Archive for May, 2021

 PROLOGUE: “Reason” is the MALE-ASSERTIVE aspect of the coniunctio oppositorum of TRANSFORMATION.  The butterfly emerges in conjugate relation to the decline of the worm.  To speak of the GROWTH of the butterfly would be a psychological error that we foist on ourselves with the error of GRAMMAR which selectively isolates the male-assertive component of dynamics and simply ignores the female-accommodating component.  The bulldozers arrive to support the GROWTH of the TOWN because what is REALLY going on is TRANSFORMATION with its MALE-FEMALE conjugate aspects of GENERATIVE GROWTH and DEGENERATIVE ACCOMMODATION.

WESTERN CULTURE has designed its languages so as to SPLIT TRANSFORMATION INTO TWO SEPARATE (Male and Female) PARTS and IGNORE THE FEMALE, thus TRANSFORMATION is reduced to GROWTH and all of the crumbling and collapse of the old to make possible the emergence of the new is IGNORED.   That is, in WESTERN CULTURE language based REPRESENTATION, we design into our language, representation that SUBSTITUTES GROWTH FOR TRANSFORMATION.  There is an ‘economy’ in this REDUCTION of TRANSFORMATION (which is NONLOCAL and IMPLICIT/RELATIONAL) to GROWTH which is LOCAL and EXPLICIT, in that by orienting to LOCAL GROWTH instead of NONLOCAL TRANSFORMATION, we can fabricate a SUBSTITUTE REALITY on a LOCAL PARTS-wise basis, as in the example of ‘the TOWN that is GROWING’.   This one-sided male-assertive construct LOCALIZES our representation of reality, or more accurately, INTRODUCES A LOCALIZED SUBSTITUTE REALITY where we NOW need address ONLY the actions and development of a notional LOCAL THING-IN-ITSELF, ignoring the REAL REALITY of overall TRANSFORMATION.

WESTERN CULTURE languages have a DOUBLE ERROR based architecture which supports the construction of SUBSTITUTE REALITY wherein GROWTH takes the place of TRANSFORMATION, a SUBSTITUTION that allows us to FRAGMENT ‘REALITY’ (in which case it is no longer ‘reality’ but instead a ‘substitute reality’) into LOCAL PIECES such as ‘the TOWN’.  This opens the way to use of the abstract concept, GROWTH, based on a LOCAL THING-IN-ITSELF. The GROWTH of a THING is RATIO based and self-referential; i.e. the notion is that whatever is initially present is increasing in size.  This RATIO-ing up of ‘what is already there’, creates a SUBSTITUTE REALITY wherein we are no longer obligated to address the conjugate impact on the overall containing space as is the REALITY in our sense experience of inclusion in TRANSFORMATION.

THERE is no such thing as GROWTH of a LOCAL THING-IN-ITSELF in our sense-experience reality since (a) there is not such thing as a ‘thing-in-itself’, and (b) there is no such thing as an empty space of infinite extent that would be necessary for a form to GROW IN ITS OWN (male assertive) RIGHT without CONJUGATE (female accommodating) of the common GROUND it is situationally included in.

GROWTH is only possible in an abstract SUBSTITUTE REALITY wherein, so we say, FIGURE and GROUND are TWO separate and independent ontological entities.   In sense-experience REALITY, FIGURE-and-GROUND-are-ONE and the only possible dynamic is NONLOCAL, RELATIONAL, TRANSFORMATION.

One-sided (male-assertive) abstractions such as GROWTH and PRODUCTION allow the construction of a SUBSTITUTE REALITY that is notionally LOCAL and BOUNDED in SPACE and TIME, … as far as our SUBSTITUTE REALITY ‘story-telling’ is concerned, a ‘story-telling’ which can be of great utility since it ‘gets around’ (substitutes for) the INEFFABLE-because-NONLOCAL-and-IMPLICIT (purely relational) SENSE EXPERIENCE REALITY.

