AUTHOR’S PROLOGUE: 

The language required to critique the concept of PATHOGEN must go beyond ‘reason’.  Reason allows us to employ the BOTH/AND LOGIC OF THE EXCLUDED MEDIUM as if it were capable of capturing the real-world of our sensory experience.  This is a CRAZY-MAKER;

“Reason” in language!—oh what a deceptive old witch it has been! I fear we shall never be rid of God, so long as we still believe in grammar.  

If we speak of “the town is growing”, we put our representation within a FLAT SPACE since in the curved space of our actual sensory experience if “the town grows”, the “Wilderness shrinks”, or in other words such change is TRANSFORMATION in the real world of our sensory experience.  ‘REASON’ is ‘flatspace’ based.  It is abstraction and it can’t handle the real world of our sensory experience. It can only handle LOCAL actions and developments, but the reality of our sensory experience is NONLOCAL.  We are included in the transforming relational continuum aka the Tao aka the Wave-field and such experience is INEFFABLE (we are like fluid forms in a fluid dynamic, as in a holographic space).

We need INTUITION to interpret our sensory experience of inclusion in the Tao and “REASON” is too limited.  As Bohm, Schroedinger and others have pointed out, we need a more comprehensive logic than the logic we use to ‘reason’; i.e. the EITHER/OR LOGIC of the EXCLUDED medium, … we need QUANTUM LOGIC which is the BOTH/AND LOGIC of the INCLUDED medium.  We can think of this ‘quantum logic’ in terms of FIGURE AND GROUND AS ONE, or as Schroedinger says; ‘SUBJECT AND OBJECT ARE ONLY ONE.

This shortfall in language and logic is involved in the  PROBLEM WITH THE PATHOGEN CONCEPT.  Since we are currently experiencing what we are calling the COVID 19 PANDEMIC, … where COVID 19 is the name given to a purported PATHOGEN that is purportedly threatening our health, … and I say ‘purported’ because in a relational representation, of reality, we have resonance and dissonance and TRANSFORMATION but “NO PATHOGENS”.   This essay explains ‘why the PATHOGEN concept is not viable”

 

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There is a problem with the concept of THE PATHOGEN that we would do well to consider, in our current acceptance of COVID 19 as a PATHOGEN, a concept that Nietzsche articulates, and modern physics reaffirms, is a DOUBLE ERROR based abstraction.  The FIRST ERROR is ‘NAMING’ that imputes local thing-in-itself existence to a relational form in the flow, and we conflate this with the SECOND ERROR of GRAMMAR which imputes to the NAMING instantiated thing-in-itself the LOCAL POWER of SOURCING ACTIONS AND DEVELOPMENTS. 

This DOUBLE ERROR allows us to use language and grammar to construct in our intellect, the abstract concept of LOCAL SOURCING of actions and developments and thus OVER-PRINTING the NONLOCAL nature of our sensory experience of inclusion in the transforming relational continuum.

For example, if I am in a crowd wherein a lot of pushing and shoving is going on (i.e. where the basic dynamic is NONLOCAL), when I am impacted by the pushing, I may employ the DOUBLE ERROR to LOCALIZE this action and identify THE PERSON THAT PUSHED ME as the LOCAL SOURCE of this action.  As playful youths, we may push a friend so that he bumps into a third party and then gets accused by that person, as being the SOURCE of an aggression, while we get off scott-free. In general, as relativity physics affirms, dynamics are relational and the concept of LOCAL SOURCING (and thus local blame/attribution of good or bad developments we associate with LOCAL SOURCING) although a reductive abstraction deriving from the DOUBLE ERROR of language and grammar, is generally employed, IN WESTERN CULTURE, as the ‘operative reality’.

In order to intuitively remind ourselves of what ‘we are dropping out of the reality of our actual sensory experience’ by the DOUBLE ERROR reduction to LOCAL SOURCING OF ACTIONS AND DEVELOPMENTS, we have to remind ourselves of ‘what we now automatically do’ in reducing our relational experience to language and grammar based terms.  This REDUCTION is ‘taken seriously’ in our WESTERN CULTURE but is employed only as a tool of INFERENCE in modern physics and EASTERN CULTURE (indigenous aboriginal cultures, Taoism/Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta).

