO” and this is what we WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS have chosen to ‘teach’;

As regards the academies, they are established in order to regulate the studies of the pupils and are concerned not to have the program of teaching change very often: in such places, because it is a question of the progress of the students, it frequently happens that the things which have to be chosen are not those which are most true but those which are most easy. And by that division in things which makes different people form different judgements, it so happens that certain people are in error contrary to their own opinion.” – Johannes Kepler, ‘Harmonies of the World’

We WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS have chosen the SIMPLIFICATION OF CONVENIENCE of SPEAKING as if FIGURE-and-GROUND-are-TWO and this SIMPLIFYING TOOL has, as Emerson notes, ‘run away with the workman, the human with the divine’; i.e. the EFFABLE figure-and-ground-as-TWO has run away with the INEFFABLE figure-and-ground-as-one.  As Schroedinger notes, the WEST but not the EAST has escaped this falling prey to mistaking our own figure-and-ground-as-two simplifications of reality for reality.  The figure-and-ground-as-one REALITY of Modern physics and the EAST (indigenous aboriginal cultures, Taoism/Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta), while INEFFABLE, can be, and is INFERRED.  As Schroedinger points out whether to make this leap of inference or not distinguishes EAST (affirmative) from WEST (negative);

… 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’

 

-***- end AUTHORS PREFACE to draw ATTENTION to a key WEST/EAST dividing subtlety hidden in language.- ***-

 

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