Dear all,

This is just a note with philosophical musings in it and I know I tend to spend a lot of time on such things, more than most has been my impression, at least in my post age 55 living time.

It seems evident that we live in an operative reality that has taken shape from the many different thoughts and activities of many different people along with a diversity of environmental influences that are different in that they don’t change across the intellectual artifice of national boundaries.

So, there are lots of things to explain ‘our differences’ between one and other whether on an individual basis or on a group basis.  As individuals, we are each unique but as social animals, we do tend to have that put us in various ‘birds of a feather’ behavioural groupings.

In this matter, I empathize with T.S Eliot and Erwin Schroedinger who call themselves Mahavits as in the Hindu Advaita Vedanta terminology referring to individuals who believe in the connectedness of all things but who behave in such a manner to be consistent with the culture they live in, … in our case the WESTERN CULTURE, where the common belief is that we are all independent beings with our own powers of sourcing actions and developments, … a belief that Nietzsche refers to as the DOUBLE ERROR since it comes from NAMING that imputes local independent being (first error) and GRAMMAR that imputes to the ‘local independent being’ its own powers of LOCALLY SOURCING actions and developments (second error).

I call this a CRAZY-MAKING belief and in my way of understanding the world, I can see how that WESTERN CULTURE popularly supported CRAZY-MAKING belief is ‘continuing to play out’.  Since I have spent the 20-plus years exploring this, I could write a book on it, or perhaps have written the equivalent of several books on it, on my www.goodshare.org/wp website.  Periodically, I get in philosophical discussions with other on the differences between my philosophy (which is essentially congruent with modern physics in those aspects of modern physics which match up with amazing consistency with indigenous aboriginal understanding of reality, Taoism/Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta.

Recent exchanges have helped me to think of more concise ways of sharing the basic differences in my philosophy and the ‘standard WESTERN CULTURE mainstream’ which seems mostly a mix of Jewish, Christian, Muslim and WESTERN-atheist views of reality, which together, cook up the WESTERN CULTURE worldview which I refer to as a CRAZY-MAKER.  I call it a CRAZY-MAKER because it splits FIGURE and GROUND into TWO which is a BIPOLAR DISORDER from those who see reality as I do which is more or less as according to modern physics, indigenous aboriginal, Taoist/Buddhist and Advaita Vedanta cultures.   There understandings of reality are very UNLIKE the WESTERN CULTURE understanding of reality in that all of the former understand the world as ONE TRANSFORMING RELATIONAL CONTINUUM, aka the Wave-field aka the Tao which is, of course, INEFFABLE-because-NONLOCAL-and IMPLICIT as Wave-field continuum must necessarily be.

This makes us ‘humanings-in-the-flow’ relational forms in the transforming relational continuum that outwell and inwell without ever becoming BEINGS and later passing out of BEING.  If we keep our eye on the transforming relational continuum as the primary reality, aka the Wave-field, the Wave-field develops as a complement of relational features which includes us, … and at some point we are re-subsumed within it meaning that as organizing developments continues it includes a complement of relational features that does not include a figure like us.  That is, we get recycled and it is obvious that the new batch of relational figures is transformed by the figures that have been substantiated in the flow and are subsumed within the flow as is the nature of TRANSFORMATION where FIGURE and GROUND are ONE (where flow and whorl are ONE).

I know I live in WESTERN CULTURE which commonly believes in FIGURE-and-GROUND-are-TWO so that the FIGURE is conceived of something SEPARATE from the GROUND; i.e. an ‘INHABITANT’ that inhabits the separate ‘HABITAT’.  This WESTERN CULTURE belief is that there exists a big empty space locally occupied by MATERIAL THINGS-IN-THEMSELVES which are CONCEIVED and BORN and that LIVE for a while and then DIE within a cycle of PRODUCTION and CONSUMPTION or CREATION and DESTRUCTION.

Notice that there is no FIELD as the basis of everything in this WESTERN CULTURE understanding of ‘reality’, there is just an empty ‘holding tank’ that is called ‘space’ which is a passive container for the two basic actions of BIRTH/CREATION and DEATH/DESTRUCTION.  This model forces upon us BINARY LOGIC where life is SWITCHED ON and occupies the empty holding space (Cartesian or Euclidian abstract space) and later SWITCHED OFF and no longer occupies the empty holding space.

This is why we WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS are in the habit of using the EITHER/OR logic of the EXCLUDED MEDIUM where something EITHER ‘is’ OR ‘is not’ (exists or does not exist).