First off, we need to recall that our experience is of inclusion in an innately ‘fluid’ Nature-dynamic, as in the example of DUNING, where the NONLOCAL-RELATIONAL dynamic of TRANSFORMATION is primary and the reduction to LOCAL and EXPLICIT is abstraction based reduction (i.e. ‘secondary’).

DUNING is a nonlocal relational resonance (wave-field) based dynamic; i.e. DUNING is a relational dynamic that “belongs to” TRANSFORMATION.  MEANWHILE, … “A DUNE” is the NAME we give to a visibly appearance that is FORMING and UNFORMING i.e. a LOCAL (slowly changing) FORMING (aka “FORM”) that makes a visual appearance and seems to persist in the fluid dynamical continuum so that our focus may lock on to the ‘from’ as if it were a LOCAL THING-IN-ITSELF that is its own SOURCE of actions and developments; an ‘illusion’ that the DOUBLE ERROR of language and grammar helps us to capture and carry in our intellectual representation schemata.

We can and do use our sensory experience to feed our intellectual representational capacity wherein we have the tools of NAMING and GRAMMAR to capture VISUAL forms in fixed (NAMING-instantiated) intellectual thing-in-itself terms, using GRAMMAR to impute to these NAMING-instantiated things-in-themselves their own powers of SOURCING actions and development.  This is the DOUBLE ERROR treatment that equips us (intellectually) to shift reality to the new abstract conceptual framework of ‘forms’ seen as LOCAL things-in-themselves notionally with their own powers of SOURCING actions and developments..

This capture and reduction of DUNING (a resonance or Wave-field phenomenon) to terms of DUNES based on ‘visual appearance’ allows us to construct a superficial ‘reality’ in which these ‘forms’ such as ‘dunes’ are conceived of as NAMING-instantiated things-in-themselves.  We can then use GRAMMAR to describe ‘the DUNE’ as a LOCAL thing-in-itself having the capabilities of  “growing and developing and moving and acting” , … mental conceptual imagery that ‘over-writes’ in our language and grammar stimulated psyche, our REAL but INEFFABLE sensual experience of inclusion in a fluid dynamic, the all-included Wave-field in which we, ourselves are relational resonance features.

While everything is in flux according to our sensory experience based REALITY of inclusion in RELATIONAL TRANSFORMATION aka ‘the Tao’ aka the Wave-field, and is thus INEFFABLE-BECAUSE-NONLOCAL, …  the reduction to fixed forms by NAMING and using GRAMMAR to impute to them “THEIR OWN” movements and development gives us an EFFABLE but abstractly reduced version of the TRANSFORMATION based ‘reality of our sensory experience of inclusion in the Tao’.

This intellectual reduction rendering our ineffable experience of inclusion in TRANSFORMATION effable, is what modern physics and the EAST employ as a tool of INFERENCE to infer the ineffable that lies beyond it, but in the WEST, this reduction has become commonly employed as the OPERATIVE REALITY.

In the NONLOCAL dynamics of unreduced reality of our sensory experience of inclusion in relational TRANSFORMATION as in the ‘GREAT RESONANCE’ aka the Tao, there are no PATHOGENS, there is only relational resonance and dissonance (in a Wave-dynamical sense of in-phase and out-of-phase as when we as a social-relational collective do things in social relational harmony and/or in social relational dissonance).  As in the example of the relational interactions in a crowd dynamic or in a traffic dynamic, our habit is to IMPUTE LOCAL SOURCING to relational dissonance so that the person receiving a jolt tends to regard the one who jolted him as the SOURCE of his jolt, as is also the case in a collision in freeway traffic where the relational reality of a complex matrix of braking and swerving wherein a fender-bender manifests, is reduced to a “victim” identifying and blaming “a perpetrator”.   This reduction of the NONLOCAL to the LOCAL by way of the DOUBLE ERROR is the WESTERN CULTURE reality-reducing NORM.

