CREDO

We are all continually depositing into the unfolding world plenum a legacy of actions and statements.  These, if later ‘bumped into’ by others such as family or friends, may raise questions [i.e. where was he/she ‘coming from’, … when he/she did/said that?]… that the author, if available, could easily help to set straight. 

If such questions ‘crop up’ in regard to actions and/or statements of mine, there may be ‘more confusion’ than usual, since my ‘Credo’ has departed significantly from a long lineage of ‘Christian’ credos on both sides of my family.

One question that I never did ask my parents, but which I’m sure they could have comfortably answered, is; ‘why did you deliver me as a young and still malleable if not ‘innocent’ child, to the ‘priests’ [i.e. to the teachings of the Catholic Church].  I have the impression that if the priests could have put the teachings into a serum and, with a syringe, injected them into my stem-cells so that they would be continually re-emerging within me and re-informing me [saving a lot of classes and refreshers], their trust and faith and concern for what they felt was in my best interests could quite possibly have supported the ‘pushing of such a plunger’.  My guess is that their feeling would be that without strongly infused Christian or Buddhist or some kind of teachings, a child is seriously exposed to ‘falling from grace’ or ‘going astray’, while the downsides of being ‘too thorough’ in infusing the teachings would likely appear to them, to be almost negligible.

Whatever my parents reasons for doing so, I was put into the hands of the Church teachers, the priests, and recall at the age of eight or nine, becoming an ‘altar boy’ and learning ‘the Credo’ in Latin.  I enjoyed this mostly because I liked the sound of Latin (especially when sung) and I was better than most of my peers at memorizing and reciting the Credo in Latin.   Of course when I uttered ‘credo…’ or ‘I believe …’, it was a recitation of someone else’s beliefs since for me these were not ‘my beliefs’ but a kind of game I was being asked to play, based on some interesting stories passed down over generations.  These interesting stories might have been coming from the most profound happenings in the world’s history but there were other parallel claims to ‘the world’s most profound events’ and i couldn’t feel the power to discriminate or to know that ‘it was so’, coming to me through the telling.

Not then, and not now, do I actually ‘believe’ in these things.  But I do understand that believing in something that ‘inspires’ or ‘comforts’ or ‘brings strength’ can be very helpful, particularly when one is going through difficult times.  On the other hand, my spirit and body have rebelled at how such ‘beliefs’ can freeze us in dysfunctional social practices.  Here, I am speaking of such things as ‘Christian nationalism’, the ‘secularized theological belief’ in the ‘sovereign state’ with its ‘God Bless our Nation’ and ‘God Bless our President’ etc. etc.

My impression, based on a lifetime of observations and experiences, is like Einstein’s;

“Nationalism is an infantile disease; it is the measles of the world” —  .

I can further add to my list of non-beliefs, besides ‘sovereigntism’ (“The emergence of the sovereign state was … the necessary instrument of Europe’s colonial expansion. –Joseph A. Camilleri, “Rethinking Sovereignty in a Shrinking, Fragmented World.”), … the following are my departures from Western culture ‘standard beliefs’;

1. I do not believe that a human is a ‘being’.  To me, a human is a relational form in the continually transforming relational spatial plenum.  Ok, fancy physics words but they overlay/match the belief of the indigenous aboriginals of Turtle Island [where all things are ‘strands in the web-of-life’] which I might as well say upfront is very, very close to my own evolved ‘credo’.   How did I ‘evolve my credo’? …

Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, 1533-1592  Of the Education of Children (1580) To Madame Diane de Foix, Comtesse de Gurson.

 

Let him make him examine and thoroughly sift everything he reads, and lodge nothing in his fancy upon simple authority and upon trust. Aristotle’s principles will then be no more principles to him, than those of Epicurus and the Stoics: let this. diversity of opinions be propounded to, and laid before him; he will himself choose, if he be able; if not, he will remain in doubt.

“Che, non men che saper, dubbiar m’ aggrata,”

for, if he embrace the opinions of Xenophon and Plato, by his own reason, they will no more be theirs, but become his own. Who follows another, follows nothing, finds nothing, nay, is inquisitive after nothing. “Non sumus sub rege; sibi quisque se vindicet.” Let him at least, know that he knows. It will be necessary that he imbibe their knowledge, not that he be corrupted with their precepts; and no matter if he forgot where he had his learning, provided he know how to apply it to his own use. Truth and reason are common to every one, and are no more his who spake them first, than his who speaks them after: ’tis no more according to Plato, than according to me, since both he and I equally see and understand them. Bees cull their several sweets from this flower and that blossom, here and there where they find them, but themselves afterward make the honey, which is all and purely their own, and no more thyme and marjoram: so the several fragments he borrows from others, he will transform and shuffle together to compile a work that shall be absolutely his own; that is to say, his judgment: his instruction, labor and study, tend to nothing else but to form that. He is not obliged to discover whence he got the materials that have assisted him, but only to produce what he has himself done with them.

2. I do not believe in law-based regulation of social dynamics administered by some supreme central authority.  [I believe in circle-based regulating]

3. I do not believe in Western retributive justice.  [I believe in circle-based restorative justice, as in the indigenous aboriginal tradition].

