ted lumley

PREFACE: We WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS are engineering the substitution of intelligence with reason (rationality).

Intelligence is, for example, where we understand that a fluid sphere as we imagine the Earth to be, can be scattering (as with volcanic eruptions) and gathering (as with subduction zones) AT THE SAME TIME.

Now, let’s remove the term “a fluid sphere” and imagine instead, a warm water ‘cell’ as might show up in a tidal zone to an observer with an infrared viewer.  The nebulous ‘shape’ of the ‘warm patch’ will manifest ‘boundaries which are blurry and continually transforming.   Grammatically, we speak of a ‘warm patch’ or ‘local thing-in-itself’ as if FIGURE and GROUND are TWO separate and distinct ontological entities.   Although FIGURE-and-GROUND-are-ONE in this case, and the differentiation is heat-flow-based, the VISUAL APPEARANCE is that FIGURE-and-GROUND-are-TWO yet the combination of intellect and language is sufficient to rationalize a representation of FIGURE-and-GROUND-as-TWO.

The TWO-NESS is abstraction and we would be wrong to say that ‘warm FIGURE’ is ‘MOVING THROUGH’ the cool ‘GROUND’, giving the sense that FIGURE-and-GROUND-are-TWO.

The more physically realistic capture of this dynamic is FIGURE-and-GROUND-as-ONE as in TRANSFORMATION, but we WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS avoid TRANSFORMATION because it opens the door to the INEFFABLE-because-NONLOCAL-and-IMPLICIT.  Indigneous aboriginal culture’s may speak of ‘Dances with Wolves’  (i.e. an IMPLICIT reference rather than an EXPLICIT THING-IN-ITSELF DESIGNATOR) so as to avoid imposing the mis-impression of EFFABLE-because-LOCAL-and-EXPLICIT, an erroneous representation since all is included in the transforming relational continuum.

Meanwhile, in our WESTERN CULTURE, since the APPEARANCE is that FIGURE-and-GROUND-are-TWO, our language and grammar ‘follow suit’ and this leads to a whole self-consistent collection of terms, a key exemplar being GROWTH.  The GROWTH of a FIGURE is only possible if the FIGURE-and-GROUND-are-TWO, otherwise we would have to acknowledge TRANSFORMATION where FIGURE-and-GROUND-are-ONE, which is THE REALITY of our sensory experience, however it is a REALITY that is INEFFABLE-because-NONLOCAL-and-IMPLICIT.  As WIttgenstein observed in this regard;

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

–Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Once we have ‘dodged’ (through our use of language and grammar) having to deal with TRANSFORMATION, we have cleared the way to constructing representation based on GROWTH which simply IGNORES the reality of TRANSFORMATION, thus we can speak of the GROWTH of cultivated land (land planted with wheat or etc.) as if that were a ‘reality’ (yes, we can ‘take that kind of ‘GROWTH’ to the bank’ even though such language ‘drops from the mind’ the reciprocal SHRINKAGE of Wilderness, the GROWTH and the SHRINKAGE together constituting TRANSFORMATION).

The point is that GROWTH is ABSTRACTION.  THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS GROWTH in the reality of our actual sensory experience because there are no ‘things-in-themselves’ and NAMING does overcome the reality that everything is in flux.

WATCH OUT!  Because we WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS are operating as if GROWTH were REAL (we have oriented our activities in support of a GROWTH ECONOMY), … the REAL REALITY of TRANSFORMATION is ‘dropping off our radar screen’ and TRANSFORMATION is happening in the manner of ‘the loose sheet that is flapping in the gale’ while we turn our backs to it and concentrate on GROWTH.

We can SAY that ‘the TOWN is GROWING larger’ but that is just a RATIO-NAL view, which as Bohm points out, is abstraction that undercuts INTELLIGENCE which is informing us that what is really happening is that the landscape is TRANSFORMING.

When we down-shift from INTELLIGENCE to RATIONALITY, we substitute the EITHER/OR logic of the EXCLUDED medium for the (quantum) BOTH/AND logic of the INCLUDED medium.