While EAST accepts that NONLOCALITY is the reality so that the DOUBLE ERROR that LOCALIZES dynamics is just a useful TOOL OF INFERENCE, the WEST, instead, accepts LOCALITY and regards the DOUBLE ERROR based reduction to LOCALLY SOURCED actions and developments as the OPERATIVE REALITY.  Hence the concept of the PATHOGEN.

The PATHOGEN is NOT REAL, … the PATHOGEN, whether the thief known as Robin Hood or Jean Valjean or a wolf defending its cubs, or the bacterium c. difficile, is the abstract artifact of the DOUBLE ERROR of language and grammar.

QUESTION: WHAT KIND OF TROUBLE DOES THIS CONFUSING that transposes relational dissonance into THE INJURY SOURCING ACTIONS OF PATHOGENS, … employing this as the OPERATIVE REALITY, … GET US WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS INTO?  e.g. in the case of c. difficile, and in the case of COVID 19 where we reduce relational dissonance to the ‘actions of PATHOGENS’?

In order to understand our WESTERN CULTURE addiction to belief in LOCAL INCIPIENT ACTION and DEVELOPMENT, we have to review how the DOUBLE ERROR is the source of EGO.

We know that the EGO swells with our sense of EXALTATION in belief that our LOCAL POWER OF SOURCING ACTIONS AND DEVELOPMENTS exceeds that of others.  and PARANOIA comes from the flip-side sense of FEAR of OTHERS who have LOCAL POWER OF SOURCING ACTIONS AND DEVELOPMENT that exceeds that of OURSELVES    However, … there is no such thing as ‘LOCAL POWER OF SOURCING ACTIONS AND DEVELOPMENTS; i.e. that is a DOUBLE ERROR of language and grammar

In the amusement park game of ‘bumper cars’, one has the power to launch assertive actions, however, these dynamics are ‘relative’ and one can only add to one’s movements deriving from the pushes one is continually receiving in the form of being bumped by others and bumping into others. Meanwhile, there is definitely SOME SENSE OF creative AUTHORSHIP of action on our part, as we participate in this relational ‘bumper car’ dynamic, but such ‘authorship’ is in no way DETERMINATIVE, and it is impossible to identify THE INDIVIDUAL RESPONSIBLE for “SOURCING” a PARTICULAR unfolding action or.  But ‘WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENT thinking being ‘what it is’, our habit is to assign “PRODUCER-PRODUCT SOURCING RESPONSIBILITY” for constructive or destructive ‘sourcing achievements’  regardless of helpful or inhibiting bumps that shape ’their performance’.

While such LOCAL SORCERY based thinking is foreign to modern physics, indigenous aboriginal cultures, Taoism/Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta adherents, it has become entrenched in WESTERN CULTURE within a system of rewards and punishments, and the giving of esteem or disdain.  In science of complexity terms, it has become LOCKED-IN BY HIGH SWITCHING COSTS; e.g. the apportioning of relatively greater powers of changing the system are allocated to those deemed to have the greatest positive powers of LOCAL SOURCING OF ACTIONS AND DEVELOPMENT, … even though in our bumper car relational reality, there is no such thing as LOCAL SOURCING OF ACTIONS AND DEVELOPMENTS.

While the ‘relativity’ of the bumper-car reality matches our sensory experience of what is going on, … it comes at the price of ineffability in that it becomes impossible to isolate a RESPONSIBLE SOURCE of an action or development due to the underlying web of relational interdependencies.  This relational reality of modern physics is accepted in EASTERN CULTURE understanding; i.e. in indigenous aboriginal cultures, Taoism/Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta, but WESTERN CULTURE demands an understanding that DOES NOT BOTTOM OUT in an unending web of relational interdependencies as in the bumper car reality.

The ANSWER to the WESTERN CULTURE sought-for explicit foundation for reality lies in the ‘DOUBLE ERROR’ of language and grammar; i.e. from NAMING to impute LOCAL thing-in-itself BEING conflated with GRAMMAR that endows the NAMING-instantiated things-in-themselves (notionally) with their own powers of SOURCING actions and developments.