With our WESTERN CULTURE languages, we can construct this SUBSTITUTE REALITY based on BREAKING OUT A FRAGMENT of the transforming relational continuum (the reality of our sense-experience).  Thanks to this breaking out of a FRAGMENT of reality, such as ‘the TOWN’ (in reality, the TOWNING in the TRANSFORMING RELATIONAL CONTINUUM), we move our psyche inside a SUBSTITUTE REALITY wherein the SEPARATE FRAGMENTS are now understood as our OPERATIVE REALITY.

THUS, TRANSFORMATION, which is NONLOCAL and IMPLICIT (relational) is REDUCED, within the SUBSTITUTE REALITY, to GROWTH which is LOCAL and EXPLICIT allowing us to break off PIECES OF REALITY and setting them up as new LOCAL SUBSTITUTE REALITIES that we can ‘get a handle on’ because they are now LOCAL and EXPLICIT as in the example of the TOWN that is GROWING that we have SUBSTITUTED for the TOWNING in the TRANSFORMING RELATIONAL CONTINUUM,

Having created the convenient language-based tool that allows us to construct a SUBSTITUTE REALITY which is a local FRAGMENT of sense-experience reality that we can GO INTO, such as ‘the TOWN’ and manipulate the contents IN DETAIL, as if the CONTENTS were local things-in-themselves (thanks to the power of language in constructing substitute realities).   So, are the houses under construction in our SUBSTITUTE REALITY of ‘THE TOWN’ … NOT REAL?   ARE THE DOORS AND WINDOWS and the CONCRETE FOUNDATION and the WALLS AND ROOFING or the HOUSES WE HAVE CONSTRUCTED,… NOT REAL?

How about we acknowledge that these things are MATERIAL and TANGIBLE but also acknowledge that there is a GREATER, ALL-INCLUDING REALITY wherein EVERYTHING IS IN FLUX.  This takes us back to where we have used language to SPLIT APART the MALE-ASSERTIVE CONSTRUCTION OF THE TOWN and the FEMALE-ACCOMMODATING of the Wilderness.  Our language DROPS OUT the FEMALE ACCOMMODATING ASPECT of REALITY (it becomes IMPLICIT).  EVERY NEW HOUSE WE CONSTRUCT implies a CONJUGATE SHRINKING of the Wilderness and the CONSUMPTION of FOREST for BUILDING SUPPLIES etc. etc. meaning that what is REALLY going on is TRANSFORMATION of the LANDSCAPE.

In a more comprehensive language architecture that didn’t have SO MUCH DROP OUT AS ENGLISH (the SAE languages in Whorf’s classification), we would NOT LEAVE OUT the CONJUGATE FEMALE ACCOMMODATING component of TRANSFORMATION, as leads to a reduction in our language representations to CONSTRUCTION and GROWTH and if these were REAL and sense-experience affirmable.  CONSTRUCTION and GROWTH are NOT REAL, they are one-sided male-assertive only ABSTRACTIONS.  They are A WAY OF TALKING ABOUT TRANSFORMATION which avoids the NONLOCAL and IMPLICIT nature of TRANSFORMATION by fabricating a SUBSTITUTE REALITY wherein the LOCAL and EXPLICIT can play the FOUNDATIONAL ROLE in the REPRESENTATION.  Such REPRESENTATION is of a SUBSTITUTE REALITY and no longer a representation of REALITY since the transforming relational continuum is in continual flux.

Indigenous aboriginal languages form representations of the LOCAL and EXPLICIT, not by CRUDELY CHOPPING THEM OUT OF THE TRANSFORMING CONTINUUM AND PRESENTING THEM AS CONCRETE THINGS-IN-THEMSELVES, but by using relational inference (e.g. ‘dances with wolves’)

In the writings of Heraclitus, to a larger degree than ever before, the images do not impose their burden of concreteness but are entirely subservient to the achievement of clarity and precision.”  — Frankfort et al, ‘The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man’