That is, we are intellectually free (in the realm of abstraction) to shift  our reality from Newtonian EITHER/OR logic of the EXCLUDED medium to the BOTH/AND logic of the INCLUDED medium (aka ‘quantum logic’).  When we do this, our understanding of dynamics may then shift from GROWTH and SHRINKAGE (or ‘PRODUCTION-and-CONSUMPTION’) as in a FIGURE and GROUND as TWO conceptualization, to TRANSFORMATION as in a FIGURE-and-GROUND-as-ONE sense.

As Bohm points out, we have the choice between RATIO-nality and INTELLIGENCE.  If we prefer to speak in terms of ‘the Town is growing larger’ (without mentioning how the Wilderness is reciprocally shrinking; i.e. without mentioning how what is really going on is TRANSFORMATION), we stay in the domain of RATIO-nality.  However, if we acknowledge the innate reciprocal relation between the GROWTH of the town and the SHRINKAGE of the Wilderness (which gets much messier in reality without the tidiness implied by our employing the NAMING-based abstractions of ‘TOWN’ and ‘WILDERNESS”), then we acknowledge the ‘real’ reality of TRANSFORMATION of the landscape.

For the indigenous aboriginal as also for modern physics, there is no question about what is going on as we are understanding it through our sensory experience and not simply through our mental manipulations of language-based abstraction; i.e. what is really going on is TRANSFORMATION.   There is no such thing in the real world of our sensory experience as ‘the GROWTH of a TOWN’. Such RATIO-NAL statements fail to even make reference to the landscape in which this ‘TOWN’ resides.  The four-leggeds, the winged and slithering ones will nevertheless experience what is actually going on which is TRANSFORMATION of the all-including relational continuum.

So what RATIO-nality does is to build on the DOUBLE ERROR of NAMING and GRAMMAR (Nietzsche) wherein we impute the existence of a LOCAL thing-in-itself by NAMING and conflate this with grammar to impute the power of GROWTH to the NAMING-instantiated thing-in-itself (e.g. “The TOWN”).  The concept of ‘the Town growing’, once it gets into our mind, allows us to use our RATIO-NALITY to picture the Town as a small thing at TIME 1, then as a larger thing at TIME 2 and because we keep using the same NAME for the TOWN, we give ourselves the impression that IT IS THE TOWN THAT IS GROWING, and we become forgetful of the GREATER REALITY of the TRANSFORMING relational continuum or ‘landscape’ that the TOWN is a relational feature within.

The point is that we can use either RATIO-nality or INTELLIGENCE to get a mental CONCEPTION of what is going on, and while the RATIO-nality constrains the picture to a LOCAL FIGURE in a separate GROUND (i.e. the FIGURE-and-GROUND-as-TWO conceptualization), INTELLIGENCE opens up our understanding to the TRANSFORMING relational continuum within which the TOWN is a feature, in a FIGURE-and-GROUND-as-ONE sense.  There is no such thing as GROWTH in a TRANSFORMING relational continuum.  The concept of GROWTH is abstraction coming from the DOUBLE ERROR of NAMING and GRAMMAR.

WE WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS have been moving progressively towards SUBSTITUTING RATIONALITY for INTELLIGENCE, in which case the impression in our minds that ‘the TOWN is GROWING LARGER AND MORE POPULOUS and MORE PRODUCTIVE’, as if were ITS OWN SOURCE of actions and development (thanks to the DOUBLE ERROR of NAMING and GRAMMAR).  This notional LOCAL TOWN THING-IN-ITSELF with its notional powers of sourcing its own GROWTH and development hijack our conceptualizing of reality, and wallpaper over, in our consciousness, that which really going on (i.e. TRANSFORMATION of the relational space wherein what we are calling ‘the TOWN’ is a relational feature),

Ok, if we accept that the world of our sensory experience is INEFFABLE-because-NONLOCAL-and-IMPLICIT, as is the nature of the transforming relational continuum aka the Wave-field aka the Tao, … then in order to EFFABLE-ize so as to share even a crude reduction of, or allusion to our actual (infeffable) experience, it makes sense to invent a language tool based on REDUCTIONS to that which is EFFABLE-because-LOCAL-and-EXPLICIT, as in the example of the ‘warm patch’ in the fluid flow where we, for convenience, re-cast the FIGURE-and-GROUND-as-ONE reality, linguistically, into a FIGURE-and-GROUND-as-TWO conceptualization.