While the DOUBLE ERROR REDUCTION of the NONLOCAL and thus IMPLICIT (the bumper car reality) to the LOCAL and thus EXPLICIT renders the ineffable effable, this ‘effable’ (pseudo-) ‘reality’ leaves something lacking.  With the DOUBLE ERROR I can tell you that the DUNE is growing taller and longer and is shifting across the desert floor, … but the inspirational feeling of inclusion in a resonance infused transforming relational continuum has GONE MISSING from this neat and tidy EXPLICIT and nicely-reasoned accounting of ‘reality’.  As Nietzsche observes;

“Reason” in language!—oh what a deceptive old witch it has been! I fear we shall never be rid of God, so long as we still believe in grammar.  

Not all impressions of the DIVINE are ‘reason’ based although the WESTERN religions seem to hold to this.  In particular, the ‘bumper car reality’ discussed above, is a radical, although natural-experience grounded, departure from the WESTERN CUTURE rational reality, as exemplified in the following;

“Man is rational and therefore like God; he is created with free will and is master over his acts.

1731 Freedom is the power, rooted in reason and will, to act or not to act, to do this or that, and so to perform deliberate actions on one’s own responsibility. By free will one shapes one’s own life. Human freedom is a force for growth and maturity in truth and goodness; it attains its perfection when directed toward God, our beatitude.

1732 As long as freedom has not bound itself definitively to its ultimate good which is God, there is the possibility of choosing between good and evil, and thus of growing in perfection or of failing and sinning. This freedom characterizes properly human acts. It is the basis of praise or blame, merit or reproach.” – Vatican Archives, The Catholic Catechism

LOCAL SOURCING is the key to our being able to ‘affable-ize’ the reality of our sensory experience of inclusion in the transforming relational continuum.  The DOUBLE ERROR is the language and grammar ploy that establishes LOCAL SOURCING.

We WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS seem to be in the habit of accepting the LOCAL SOURCING as ‘reality’ and this seems to have a lot to do with EGO being the synthetic artifact of the DOUBLE ERROR of language and grammar which underpins the abstraction of LOCAL SOURCING.

Like the cultures of the EAST and like modern physics, when I say; “the DUNE is growing higher and longer and is shifting across the desert floor (implying a FIGURE and GROUND split), I am just using this as a communications tool for sharing the ineffable because my sensory experience based understanding is that what I am talking about is ‘resonance phenomena’ as fits with our experience of inclusion within the transforming relational continuum, an experience which is ineffable, because it can’t be reduced to terms of NAMING instantiated things-in-themselves with GRAMMAR instantiated powers of sourcing actions and developments, BECAUSE EVERYTHING IS IN FLUX (Heraclitus, modern physics, Bohm, Nietzsche, Schroedinger).

CAN WE NOT BRING THIS ESSAY TO SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS?

What I am talking about here cannot be explicitly told and that is why modern physics employs such RELATIONAL INFERECE devices as the ‘Wittgenstein ladder’ and ‘The surprise version of the game of Twenty Questions’.  The challenge is that REALITY is the all-inclusive Wave-field aka the transforming relational continuum aka the Tao that includes everything including us so that we can’t ‘get outside of it’ to describe it;

“The Tao that can be told is not the true Tao”

“Listening not to me but to the Logos, it is wise to remember that all things are One.”

 

SUMMARY AND EXPLANATION

COVID 19: The Problem with the PATHOGEN concept

 

The PATHOGEN concept is based on the DOUBLE ERROR of language and gramma (which imputes locally incipient sourcing of action and development).  It is a WESTERN CULTURE STANDARD for explaining relational dysfunction but it is highly oversimplified and based on the abstractions of LOCAL THINGS IN THEMSELVES WITH NOTIONAL POWERS OF SOURCING ACTIONS AND DEVELOPMENTS.

This ‘DOUBLE ERROR’ abstraction is where EGO comes from and also the paranoid fear of other entities, such as PATHOGENS, with notional destructive powers (the INVERSE OF EGO).  This type of abstract thinking in terms of THE ATTACK OF PATHOGENS eclipses and substitutes for understanding based on relational TRANSFORMATION, as in the modern physics and/or ‘Wage-field’ reality.

Since the Wave-field reality is ineffable, there is no-one to ‘speak for it’ and so the articulators of effable reductions have the ‘COMMONS OF SILENCE’, as Ivan Illich puts it, all to themselves.