And, similarly, why we EASTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS are in the habit using the BOTH/AND logic of the INCLUDED MEDIUM where something BOTH ‘is’ AND ‘is not’.  We can understand this by way of the FIGURE and GROUND as ONE where the boil develops with the flow as constitutes TRANSFORMATION and when the boil is no longer visible as a distinct ‘thing-in-itself’ its presence is reflected in the TRANSFORMATION of the flow it is included in.  You can’t engage with the same community twice because it is not the same community and you are not the same engager.  That’s how TRANSFORMATION ‘works’; i.e. it is a manifesting of FIGURE-and-GROUND-are-ONE.

As it happens, while Newtonian physics supported the EITHER/OR logic of the EXCLUDED medium wherein FIGURE-and-GROUND-are-TWO, modern physics supports the BOTH/AND logic of the INCLUDED medium wherein FIGURE-and-GROUND-are-ONE.

To cut to the quick, we have the makings of two very different UNDERSTANDINGS OF REALITY (aka ‘world views’) here, the FIGURE-and-GROUND-as-TWO being the common WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENT view and the FIGURE-and-GROUND-as-ONE being the common modern physics, indigenous aboriginal, Taoist/Buddhist and Advaita Vedanta UNDERSTANDING OF REALITY (world view).

Some of the salient DIFFERENCES that fall out of these two different views of reality include;

-1- reality is inclusion in a transformational flow that is INEFFABLE-because-NONLOCAL-and-IMPLICIT in the EAST while reality in the WEST is inclusion in an empty space that is EFFABLE because populated by LOCAL and EXPLICIT things-in-themselves with powers of creation and destruction.  This notion of ‘powers of creation and destruction’ is where EGO comes from.

-2- While the EAST understands the basic world dynamic as TRANSFORMATION in which relational flow forms are continually emerging, developing and in-merging, the WEST understands the basic world dynamic as BIRTHING and DYING for animate forms and as PRODUCTION and CONSUMPTION for inanimate forms.  NOTE that the EAST has no need to have two different life-and-death cycles for animate and inanimate forms since TRANSFORMATION within the Wave-field dynamic takes care of everything.

-3- Excuse the WEST because when the WEST speaks of PRODUCTION, it does leave a lot of holes in the ground all over the place from mining and oil drilling and stumps from logging which is very suggestive of TRANSFORMATION, but the term PRODUCTION is needed to point out that HUMANS are the SOURCE or SORCERERS of the wonderful benefits of chopping down and milling trees etc. or digging out minerals and smelting them and so on, … so that what looks a lot and smells a lot like TRANSFORMATION is captured under the rubric PRODUCTION to emphasis the HUMAN SOURCING of such actions and developments.  The EAST, meanwhile, blurs such things by using the term TRANSFORMATION which is all-inclusive so that it does not identify humans as the SOURCE of TRANSFORMATION but includes humans WITHIN THE (overall) TRANSFORMATION so the term holds since it includes ‘the production of humans’.

As Nietzsche has pointed out, terms like PRODUCTION make use of the DOUBLE ERROR of NAMING and GRAMMAR to impute the abstract notion of LOCAL SOURCING of actions and development so that one is not held speechless by the reality of the INEFFABLE-because-NONLOCAL-and-IMPLICIT as is the nature of TRANSFORMATION.  The DOUBLE ERROR allows WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS to say X or Y (Fred, Joe, Acme mining, China etc. ) ‘produce coal’ which LOCALLY JUMPSTARTS an action, bypassing the reality of TRANSFORMATION which is INEFFABLE-because-NONLOCAL-and-IMPLICIT.

We can therefore say that PRODUCTION is one of those terms that allows us to reduce so as to EFFABLE-ize TRANSFORMATION which is INEFFABLE-because-NONLOCAL-and-IMPLICIT.

* * *

Enough for the complications arising from WESTERN CULTURE’s reduction of TRANSFORMATION to CREATION and DESTRUCTION.

My point is that TRANSFORMATION is the REALITY but it is INEFFABLE-because-NONLOCAL-and-IMPLICIT, so in order to engineer a language that allows us to share even a crude reduction of the reality of inclusion in TRANSFORMATION, we can employ this DOUBLE ERROR technique of NAMING and GRAMMAR to reduce and render LOCAL and EXPLICIT that which is, in reality, NONLOCAL and implicit (TRANSFORMATION).

