Author’s Preface: 

 

WESTERN CULTURE has evolved a STANDARD LINGUISTIC CONCEPTUALIZING HABIT which DROPS OUT acknowledgement that we are included in an ENERGY-CHARGED PLENUM and therefore WE ARE “NOT”, as we commonly make out to be the case in our everyday speech, INCLUDED IN AN ABSOLUTE EMPTY AND INFINITE SPACE.

 

PSYCHOLOGICAL ISSUES are engendered as a CONSEQUENCE of the REALITY that SPACE IS NOT EMPTY while our LANGUAGE PRETENDS that it IS EMPTY.

 

BY using LANGUAGE that REDUCES THE ENERGY-CHARGED PLENUM to EMPTY SPACE, we SIMPLIFY our CONCEPTUALIZATIONS of REALITY in that we need concern ourselves, as far as our language is concerned, ONLY with actions that are MALE ASSERTING/ACTUALIZING such as ‘THE TOWN IS GROWING’ (as if within an EMPTY SPACE) in which case we make no accounting for the CONJUGATE ‘SHRINKING OF WILDERNESS’ and thus we OBSCURE the overall reality of the TRANSFORMING of the LANDSCAPE, and push ahead with LANGUAGE that has us IMAGINING what we call “GROWTH” of the TOWN when THERE IS NO SUCH THING as “GROWTH” in the REAL WORLD of our SENSE EXPERIENCE which is informing us of the TRANSFORMING of the LANDSCAPE, … AS IS CAPTURED IN INDIGENOUS ABORIGINAL LINGUISTIC CONCEPTUALIZING SCHEMES, and as Bohm and Alan Watts and others point out “WE WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS SHOULD BE CAPTURING TRANSFORMATION RATHER THAN GROWTH IN OUR LINGUISTIC CONCEPTUALIZING SCHEME”.

 

We WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS, because of the SIMPLIFICATIONS we have built into our LINGUISTIC CONCEPTUALIZING SCHEME such as the SUBSTITUTING of EMPTY SPACE for the ENERGY-CHARGED PLENUM, has allowed us to conceive of ourselves AS IF WE ARE LIVING IN A REALITY THAT FEATURES “GROWTH”, “DEVELOPMENT” and “PRODUCTION” of goods, while all the while, and as the LANGUAGES of indigenous aboriginals and MODERN PHYSICS are reporting, WE ARE INCLUDED WITHIN A TRANSFORMING RELATIONAL CONTINUUM.  So, there is a PROBLEM here and it is not just that “GROWTH”, “DEVELOPMENT” and “PRODUCTION” are “TOO SIMPLE” and fail to capture the reality we affirm with our sense-experience, the PROBLEM is that we are CONSTRUCTING WITH LANGUAGE, A SUBSTITUTE REALITY based on MALE ASSERTING/ACTUALIZING ONLY while our SENSE-EXPERIENCE “IS INFORMING US DIRECTLY OF OUR INCLUSION IN THE TRANSFORMING RELATIONAL CONTINUUM” wherein “EVERYTHING IS IN FLUX” as Heraclitus said, and as is the understanding of Modern physics, Indigenous aboriginals, Taoists/Buddhists and Advaita Vedanta.

 

WE WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS, in order to remove ourselves from the deepening PROBLEMS of FRAGMENTATION of OBSCURANTISM pointed out by Bohm, need to be using a FLOW-BASED LINGUISTIC CONCEPTUALIZING SCHEME and BREAK OUR HABIT of speaking in the FALSE TERMS of GROWTH, DEVELOPMENT and PRODUCTION whereby we MAKE THE MISTAKE of constructing SIMPLIFIED PSEUDO-REALITIES which we are SUBSTITUTING for our SENSE-EXPERIENCE GROUNDED REALITY”, a MISTAKE that is the SOURCE of FRAGMENTATION.

 

1 FRAGMENTATION AND WHOLENESS  (from Wholeness and the Implicate Order, David Bohm, 1980)

The title of this chapter is ‘Fragmentation and wholeness’. It is especially important to consider this question today, for fragmentation is now very widespread, not only throughout society, but also in each individual and this is leading to a kind of general confusion of the mind, which creates an endless series of problems and interferes with our clarity of perception so seriously as to prevent us from being able to solve most of them.