THE SEARCH FOR THE INEFFABLE REALITY VIA EFFABLE RATIONAL DEBATE CAN ONLY GIVE RISE TO SYNTHETIC REALITIES inducing debates over ‘appearances’ as in the conservative – liberal debate that Jonathan Swift satirizes in Gulliver’s Travels as people who polarize against each other on the basis of whether it is proper to open a boiled egg from the pointy end of from the roundy end.

A more realistic reality is in terms of the NONLOCAL relational dynamic (the Wave-field aka the Tao) where there is no dependency on LOCAL THINGS-IN-THEMSELVES, these being understood as APPEARANCES and employed as if ‘real’ and in he process substituting for the natural relational Wave-field reality.

The ‘more realistic reality’ is meanwhile ‘ineffable’ but it can be alluded to or inferred, as in the following anecdote;

A BUMPER CAR UNDERSTANDING OF NONLOCALITY

In the amusement park game of ‘bumper cars’, one, as driver, has the power to launch assertive actions, however, these dynamics are ‘relative’ and one can only add to one’s movements deriving from the pushes one is continually receiving in the form of being bumped by others and bumping into others. Meanwhile, there is definitely A STRONG SENSE OF creative AUTHORSHIP of action on our part, as we participate in this relational ‘bumper car’ dynami.  HOWEVER, such ‘authorship’ is in no way DETERMINATIVE, and it is impossible to identify THE INDIVIDUAL RESPONSIBLE for “SOURCING” a PARTICULAR unfolding action or development.  But ‘WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENT thinking being ‘what it is’, our habit is to assign “PRODUCER-PRODUCT SOURCING RESPONSIBILITY” for constructive or destructive ‘sourcing developments’ regardless of helpful or inhibiting bumps that are shaping ’the performance’ that is NOT EXCLUSIVELY ONE’S OWN performance but is NONLOCALLLY influenced but which nevertheless APPEARS to be ONE’S OWN performance. 

Thus, the bumper car dynamic illustrates how NOLOCAL dynamics can APPEAR to be LOCAL.  So when boy A bumps boy B so that boy B ‘bumps’ girl G, the boy B is accused of sourcing the bump and this is in fact true since ‘the bump’ is the ‘collision’ of two things as in a pathogen-victim clash seen as an isolated event.  What we are doing, psychologically here, in this common case, is allowing language and grammar to FRAME a single collision within an absolute Euclidian reference frame and thus impose the psychological impression of LOCAL SOURCING.  But bumper-car collisions are inherently NONLOCAL in origin (nonlocality is equivalent to relational TRANSFORMATION).  More than this, NONLOCALITY aka RELATIONAL TRANSFORMATION is the natural reality of our sensory experience, as the experience of the bumper car driver car driver.  However, when we talk about such experience, we make capture it in the intellectual terms of LOCALLY SOURCING  our movement from A to B (no matter how many times we get knocked back, sideways and forward.  LOCAL SOURCING IS A LANGUAGE AND GRAMMAR DOUBLE-ERROR BASED ABSTRACTION, that DROPS OUT the accelerating forward pushes, the retarding push-back and sideways deflections of bumper car reality.

THE BUMPER CAR UNDERSTANDING OF NONLOCAL REALITY can be explained in principle, as has just been done, but it is INEFFABLE in the sense that we focus on ‘the movement of what we take to be AN EXPLICIT AND PARTICULAR THING  (even if the thing is continually forming and reforming in the flow, like a hurricane).

That’s our FIRST ERROR; i.e. regarding the thing in the flow as persisting as the same thing even though, as Heraclitus says, everything is in flux so we can’t step into the same river twice because it is not the same river and we are not the same person doing the stepping in.   (In other words, what is REALLY going on is TRANSFORMATION).

Our SECOND ERROR is GRAMMAR where we impute to the particular thing in the flow ITS OWN POWER OF SOURCING ACTIONS AND DEVELOPMENTS.  For us ‘FLOW-FORMS’, this SECOND ERROR introduces an unresolvable ambiguity as to whether the ‘LOCAL THING-IN-THE-FLOW’ is SOURCING MOVEMENT AND DEVELOPMENT IN THE FLOW, or whether ‘the FLOW’ is SOURCING DOVEMENT AND DEVELOPMENT WITHIN THE ‘LOCAL THING-IN-THE-FLOW’.