What appears to be happening is that while we reduce the INEFFABLE-because-NONLOCAL-and-IMPLICIT by way of the DOUBLE ERROR of NAMING and GRAMMAR to the EFFABLE-because-LOCAL-and-EXPLICIT, … for the expedient purpose of being able to share EVEN A CRUDE REDUCTION or INFERENCE of the INEFFABLE, to use in discourse as a tool for triggering in the recipient mind, INFERENCE of the INEFFABLE, such a tool of INFERENCE is IN NO WAY FIT to serve, LITERALLY, as a SUBSTITUTE REALITY, so that when we hear that ‘THE TOWN IS GROWING LARGER AND MORE POPULOUS AND PRODUCTIVE’, … we must remember, as the indigenous aboriginal inevitably will, that the primary reality is the INEFFABLE-because-NONLOCAL-and-IMPLICIT transforming relational continuum aka the Wave-field aka the Tao.

Our DOUBLE ERROR based representation of the ‘TOWNING WITHIN THE TRANSFORMING RELATIONAL CONTINUUM’ by assigning a NAME to it (FIRST ERROR since NAMING imputes persisting LOCAL BEING) and then using GRAMMAR (SECOND ERROR) to impute to ‘the TOWN’ its own powers of SOURCING actions and developments (GROWING larger and more populous and productive) achieves the desired psychological effect of constructing a reduced but EFFABLE-because-LOCAL-and-EXPLICIT intellectual conceptualization of the INEFFABLE-because-NONLOCAL-and-IMPLICIT relational form in the flow.

While our INTELLIGENCE continues to recall the greater reality of the inherently INEFFABLE-because-NONLOCAL transforming relational continuum, our RATIO-NAL intellection, thanks to the DOUBLE ERROR of NAMING and GRAMMAR, now has the means of constructing in the intellectually abstracting psyche, a pseudo LOCAL reality, which can only be a pseudo-reality since the real reality of TRANSFORMATION is the inherently NONLOCAL Wave-field aka the Tao.

The RATIONAL intellectual pseudo-reality is something we can articulate, share and discuss and learn from, although we will mislead ourselves if we fail to keep ‘in mind’ that such abstractions as LOCAL BEING and GROWTH are ABSTRACTIONS that can only INFER the TRANSFORMING REALITY that lies beyond reach of the EFFABLE-because-LOCAL-and-EXPLICIT (i.e. the LOCAL and EXPLICIT being something we ‘conjure up’ using NAMING instantiated LOCAL BEINGS with GRAMMAR supplied powers of SOURCING actions and developments, as in the example of ‘the TOWN that is growing larger and more populous and productive’.

If at some point there were close to 100 percent of us who, when we spoke of ‘the Town growing larger and more populous and productive’, would understand that the indigenous aboriginal understands as in Chief Seattle’s speech, that the over-riding REALITY is the transforming relational landscape in which the Town, is a relational feature, and NOT a LOCAL THING-IN-ITSELF with its own powers of GROWING and SOURCING actions and developments, … many of that 100 percent have become forgetful as we become engaged with the needs of the GROWING TOWN understood as a LOCAL thing-in-itself, and being pre-occupied with LOCAL development needs, become forgetful our inclusion in TRANSFORMATION aka ‘the Tao’ aka ‘the Logos’.

Heraclitus spoke to this problem of forgetfulness as follows;

Of the logos [aka the Tao, the Wave-field], which is as I describe it, people always prove to be uncomprehending both before they have heard it and once they have heard it. For, although all things happen according to the logos, people are like those of no experience, even when they do experience such words and deeds as I explain when I distinguish each thing according to its phusis (nature / constitution) and declare how it is; but others are as ignorant of what they do when awake as they are forgetful of what they do when asleep.

Those who hear and do not understand are like the deaf. Of them the proverb says: “Present, they are absent.”