WARNING: … AMBIGUITY COMES INTO this WESTERN CULTURE REDUCTION of TRANSFORMATION to LOCAL and EXPLICIT, as follows;   When we inject a local starting point into the transforming relational continuum we get the conservative – liberal ambiguity as to whether the individual sources action in the many or whether the many source action in the individual, or whether continents source drift or the seafloor sources spreading?     We don’t get this ambiguity when we assume transformation where FIGURE-and-GROUND-are ONE, … we only get the ambiguity when we assume LOCAL SOURCING of actions and developments (the ‘DOUBLE ERROR’ of NAMING and GRAMMAR).   In the ‘DOUBLE ERROR’, NAMING ‘splits out a local thing-in-itself’ and GRAMMAR gives it the power of sourcing actions and developments.  It’s not hard to see that LOCALIZING and EXPLICITizing action is what has to be done to EFFABLE-ize action since TRANSFORMATION is NONLOCAL and IMPLICIT which is what makes it INEFFABLE. No more observations such as ‘there is hurricaning’ in the transforming relational continuum, but in its place; ‘Hurricane Rita is at coordinates X and Y, increasing in size and intensity and heading towards New Orleans.

It’s not that it isn’t useful to make this reduction from TRANSFORMATION that is INEFFABLE-because-NONLOCAL-and-IMPLICIT to that which is EFFABLE-because-LOCAL and EXPLICIT, it’s just that our WESTERN CULTURE PRACTICE is to ‘SUBSTITUTE’ ‘the reduction’ for reality and forget about the un-reduced ‘real’ reality of TRANSFORMATION.

As Wittgenstein puts this;

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

 

Zen author Alan Watts suggest that we add an ‘ing’ onto all nouns (NAMES) to suggest their innate motive (relational forms in the flow) nature, thus we would speak of ‘humanings’ rather than ‘humans’, since the latter implies FIXED LOCAL THING-IN-ITSELF BEING while the former implies FLUID-FEATURES-IN-THE-FLOW.

This is the same issue that Nietzsche is addressing in pointing out that we make a “DOUBLE ERROR” in our combining of NAMING and GRAMMAR to engineer an ‘EFFABLE-izing’ reduction to LOCAL and EXPLICIT of the INEFFABLE-because-NONLOCAL-and-IMPLICIT.  That is, once the flow-form that is an ‘appearance’ in the flow is given LOCAL BEING by NAMING, this newly created LOCAL thing-in-itself is, thanks to GRAMMAR, equipped with the notional power of SOURCING ACTIONS AND DEVELOPMENT.

While we started off with an entirely transient TRANSFORMATION in which our vision informed us  of the presence of a fluid forming (not ‘presence’ as ‘being’ but presence as ‘appearance’) in the flow.  The DOUBLE ERROR psychologically reduces this by way of NAMING and GRAMMAR, to a notional LOCAL, independently-existing thing-in-itself, notionally with ITS OWN powers of SOURCING actions and developments. From a forming-the-flow (which Watts suggests calling a ‘humaning’), the DOUBLE ERROR has us THINKING of this fluid scenario in the abstract DOUBLE ERROR based terms of a LOCAL NAME-instantiated thing-in-itself with its own GRAMMAR-given powers of sourcing actions and development.

… and DON’T FORGET, … this is very basic to language and we are going to carry on in this manner, building all sorts of intellectual constructions using this DOUBLE ERROR technique which starts with a purely relational flow-field within which there is locally the APPEARANCE of formings, and reduces this in the psyche to notional LOCAL things-in-themselves with their own GRAMMAR-given powers of SOURCING actions and developments.    IS IT NOT CLEAR WHAT IS GOING ON HERE?  The whole ball-of-wax-as-ONE reality with it’s internal flowing forms wherein everything is related is being TAKEN APART and redisplayed in the psyche in such a manner that the formings in the flowing are recast as separate things in their own right which we can use GRAMMAR to animate as if they were ‘independent’ and in the process, let the body of the flow fade into the background of our consciousness as our active consciousness RECONSTRUCTS REALITY on this new basis (where the INEFFABLE-because-NONLOCAL-and-IMPLICIT [flow-field] has been REDUCED to the EFFABLE-because-LOCAL-and-EXPLICIT).

So, NOW WE’RE TALKING!

Of course, its in a rather fragmented fashion, so while we sense inclusion in a starry fluid universe of mind-boggling expanse and complexity, our TALK can START from something LOCAL and we can use NAMING to impute LOCAL THING-IN-ITSELF EXISTENCE to a forming in the flow and conflate this with GRAMMAR to impute local SOURCING of actions and development of the NAMING-instantiated LOCAL thing-in-itself, to engineer a PIECE-MEAL LOCALIZING of the inherently NONLOCAL.  BUT WE’RE NOW TALKING in terms of this reduced reality, while we can say nothing about the ‘real reality’ because language freezes visual images and is innately incapable of capturing articulations of inclusion in the transforming relational continuum.  The psychological impressions triggered by language, as a reductive tool, is fantastic!  The psychological impressions triggered by language, as a cognitive substitute that directly informs our actions and becomes the ‘main feed’ that SUBSTITUTES for our direct sensory experience of inclusion in the INEFFABLE-BECAUSE-NONLOCAL-AND-IMPLICIT, is a huge mistake of WESTERN CULTURE.  It is a case of the language-as-psychological-reducer-of-reality’ tool, running away with the workman, the human with the divine’, as Emerson expressed it.  It is the basis for the EAST-WEST split where NEVER THE TWAIN SHALL MEET.