This DOUBLE ERROR built into LANGUAGE AND GRAMMAR THUS induces a SCHIZOPRHENIA in WE WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS with roughly ‘half of us’ believing that LOCAL THINGS such as ourselves SOURCE movements and developments in the FLOW, while the roughly ‘other half of us’ is believing that ‘the FLOW’ is SOURCING movement and development of us as ‘LOCAL THINGS IN THE FLOW’.

This manifests in WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS as the CONSERVATIVE-LIBERAL BIPOLARITY.   (WESTERN culture-inbuilt SCHIZOPHRENIA.).  That is, language and grammar allows us to represent LOCAL SOURCING in either an  INSIDE-OUTWARD sense (boil sources flow) or OUTSIDE-INWARDS sense (flow sources boil).  In modern physics, however, THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS “SOURCING” OF ACTIONS AND DEVELOPMENTS, THERE IS ONLY relational “TRANSFORMATION”

 

In oil exploration, geologists and geophysicists push one another around with their ‘drill here’ pointing finger as in a game of bumper cars and then a hole is drilled where they are all blamed if it is a ‘dry hole’ and where, if it is an oil discovery, the company manager is credited.  Geologists and geophysicists consider themselves to be the REAL SOURCE of the discovery while managers consider themselves to be the REAL SOURCE of the discovery.  There are TWO DIFFERENT “REALITIES” AT PLAY HERE (the former is the LIBERAL many-to-one reality and the latter the CONSERVATIVE one-to-many reality, as also with the Zen koan of wind-and-flag.  The flag is like the manager whose flapping sources the movement of the worker collective, while the wind is like the movement of the worker collective that sources the flapping of the manager (the ‘flag’ representing the team).   In the petroleum exploration example, the manager may be an MBA who knows nothing of paleontology or seismology so the ‘management direction’ can only be implicit and not explicit.

 

While ‘the EAST’ understands reality in terms of relational TRANSFORMATION, the ‘WEST’ understands reality in terms of GROWTH, and the psyche has an ambiguous option of understanding GROWTH in (a) inside-outward ONE-TO-MANY terms as in the CONSERVATIVE view, or (b) outside-inward MANY-TO-ONE terms as in the LIBERAL view.  (e.g. the CONSERVATIVE (a) one-bad apple spoils the barrel toplogy versus the (b) it takes a whole community to raise of [good/bad] child. These two polar oppositive choices divide WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS.

NEITHER (of the WEST’s choices of (a) or (b) MAKE SENSE BECAUSE THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS ‘SOURCING’ OF ACTIONS AND DEVELOPMENTS (“SOURCING” in abstraction fabricated by  THE DOUBLE ERROR OF LANGUAGE AND GRAMMAR), THERE IS ONLY RELATIONAL TRANSFORMATION … AS IN THE BUMPER CAR DYNAMIC which is NONLOCAL.

How could our common WESTERN CULTURE imputing of PATHOGEN status to COVID 19 backfire on us?

What do I have against the use of the PATHOGEN CONCEPT?

The PATHOGEN (the generator of injurious acts and developments aka ‘pathology) is one of the multiple ways we have of EFFABLE-IZING the ineffable.  As Ivan Illich pointed out in ‘Silence is a Commons’, the invention of the loudspeaker is allowing us to subject ourselves to a lot of ‘noise’ that is being passed off as meaningful information/signal.

The PATHOGEN could be an animal, microbe or human that is cast as the SOURCE of destructive actions and developments.  It is DOUBLE ERROR based abstract concept.  Am I saying that these pictures of the PATHOGEN COID 19 are NOT REAL?  No, but I am saying that pictures of Robin Hood and Jean Valjean as on MAN WANTED posters correspond to REAL human forms that have been LABELLED PATHOGENS on the basis of their perceived problematic actions and developments that threaten to trigger TRANSFORMATION of the social relational dynamic.  Their actions are in fact not ‘coming rom themselves’ but are induced by rising (have/have-not) imbalance in the social relational dynamic which is inducing in them actions in the service of rebalancing the social-relational dynamic. WESTERN CULTURE AUTHORITIES  that are empowered to sustain peace and order according to publicly endorsed status quo structure, see as PATHOGENS, those whose actions may ignite TRANSFORMATION in the established social order.