— Heraclitus

In other words, falling into the habit of understanding reality by way of RATIO-NAL intellection is like saying LOOK NOW, … and see ‘the TOWN GROWING’ and sprawling out over the land, as if it were a cancerous growth, while something inside us, that lies deeper than our RATIO-NAL intellectual constructions; i.e. our INTELLIGENCE, is delivering the intuition that what is really going on is our inclusion in TRANSFORMATION.

Because this inclusion in TRANSFORMATION that our INTELLIGENCE is informing us of is ineffable, it has to lie in waiting in the darkness that lies behind all the foreground RATIO-NAL intellectual intercourse> OUR WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENT ERROR is to imploy RATIO-NALITY as our ‘operative reality’.  Conversely, the indigenous aboriginal, when he hears the RATIO-nal statement that ‘The TOWN is GROWING’ will translate ‘on-the-fly’ to ‘the landscape is TRANSFORMING’ which reunites the FIGURE and the GROUND-as-ONE which the DOUBLE ERROR of NAMING and GRAMMAR has split apart into FIGURE-and-GROUND-as-TWO.

We WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS seem to be on a current trend where RATIONALITY, wherein FIGURE-and-GROUND_are-TWO  (the inhabitant-habitat and production-consumption split) has taken over the job of operative reality construction from our INTELLIGENCE wherein FIGURE-and-GROUND-are-ONE (where inhabitant-and-habitat and production and consumption are reunited within TRANSFORMATION).

We WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS seem to be at a point where we are putting RATIONAL ABSTRACTION into an unnatural and dysfunctional primacy over INTELLIGENCE, not just in our speech, but in our understanding.

* * * END OF PREFACE * * *

When we experience and/or observe a swirling in the atmosphere, we WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS tend to try to capture this, as all events in general, in the DOUBLE ERROR based terms of NAMING and GRAMMAR.  We come up with statements such as ‘A hurricane is stirring up the atmosphere’.

This approach invites the inverse alternative; ‘the atmosphere is stirring up a hurricane’.

Philosophers over the Ages have struggled with how this splitting can confuse our psyches.  Mircea Eliade wrote an entire book on this one issue entitled ‘Mephistopheles et L’Androgyne’, the English title being ‘The Two and the One’.

In our WESTERN CULTURE, people divide into polarized groups on the question of whether the individual sources a stirring up of the social collective or whether the social collective sources a stirring up of the individual.  Was it really Hitler that stirred up the German people?  What it the stirred up British people that produced a Churchill?  Are such ‘leaders’ naturally born with this local genetic power of sourcing coordinated actions or are they ordinary people who circumstances put them in the center of things?   Does the figure condition the ground or does the ground condition the figure as in the NATURE or NURTURE dichotomy?

We WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS continue to struggle with this question which begins with the emergence of some or other BIPOLAR DISORDER (war, insurrection, conflict etc. which seems to be able to manifest not only between individual persons or nations etc. but sometimes also within them as in civil wars, which within an individual is termed schizophrenia (a clinical version the BIPOLAR DISORDER that is rampant in WESTERN CULTURE).

While we WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS struggle in search of answers to questions such as ;’does the hurricane source the stirring up of the atmosphere?’, … or ‘does the atmosphere source the stirring up of the hurricane?’  … EASTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS DO NOT GO THERE, because of our basic understanding, which has been reaffirmed by modern physics, the real dynamic of the world we share inclusion in is TRANSFORMATION, as in the Wave-field of modern physics which is a transforming relational continuum that is everywhere-at-the-same-time.

TRANSFORMATION HAS NO “SOURCING”, so that the BINARY ambiguity wherein EITHER the hurricane SOURCES the atmospheric flow OR the atmospheric flow SOURCES the hurricane, NEVER ARISES and thus there is no AMBIGUITY in TRANFORMATION.

As philosophers have noted, people have struggled with the question of whether FIGURE-and-GROUND-are-ONE ( as understood in modern physics and by EASTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS including indigenous aboriginal cultures), or whether FIGURE-and-GROUND-are-TWO (Newtonian physics and WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS).

(more…)