In Collapse of Chaos, mathematician Ian Stewart and biologist Jack Cohen discuss how our understanding can divide into reductionism and holism and of course there are many articles that speak about a ‘left brain’ and ‘right brain’ split but there is much less discussion about the NEED for invoking such a split.  Why do we argue over whether continents source drift or seafloor sources spreading, or the Zen classic of whether the flapping flag sources wind or whether the wind sources the flapping of the flag?

All of the attention we give to which of two BIPOLAR opposing options ‘makes sense’ draws our attention away from the knee-jerk assumption in all such antimonies, the assumption of LOCAL SOURCING (if you review the preceding paragraph, you will see the word ‘source’ used to play a foundation role in the thinking that us precipitated in us by the language used; i.e. the thinking that it is ‘reasonable’ to assume that something or other is SOURCING the physical dynamics we observe, whether the flapping of the flag or the drifting of continents).  MUST THERE BE ‘A SOURCE’ to actions and developments?  THERE IS NO ‘SOURCE’ IN “TRANSFORMATION”, it is a relational phenomenon as in a Wave-field dynamic.

Of course, if everything is in flux, as Heraclitus and others have suggested, the world of our experience becomes INEFFABLE-because-NONLOCAL-and-IMPLICIT.  ‘INEFFABLE’ only means that we can’t capture the phenomenon ‘in words’, as is the case when we are inclusions in a transforming field.

Since inventing, via reductions or whatever that infer the ineffable, some contrivance for use as some kind of ‘go-by’ that IS EFFABLE opens the door to our being able to SHARE such reductive inferences of the INEFFABLE, so that we can share our experiences, kind of like we do in the game of Twenty Questions, except that the ‘form’ that is ‘taking shape’ within the web of suggestive inferences remains IMPLICIT, which makes this the SURPRISE version of the game of Twenty Questions.  In this approach, we could build a relational web of inferences that slowly give form to ‘a hurricane’ with clues like ‘the horizon darkens, and the winds pick up the animals take shelter and the land and sky is transforming so that the someone will guess what the one word is that captures that whole matrix of transformation in one fell swoop; i.e. ‘hurricane’ in which case we can shift reality out of the realm of relational TRANSFORMATION into the new world of NAMING and GRAMMAR based depictions with the ‘HURRICANE’ now playing the ‘lead role’ as the LOCAL SOURCING AGENT, leaving behind that spread-out-mess with linkages back into weather and so into sun and starts and the ends of the universe (if something that is continually emerging and subducting such as the transforming relational continuum has ‘ends’ since something that is continually becoming is BOTH GROUND and FIGURE at the same time, and thus is not troubled by logistics that deal with how big does the GROUND need to be to contain all those FIGURES?  It is all taken care of automatically in the case where FIGURE-and-GROUND-are-ONE.

But, as already discussed, FIGURE-and-GROUND-as-ONE is INEFFABLE-because-NONLOCAL-and-IMPLICIT which is not a critique of ‘reality as it may be’ but only a show-stopper for language-based articulation of reality.  If we want to talk about and share our ideas about ‘reality’, we have to invent an EFFABLE reality and we have done this by REDUCING the INEFFABLE-because-NONLOCAL-and-IMPLICIT Wave-field reality, to an EFFABLE-because-LOCAL-and-EXPLICIT Material reality, where, for example, that hurricane whorling-in-the-flow where FIGURE-and-GROUND are only ONE, is reduced by the DOUBLE ERROR of NAMING and GRAMMAR to a new imagination-based reality wherein FIGURE-and-GROUND are TWO.

Ok, that gives us the EFFABILITY we want because we now focus on the FIGURE and use GRAMMAR to set it in motion as if on its own.  How’s this, … “hurricane Katrina’ is growing larger and stronger and is devastating the city of New Orleans’”?  Was this not more explicit and useful if ‘less complete’ than ‘the world is a transforming relational continuum’?