TRANSFORMATION, as in plate tectonics, volcanism etc. underscores the reality that, in Nature, everything is in flux; i.e. relational TRANSFORMATION is the basic reality.

We have seen that ‘the proliferation of things’ like ‘Robin Hoods’ and ‘Jean Valjeans’ and ‘c. difficiles’ that are labelled PATHOGENS, derives as remedial response to rising relational imbalance.  They are actually the solution rather than the problem; i.e. they are AGENTS OF TRANSFORMATION, so to label them PATHOGENS and try to eliminate them doesn’t make sense, although ‘getting out of their way’ or even ‘helping them out’ may make a lot of sense, as when controlled burns are used to ‘guide forest fires’ in such a manner as to lessen the burning of human-settled areas.  In this case, there is an implicit acknowledgement that TRANSFORMATION is in a Natural precedence over what we conceive of as ‘human-sourced-developments’.  There are no ‘human-sourced developments’, that is an abstract notion based on the double error of language and grammar; i.e. there is only an all-inclusive transforming relational continuum.  E.g. the human sourced GROWTH of cultivated lands is, as the same time, the shrinkage of Wilderness lands and that, taken together, is TRANSFORMATION.   The concepts of GROWTH and SHRINKAGE imply some ‘thing-in-itself that is doing the GROWING or SHRINKING and that is unreal abstraction.  It  is in fact the DOUBLE ERROR of language and grammar.

Ok, if we demolish the concept of PATHOGEN and put TRANSFORMATION in its place, what then are the corresponding lessons for dealing with what we have been calling the COVID 19 Pandemic?

In the case of natural TRANSFORMATION, that is ‘tamed’ somewhat by human actions, the intentional ‘burns’ in the forest to slow things down and prevent a fire from getting to the full mother lode and going ballistic, recall ‘immunization’ programs’ in medicine.  There could be many things that could be ingested by humans that could slow down TRANSFORMATION and this likely explains how some people are relatively unaffected by COVID while others are.  What is the difference in their diet and physical-material makeup?  This is not about the military model of ‘the body’s defences’.  It is not the ‘forest’s defences’ that fend of forest-fires, it is the ambient environmental conditions that can condition the forests so that they are tinder dry and ready to burst into flames.  As Nishitani notes, ‘fire burns’ is another one of those ‘double errors’ like Nietzsche’s ‘lightning flashes’ which imputes LOCAL SOURCING when what is really going on is RELATIONAL TRANSFORMATION.

If we are thinking in terms of LOCAL SOURCING, we are NOT IN THE REAL WORLD because in the real world, there is only relational TRANSFORMATION.

LOCAL SOURCING is used to effable-ize the ineffable; i.e. relational TRANSFORMATION.

Relational imbalance induces relational dissonance which can be seen in terms of ‘the attack of pathogens’.  The case of c. difficile is easy to work through and gives a general understand of how we HIDE TRANSFORMATION with the use of the DOUBLE ERROR, as in the case of the alleged ATTACK OF PATHOGENS.

Ok, if the whole forest is tinder dry in the long hot summer and ready for the whole thing to go up in flames, we can ‘flatten the infection curve’ by quarantining the forests keeping them free of fire-breeding agents, removing corridors of trees from tree-crowded areas so as to insert fire-barriers that the flames can’t jump across and ‘hold on’ until the ambient conditions that make the situation incendiary have passed.

BUT WE SHOULD LOOK FOR THE AMBIENT CONDITIONS THAT MAKE THE SITUATION INCENDIARY!  WHAT ARE THEY FOR COVID 19?

So long as we CAST COVID 19 AS A PATHOGEN, rather than as a condition of the microbial soup we are included in, we will be focusing on how to stave off and defend against the PATHOGEN attack, rather than thinking in terms of TRANSFORMATION and how we should prepare ourselves for passage through TRANSFORMATION.

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