“English compared to Hopi is like a bludgeon compared to a rapier.” – Benjamin Whorf [i.e. Whorf is speaking of ‘English’ employed rationally rather than relationally (poetically), delivering content in terms of the absolute, local and explicit]

NOTA BENE: The message in this PROLOGUE is that while our sense-experience reality is of INCLUSION IN TRANSFORMATION which is INEFFABLE-because-NONLOCAL-and-IMPLICIT (relational), we WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS have developed a language architecture that CIRCUMVENTS this ‘complexity’ by creating a SIMPLER SUBSTITUTE REALITY based on the ABSTRACTIONS of “GROWTH” and ‘PRODUCTION”, male assertive concepts IMPUTE the SPLITTING APART of FIGURE and GROUND INTO TWO ONTOLOGICAL ENTITIES and then constructing a SUBSTITUTE REALITY based on the FIGURE… AS IF THE FIGURE WERE RE-SITUATED WITHIN AN ABSOLUTE EMPTY SPACE OF INFINITE EXTENT, … thus avoiding the complexity in sense-experience reality (inclusion in the transforming relational continuum) that renders it INEFFABLE-because-NONLOCAL-and-IMPLICIT (purely relatoinal).   WHAT WE WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS FORGET, IN USING LANGUAGE THAT CONSTRUCTS SUBSTITUTE REALITIES THAT ARE EFFABLE AT THE EXPENSE OF NO LONGER CAPTURING SENSE-EXPERIENCE REALITY, IS THAT OUR SUBSTITUTE REALITY CONSTRUCTING LANGUAGE IS ONLY GOOD FOR “INFERENCE” OF THE SENSE-EXPERIENCE REALITY THAT IS INEFFABLE BECAUSE NONLOCAL AND IMPLICIT.

WESTERN CULTURE PSYCHOLOGICAL CONFUSION IS ARISING FROM OUR USE OF THIS “SUBSTITUTE REALITY” AS OUR “OPERATIVE REALITY” hence Emerson’s ‘the tool runs away with the workman, the human with the divine’.   When we hear talk of GROWTH and PRODUCTION, we must remember that these are abstractions of convenience.  These SUBSTITUTE REALITY based terms; GROWTH and PRODUCTION are convenient because they are LOCAL and EXPLICIT, MEANWHILE, the SUBSTITUTE REALITY obscures (eclipses by substituting for) the REAL (sense-experience affirmable) reality of TRANSFORMATION which is NONLOCAL and IMPLICIT.

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This essay entitled When FIGURE-and-GROUND-as-ONE becomes FIGURE-and-GROUND-as-TWO explores the basic SPLIT in our way of understanding reality that divides us and can polarize us against each other, based on our different ways of ‘linguistically representing sense-experience reality’.   The “EAST” is the designation given to those of us who understand FIGURE-and-GROUND-as-ONE, which is reaffirmed by Modern physics and has been the understanding of indigenous aboriginal cultures, Taoism/Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta.  The “WEST” is the designation given to those of us who understand FIGURE-and-GROUND-as-TWO, which is confirmed by the BINARY LOGIC based understanding of Newtonian physics which, as Benjamin Whorf has shown, derives from the early WESTERN CULTURE language architectures of Europe.

Whorf’s point is that IT IS LANGUAGE that shapes our representations of reality, rather than sense-experience reality shaping our language-based representations.   Nietzsche reaffirms Whorf’s principle in pointing out the DOUBLE ERROR of NAMING and GRAMMAR which liberates the FIGURE from the GROUND and allows us to construct FIGURE-and-GROUND-as-TWO based representations such as ‘the TOWN is GROWING’, … giving us this SUBSTITUTE REALITY which totally occludes our FIGURE-and-GROUND-as-ONE sense-experience grounded understanding of reality.  FIGURE-and-GROUND-as-TWO propositions such as ‘The TOWN is GROWING’ is INTELLECTUAL ABSTRACTION that distracts our psyche from our FIGURE-and-GROUND-as-ONE sense-experience reality (wherein our sense-experience informs us of our inclusion in the transforming relational continuum aka the Wave-field aka the Tao).