I suppose Kurt Goedel of Geodel’s Theorem fame would remind us; ‘Look, if you want to use logic to get more explicit, you have to do so at the cost of completeness’.  If you focus in on and ‘spotlight’ a feature in the flow that you have isolated (in your psyche and certainly not in reality) by calling it Hurricane Katrina, you have done so at the expense of putting in the dark, the whole transforming relational continuum that Katrina is inextricably included in.  All finite systems of logic are incomplete, and your logic-based story that reduces NONLOCAL TRANSFORMATION to LOCAL THINGS AND THEIR ACTIONS, by way of NAMING and GRAMMAR, … is exemplary of that reduction from the NONLOCAL and IMPLICIT as the price of getting more LOCAL and EXPLICIT.  Watch out for DROP-OUT in your understanding, kiddo.

So, we have this ‘Devil’s bargain’ situation whereby we sacrifice completeness in order to garner more explicitness.  By the time we finish chopping off the enveloping TRANSFORMATION so as to close down and in on the ‘local’ and ‘explicit’ form of Katrina what was understood as all part of Katrina is being swept into the dustbin in our editing and cropping room or psyche compartment. We WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS know this game well.  We call it EGO where we save the ‘good bit’ in the middle and chop away all the stuff that is really part of what it is, as with Katrina, so that the NAME is the only thing persisting and the action and development associated with the NAME now has to be invented with GRAMMAR since the scenario of an all-encompassing TRANSFORMATION that is the NONLOCAL part and parcel of the emergent LOCAL thing-in-itself (thank you, vision and language) is stripped off and discarded in the DOUBLE ERROR psycho-editing room caper.

Ok, why should we not have to ‘pay a price of completeness’ in our reducing of the INEFFABLE-because-NONLOCAL-and-IMPLICIT to something very different but at least EFFABLE-because-LOCAL-and-EXPLICIT?  Well, we do have to pay the price of incompleteness of gaining EFFABLE-because-LOCAL-and-EXPLCIT at the expense of INEFFABLE-because-NONLOCAL-and-IMPLICIT, because while the LOCAL images are MORE EXPLICIT LOCALLY, the price we paid for it (the Devil’s dues as some systems theorists put it) is the price of our having introduced AMBIGUITY.  Sure we can talk about the hurricane as a thing-in-itself with its own powers of sourcing actions and developments, but having split out the hurricane-as-inhabitant of the atmosphere, we are leaving apart like a loose sheet in the wind, the habitat that we have split the inhabitant out of, such is the game of language and grammar we are playing.

The ambiguity we are unleashing in the notional (naming and grammar) splitting apart of inhabitant and habitat is that we can apply the tools of GRAMMAR to either the inhabitant or the habitat or to both and the key tool of GRAMMAR is the VERB which imputes the power of LOCAL SOURCING to the NAMING-instantiated LOCAL thing-in-itself, leaving us with an unresolvable ambiguity as to whether the flapping of the flag source the wind or whether the wind sources the flapping of the flag.

Were just straining our brain with language and grammar on this one, and if we instead re-accessed our sensory experience of inclusion in the transforming relational continuum, we would understand that everything is in flux and that REALITY does not ‘really’ reduce to the simplistic dichotomy of ‘inhabitant’ and ‘habitat’, a binary abstraction which is the source of BIPOLAR DISORDER in us WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS.

So long as we stick with employing this type of language I am using right now, to try to make sense out of a supposed REALITY that is constituted by INHABITANTS moving about and interacting within a HABITAT wherein FIGURE-and-GROUND-are-understood-as-TWO (i.e. where FIGURE-and-GROUND-are-understood as-TWO), we are signing up for some serious BIPOLAR DISORDER.

Thank you modern physics and thank you indigenous aboriginal cultures and Taoism/Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta for at least trying to show us misguided WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS that the reality of our sensory experience embodies FIGURE-and-GROUND-as-ONE (INHABITANT-and-HABITAT-as-ONE), … and for reminding us that it is only a language game wherein we reduce FIGURE-and-GROUND-to-TWO (INHABIANT-and-HABITAT-to-TWO).   That is; if we didn’t use our psyche to make that reduction, we would be left with the natural state of reality being INEFFABLE-because-LOCAL-and-IMPLICIT, as the Wave-field aka transforming relational continuum is wont to be.

Ok, not quite a ‘deal with the devil’ but we could say, a ‘deal with the devilish EGO within us) that insists on imputing LOCAL SOURCING POWERS to NAMING-instantiated notional things-in-themselves.  And, yes, that does break us out of (break our psyches out of) the condition of INEFFABLE-because-NONLOCAL-and-IMPLICIT that characterizes us flow-forms who are not ‘really’ split apart from the overall flow aka the Wave-field aka the Tao of Lao Tzu aka the Logos of Heraclitus, but are fluid features within the Wave-field.  That is, the DOUBLE ERROR synthetically LIBERATES us from the flow and sets up as LOCAL INDEPENDENT OPERATORS with our own ‘business’, the archetype for the WESTERN CULTURE system of capitalism which has us imagine that there really are ‘independent businesses’ with their own powers of LOCALLY SOURCING actions and developments.  NICE PLOY that the EGO loudly applauds, but far from realistic in any sensory experience supported understanding.