Thus art, science, technology, and human work in general, are divided up into specialities, each considered to be separate in essence from the others. Becoming dissatisfied with this state of affairs, men have set up further interdisciplinary subjects, which were intended to unite these specialities, but these new subjects have ultimately served mainly to add further separate fragments. Then, society as a whole has developed in such a way that it is broken up into separate nations and different religious, political, economic, racial groups, etc. Man’s natural environment has correspondingly been seen as an aggregate of separately existent parts, to be exploited by different groups of people. Similarly, each individual human being has been fragmented into a large number of separate and conflicting compartments, according to his different desires, aims, ambitions, loyalties, psychological characteristics, etc., to such an extent that it is generally accepted that some degree of neurosis is inevitable, while many individuals going beyond the ‘normal’ limits of fragmentation are classified as paranoid, schizoid, psychotic, etc.

 

Bohm ALERTED US TO THIS PROBLEM TO US” in 1980, highlighting the FRAGMENTATION that we are creating by way of our LINGUISTIC CONCEPTUALIZING scheme which is giving a foundational role to the MISTAKE of our SUBSTITUTING ABSOLUTE EMPTY SPACE for the ENERGY-CHARGED PLENUM ( “Space is not empty.  It is full, a plenum as opposed to a vacuum, and is the ground for the existence of everything, including ourselves.” (Bohm). 

 

So, in our sense-experience affirmed reality, and as captured in the LINGUISTIC CONCEPTUALIZING schemes of Modern physics, indigenous aboriginals, Taoists/Buddhists and Advaita Vedanta, THE STUFF what we Western Culture Adherents are continuing to MISTAKENLY refer to as an “empty space dotted with material fragments”, …  is the all-including WAVE-FIELD aka ENERGY-CHARGED PLENUM, the ground for the existence of everything, including ourselves.

 

We are now in the year 2025, 45 years after Bohm’s warning and we are experiencing continuing FRAGMENTATION as in the POLARIZING CONFLICT in WESTERN CULTURE “POLITICS” between CONSERVATIVES (Republicans) and LIBERALS (Democrats).  Both factions are falling into the TRAP of using, for their understanding, the too simple BINARY EITHER/OR LOGIC of the EXCLUDED MEDIUM, the LOGIC of CLASSICAL PHYSICS instead of the needed NONBINARY BOTH/AND LOGIC of the INCLUDING MEDIUM, the LOGIC of MODERN PHYSICS which is also the LOGIC of indigenous aboriginals which supports a REALITY WHEREIN SPACE IS NOT EMPTY, WHERE LOGIC IS NONBINARY.  When we use NONBINARY LOGIC, our awareness opens up to the INTERCONNECTEDNESS and INTERNDEPENDENCE of all material forms as with indigenous aboriiginal STRANDS IN THE WEB.  Here, the origin of actions and developments is understood to be NONLOCAL and IMPLICIT, calling for RESTORATIVE JUSTICE, rather than PUNITIVE/PURIFICATIONIST JUSTICE.  PURIFICATIONIST JUSTICE is based on “APPEARANCE” of actions and developments that are MISTAKENLY assumed to be LOCAL and EXPLICIT.

Because the FOCUS is on the particular STRAND in the web that is manifesting VIOLENT ACTION, that STRAND is easily (BUT MISTAKENLY) conceived of as a LOCAL and EXPLICIT SOURCE OF VIOLENCE.  The REALITY is that the VIOLENT ENERGY is of NONLOCAL and IMPLICIT origin, deriving from TENSIONS that HAVE BEEN BUILDING IN THE SOCIAL RELATIONAL WEB; i.e. in the relational matrix of the INTERCONNECTED and INTERDEPENDENT social collective.

 

This completes the AUTHOR’S PREFACE to introduce what this essay, The CONSEQUENCES of the REALITY that SPACE IS NOT EMPTY, is ALL ABOUT.

 

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