This essay shares understanding that reconfirms Whorf’s hypothesis that language shapes worldview.

The hypothesis of linguistic relativity, also known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, the Whorf hypothesis, or Whorfianism, is a principle suggesting that the structure of a language affects its speakers’ worldview or cognition, and thus people’s perceptions are relative to their spoken language.

In particular, this essay reviews how our WESTERN CULTURE languages (Whorf’s SAE language architecture variant) reduces the QUANTUM logic based (FIGURE-and-GROUND-as-ONE based) understanding of reality to the BINARY LOGIC based (FIGURE-and-GROUND-are-TWO based) understanding of reality.   The problematic result is that we WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS habitually FRAGMENT reality, breaking it down into NOTIONAL separate pieces and then using GRAMMAR to impute the ‘liberated fragment’ its own powers of action, growth and development.    Our WESTERN CULTURE language representations, as a result, are constructions of SUBSTITUTE REALITIES that seem to exist and function ‘on their own’ as separate fragments or ‘islands’ within an absolute empty and infinite containing space.   These WESTERN CULTURE SUBSTITUTE REALITIES are being employed as OPERATIVE REALITIES and this, as Bohm, Nietzsche and others have pointed out, is breeding SHIZOPHRENIA in our WESTERN CULTURE as manifests in the social collective in the Conservative-Liberal polarized opposition.

The indigenous aboriginal cultures, Taoism/Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta, since they embrace sense experience reality consistent FIGURE-and-GROUND-as-ONE language structure, are not smitten by the psychological FRAGMENTATION that comes with the FIGURE-and-GROUND-as-TWO based SUBSTITUTE REALITY of WESTERN CULTURE language architectures.

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Our understanding of reality is influenced by language and the languages of EAST and WEST have built-in-‘topologies’ that shape our understanding of reality differently;

THE EAST:  Here, the understanding of reality is in terms of TRANSFORMING which can be understood in QUANTUM LOGIC terms wherein FIGURE-and-GROUND-are-ONE, as in the Modern physics relation between the electromagnetic field and matter wherein ‘matter’ is a ‘condensation of the electromagnetic field.  The continuing circle of re-congealing into tangible matter and redissolving into Wave-field as in the case of EARTHING or PLANETING in the all-pervading electromagnetic field manifests as TRANSFORMATION of the contents of the containing space. wherein CONTAINER-and-CONTENT-are-ONE and are continually undergoing TRANSFORMATION.  That is the basic nature of the ‘field-matter’ relation as discerned by Modern physics.

Since according to our present conceptions the elementary particles of matter are also, in their essence, nothing else than condensations of the electromagnetic field— Einstein, ‘Ether and the Theory of Relativity’

TRANSFORMATIOJN is symbolically represented by the Tai-Chi symbol which suggests the FIGURE-and-GROUND-as-ONE relation.

THE WEST: Here, the understanding of reality is in terms of CREATION and DESTRUCTION which can be understood in BINARY LOGIC terms wherein FIGURE-and-GROUND-are-TWO, and in the relation between material being that “IS” and emptiness that “IS NOT”, setting up the two opposing conditions of EITHER “IS” OR “IS NOT”.  This BINARY LOGIC, when incorporated into language-and-thought based representation, requires the concepts of CREATION/BIRTH and DESTRUCTION/DEATH. Reality based on the BINARY LOGIC couple of CREATION and DESTRUCTION give rise to a SUBSTITUTE REALITY which bypasses all references to TRANSFORMATION and “insists” that something EITHER “IS” OR “IS NOT”.   Newtonian physics encapsulates this WESTERN concept of reality based on the BINARY LOGIC whereby something EITHER “IS” OR “IS NOT”, removing all possibility of envisaging ‘reality’ in terms of TRANSFORMATION and thus introducing a SUBSTITUTE REALITY wherein basic change can only come through CREATION/BIRTH and/or DESTRUCTION/DEATH.

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