BUT WILL SUCH BIPOLAR DISORDERING NONSENSE ‘WORK’ as a basis for social dynamics organizing?

YES! so long as one believe in abstractions such as that there really do exist NAMING based LOCAL things called HUMANS that ‘really are’ LOCAL, INDEPENDENT BEINGS with their own (GRAMMAR-given) powers of sourcing actions and developments.

INTELLECTUALLY, we can make this language and grammar based intellectualizing game ‘work’ for us provided that we are all ‘playing the same game’.  There is meanwhile, a glitsch in this psycho-game-play, and it comes in the form of an innate ambiguity at the point that we proclaim independent existence by way of NAMING, and this is because when we synthetically liberate the FIGURE so that we can portray it, with the help of GRAMMAR, as a LOCAL SOURCE of actions and developments, we are at the same time liberating the GROUND that we chopped the FIGURE out of, and giving it access to GRAMMAR and thus to the LOCAL SOURCING of actions and developments.  This gives rise to this ambiguity as to whether the FIGURE stirs up the GROUND or whether the GROUND stirs up the FIGURE, in all of its various BIPOLAR DISORDER manifesting forms such as the conservative – liberal BIPOLAR DISORDER deriving from the ambiguity as to whether the dynamics of the INDIVIDUAL sources the dynamics of the SOCIAL COLLECTIVE or whether the dynamics of the SOCIAL COLLECTIVE sources the dynamics of the INDIVIDUAL.

While WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS will actually debate this notional BIPOLARITY ad infinitum, which is a psychological aberrance and not a sensory experience grounded reality, modern physics, indigenous aboriginal cultures, Taoism/Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta adherents will quietly point to the yin/yang or Tai-Chi symbol that simply signals that FIGURE-and-GROUND-are-ONE, and that this convervative-liberal split is deriving from the BIPOLAR DISORDER wherein one believes that FIGURE-and-GROUND-are-TWO.

That is why “EAST is EAST and WEST is WEST and never the twain shall meet” as Kipling observed, and now we can add ‘modern physics’ to the side of the EAST, as has been made clear in modern physics by David Bohm, F. David Peat (Blackfoot Physics) and by Nietzsche who coined the term DOUBLE ERROR for the WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENT habit of using NAMING and GRAMMAR to split the inhabitant out of the habitat and RE-PRESENT them, in our psychological discernments, as FIGURE-and-GROUND-as-TWO.

So, how to close down this note simply?  Normally, we use summaries, but the process of summarizing in our WESTERN CULTURE, normally employs ‘rationalizations’ based on EITHER/OR logic of the EXCLUDED medium, … and what I am sharing is that that sort of logic IS OUR PROBLEM; i.e. it is the source of our CULTURE-imbued BIPOLAR DISORDER where we split things into BIPOLAR pairs as in ‘right’-and-‘wrong’ and ‘birth’-and-‘death’ and ‘figure’-and-‘ground’ which does allow us to split into EFFABLE form, the transforming relational continuum.  The problem is we need to practice the psychological calisthenics of jumping back and forth between the EFFABLE-because-LOCAL-and-EXPLICIT and the INEFFABLE-because-NONLOCAL-and-IMPLICIT, the latter being the reality we are trying to share a reduced but effable expression of, not to share it so that it becomes our substitute operative reality, just to share it so as to assist the intuitive leap to the INEFFABLE-because-NONLOCAL-and-IMPLICIT which is where natural experiential understanding lives.

Who would’ve thunk that we WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS, in employing the DOUBLE ERROR tool, that imputes the power of sourcing actions and developments to whatever we want to NAME, would have stopped using it as a tool of inference to help us make an intuitive leap to the INEFFABLE-because-NONLOCAL-and-IMPLICIT sensory experience reality, … and habitualized using its reality representations as if they were the real reality?  Not I, for sure, because I didn’t hang out back in the WESTERN CULTURE in those days where Heraclitus and Parmenides where arguing on opposite sides of that debate, which one might say that Parmenides won with his compelling argument that a thing EITHER IS OR IS NOT, and if it IS, we can forget about the IS NOT arm of this BIPOLAR option.  Of course, rather than giving all that credit of intellectually persuasive influence to Parmenides, we might consider that EGO based on BEING derives from the ‘IS’ branch of this BIPOLAR BRANCHING, as in its application to EITHER I AM OR I AM NOT and to EITHER I AM the LOCAL SOURCE of this WONDERFUL ACTION and DEVELOPMENT or I AM NOT, … or SHE is the LOCAL SOURCE of this TERRIBLE ACTION and DEVELOPMENT or SHE IS NOT.  Such binary propositions are the Keep It Simple Stupid binary logic basis of WESTERN binary REWARDS and PUNISHMENTS based JUSTICE.

Eclipsed in the WEST although not in the EAST was the philosophical understanding as with Heraclitus, who had argued along with the EAST for BOTH IS AND IS NOT as with the understanding of the boil in the flow where FIGURE and GROUND are ONE and there is only the APPEARANCE of TWO.  Based on the findings of modern physics, we now call the logic of BOTH IS and IS NOT, ‘quantum logic’ since it describes the FIGURE and GROUND as ONE reality of our sensory experience of inclusion in the all-including Wave-field.

Of course, it is not ‘catching on’ in our WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENT society because, as we might suspect, people who have built up an EGO based on belief in their own powers of LOCAL SOURCING of actions and developments as comes from the DOUBLE ERROR combination of NAMING (enter one’s name here) and GRAMMAR (enter the actions that you claim to be the authoring source of).  Since I was discussing ambiguity here, this is where the danger is easily seen in the WESTERN way of thinking because if you an EASTERN CULTURE ADHERENT, not only will you NOT lay claim responsibility for authorship of GOOD actions and developments, you will likewise not be ‘blamed’ for the authorship of BAD actions and developments.  Instead, the understanding will be ‘mitakuye oyasin’ where all things are related as in TRANSFORMATION so that the dynamics of reality, being relational, can vary from harmonious to dissonant and there is in NO CASE the suggestion of LOCAL SOURCING of actions and developments, as the common assumption in WESTERN CULTURE which leads directly to BIPOLAR DISORDER.

The next time you find yourself thinking in terms of LOCAL SOURCING (the EGO most often blossoms into being when you find yourself close to the centre of emergence of relational harmonies popularly captured in language using NAMING and GRAMMAR DOUBLE ERRORS as GOOD or BENEFICIAL actions and developments.  The EGO-based popularizing of this kind of psychological representation opens the door, because of the habitual employment of binary EITHER/OR logic, to the logical consistency-based necessity of identifying not only GOOD and BENEFICIAL actions and developments but also BAD or HARMFUL actions and developments, which as we know is an expression of the BIPOLAR thinking that is popular in our WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENCY.

So what gets anchored in place by the EGO and held in place in WESTERN CULTURE by the iconizing-as-angelic of the GOOD and the iconizing as demonic of the BAD, all of which is held in place by the DOUBLE ERROR of NAMING and GRAMMAR which makes possible the imputing of LOCAL SOURCING to NAMING-instantiated LOCAL things-in-themselves endowed by GRAMMAR with ‘powers of SOURCING actions and developments’.

JUSTICE, in WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENT terms, comes from giving fair balance to REWARDING GOOD and PUNISHING EVIL and in the process, ignoring the greater reality of relational TRANSFORMATION as is the reality embrace in modern physics, indigenous aboriginal cultures, Taoism/Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta.  Well, we can understand what is going on here in the first case, because of the INEFFABLE-because-NONLOCAL-and-IMPLICIT nature of the Wave-field reality of our actual sensory experience.  That is, we do need a tool to reduce the INEFFABLE to some sort of, however imperfect, EFFABLE form so that we can share some inference of the INEFFABLE reality.  Again, as is woven into this discussion, the EFFABLE-izing of the INEFFABLE that comes by way of reducing the INEFFABLE-because-NONLOCAL-and-IMPLICIT to the EFFABLE-because-LOCAL-and-EXPLICIT gives rise to the AMBIGUITY PROBLEM whereby each ‘half’ of the relational continuum we have split asunder to get to some smaller pieces that are ostensibly LOCAL and thus EFFABLE, is liberated to serve as a LOCAL SOURCE of actions and developments, and that’s why we get the ambiguity of the movement of the flag that can source movement of the air and/or the movement of the air that can source movement of the flag.   THE AMBIGUITY ARISES FROM THE ABSTRACT CONCEPT OF LOCAL SOURCING WHICH WE INJECTED WITH THE DOUBLE ERROR OF NAMING AND GRAMMAR.

Hey, if we’re going to break into the transforming relational continuum and split it into two separate parts so that we can use one of the parts for LOCAL SOURCING purposes, … someone is bound to pick up the ‘spare part’ from this psychological dividing and start using it as well, for LOCAL SOURCING.  So if we capture transformation, wherein there is no SOURCING, in the reduced terms of, for example, CONTINENTAL DRIFT, where the drifting of continents can be ‘seen’ as the SOURCE of evolving of the surface of the earth, some wise guy is going to pick up those same psychological-linguistic game rules and propose that seafloor spreading is the SOURCE of the evolving of the surface of the earth.

As you can see, the concept of EVOLUTION applies to notioal LOCALLY EXISTING THINGS whereas TRANSFORMATION leap-frogs over LOCAL THINGS to the transforming relational continuum, so we don’t have to ground our representation in ‘already-existing’ LOCAL things-in-themselves.  Instead, we can accept that the world is a transforming relational continuum wherein we can employ our visual sensing to capture local-appearing forms (formings) by using language to NAME those formings and then using GRAMMAR to notionally (psychologically) impute to them their own powers of action and development.

While our understanding can remain at the level of appreciating the world of sensory experience as an all-including Wave-field aka a transforming relational continuum in which we are included, once we shift to a new representation of reality in EFFABLE terms where the effable refers to EFFABLE-because-LOCAL-and-EXPLICIT, we may become forgetful of the fact that we are in a pseudo-reality that has been reduced for the expedience of rendering an EFFABLE reduction of the INEFFABLE.  NAMING and GRAMMAR are intellectual tools that can do this; i.e. can ‘effable-ize the ineffable, …not ‘OUT THERE’ in the world of our sensory experience but ‘IN HERE’ in inner world of our intellectual constructions of pseudo-reality that give us a reduced but articulable language-based rendering of NOT REALITY-as-in-the-reality-of-our-sensory-experience-of-inclusion-within-it, but REALITY as in the SUBJECTIVELY VIEWED VISUAL IMAGERY of the world ‘out there’ which we derive from subject-object splitting (binary logical) REDUCTION.

So, the PRICE we pay for getting ourselves some EFFABILITY to substitute for the INEFFABLE is subject-object splitting or BIPOLAR SPLITTING which as a throw-away tool is a handy effability-getter, but it comes at the price of subject-object splitting which can easily ‘backfire’ on us if we are not careful; i.e. if we should let the subject-object splitting tool run away with the workman so that the workman splits himself out of the world in his using of the splitting tool.

The EAST is not falling into that trap and the yin/yang flag is still flying for many which reminds us that FIGURE-and-GROUND-are-ONE.  However, the WEST continues to be seduced by EGO which arises from actually believing as ‘real’ the notion of FIGURE-and-GROUND-as-TWO, … that notion that liberates the farmer so that he thinks in terms of cultivating the ground without at the same time understanding the reduction of Wilderness or in other words, the overall dynamic of and all-including TRANSFORMATION wherein LOCAL SOURCING is impossible, other than as a cognitive deception (Maya) that gives rise to, and is sustained by EGO.

Ok, I hope that was not TOO long as to put off the reading.

As mentioned at the beginning of the note, these are philosophical musings I have found to resonate with my sensory experience-based understandings.  In many cases these understandings that I express clash with my/our WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENCY reality-teachings.   In fact, my understandings are much more in harmony with my understandings of modern physics and the philosophical understandings Nietzsche, Bohm, Peat, indigenous aboriginal cultures, Taoism/Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta.  My view is that our natural sensory experience is a full conveyer of reality and the problem for us is that our language and intellect can really screw up our understanding.

That is, I don’t believe our language and intellect is ‘adding to our understanding’, it is simply providing an imperfect means for sharing our experience which can be very helpful; e.g. ‘red-and-black, that’s a jack’, red-and-yellow kill a fellow’ is a valuable phrase that comes from the experience of others that we can avoid repeating.  Language is an amazing vehicle for sharing understanding but not for sharing experience.  The virgin Ph.D. in sexual relations will know far more than others about such things and here the key word is ‘know’ because ‘intellectual knowing’ does not get us to ‘carnal knowing’ (sensory experience).

Today, our ‘knowledge’ is cantilevered out well beyond the limits of our actual ‘sensory experience’ and that is leaving us with a lot of loose cannon balls among us, who trust in their own highly cantilevered ‘knowledge’ that is ungrounded in ‘sensory experience’.  We WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS make matters worse on this count by delivering to ‘chosen individuals’ special powers where they are encouraged to use ‘their knowledge’ to direct the behaviours of massive social collectives, and where the massive social collective is actually looking for and ready to seize upon such ‘leaders’ as can guide them out of the desert, a once fertile ground that has become a desert by that same process of elevating intellectual knowledge to an unnatural primacy over sensual experience.

* * *