4. I do not believe in a supernatural God [a God beyond and outside of nature].  I do believe in ‘one natural world’ with nothing beyond it, where the unknowable animating source is immanent in the world [as with indigenous aboriginal, Buddhist, Taoist and Advaita Vedanta beliefs which are consistent with modern physics which points to an understanding of the world as a continually transforming relational spatial plenum]

 * * *

The various ‘writings’ I have left around include numerous ‘anarchist essays’ where I accept the categorizing of my views as ‘anarchist’, although that term is extremely ambiguous in that it gives rise to a diverse multiplicity of interpretations beyond its basic meaning that I would give it, that my ‘anarchist views’ are coming from; i.e.

My definition of ANARCHISM is;  ‘uncontrived, natural and spontaneous order’;

“Central to Taoist teaching is the concept of wu-wei. It is often translated as merely non-action. In fact there are striking philological similarities between ‘anarchism’ and ‘wu-wei‘. Just as ‘an-archos‘ in Greek means absence of a ruler, wu-wei means lack of wei, where wei refers to ‘artificial, contrived activity that interferes with natural and spontaneous development’. From a political point of view, wei refers to the imposition of authority. To do something in accordance with wu-wei is therefore considered natural; it leads to natural and spontaneous order. It has nothing to do with all forms of imposed authority.” – Peter Marshall, ‘Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism

As there is a spectrum of more, less and non-violent elements in most conflicts so it is in the clash between advocates of authoritarian and non-authoritarian social dynamics.   And as in most conflicts, one’s personal experience history influences whether one remains ‘moderate’ or takes them over a threshold into a more extreme activism.  There are many types of anarchism and within them, there are wide ranges in the manner in which people act on their beliefs.   Generalization is impossible, though it is a familiar media and government tactic to generalize using the most extreme elements to selective demonize factions in a conflict; i.e. insurgents are ‘freedom fighters’ if the government they are trying to bring down is an enemy of the term-coiner and ‘terrorist’ if the government under siege is friendly to the term-coiner.

Meanwhile, it is natural, if one wants to share views with others who have common interests such as ‘decolonization’, to share them in a forum where such others gather.  Visitors of the same watering hole can be quite varied; it is a place where serpents and lions ‘rub shoulders’.

Included in these essays, some of which may have ‘stimulated some reflection’, are essays attacking Western retributive justice, attacking Sovereigntism and Colonialism, attacking law-based social regulation, attacking herd-following belief in science [I will comment further on this], attacking Enlightenment view of man, organism, organization as ‘independent reason-driven systems’ etc. etc.

I have used the word ‘attacking’ rather than ‘critiquing’ or discussing, and it is important, to an understanding of ‘my attacks’, to differentiate what I intend by it from the more common interpretations of the word ‘attack’.

In the writings of Taiaiake Alfred, a Mohawk/Iroquois professor of indigenous governance at the University of Victory (whom I have met with and with whom I have much common agreement with); i.e. in his books ‘Peace, Power and Righteousness’, ‘Heeding the Voices of our Ancestors’ and ‘Wasáse’, … there is an expressed need, in the ‘decolonizing initiative’, to ‘undermine the intellectual premises of colonialism’.

My definition of ‘ATTACK’ is; ‘to undermine the intellectual premises of Western institutionalized society’ insofar as such intellectual premises can be demonstrated as flawed.

I have already mentioned ‘sovereignism/colonialism, moral judgement of individuals and ‘law-based social regulation’ which are all based on seeing man, organism and organization as ‘independent reason-driven systems’.

As in ‘wu-wei’, this does not mean ‘attack’ in the sense of win/lose struggle or war of ‘good’ against ‘evil’ etc.  One could use a metaphor here and say that ‘natural and spontaneous order’ corresponds to ‘fresh air’ while ‘contrived order imposed by a supreme authority’ corresponds to a fart.  The ‘attack’ of communists on capitalists would preserve the issuing stuff forth from a central odority and so attempt to overpower one fart-odor with another fart-odor.  The ‘attack’ as I am defining it, is to undermine the intellectual premises of colonialism so that farting is suspended and we will again have access to the ‘fresh air’ of natural and spontaneous order, eg;

“To Engels, Morgan’s description of the Iroquois [in Lewis Henry Morgan’s Ancient Society and The League of the Haudenosaunee or Iroquois] was important because “it gives us the opportunity of studying the organization of a society which, as yet, knows no state.” Jefferson had also been interested in the Iroquois’ ability to maintain social consensus without a large state apparatus, as had Franklin. Engels described the Iroquoian state in much the same way that American revolutionaries had a century earlier: “Everything runs smoothly without soldiers, gendarmes, or police, without nobles, kings, governors, prefects or judges; without prisons, without trials. All quarrels and disputes are settled by the whole body of those concerned. . . . The household is run communistically by a number of families; the land is tribal property, only the small gardens being temporarily assigned to the households — still, not a bit of our extensive and complicated machinery of administration is required. . . . There are no poor and needy. The communistic household and the gens know their responsibility toward the aged, the sick and the disabled in war. All are free and equal — including the women.” — Bruce E. Johansen, Forgotten Founders

 Now, I am cognizant of the fact that many people believe that if the central authority were ‘withdrawn’ everything would fall into chaos and anarchy, … and by anarchy, people commonly think ‘disorder’ rather than ‘anarchism’;  

 Just as ‘an-archos‘ in Greek means absence of a ruler, wu-wei means lack of wei, where wei refers to ‘artificial, contrived activity that interferes with natural and spontaneous development’. From a political point of view, wei refers to the imposition of authority.

But, at the same time, many people are tired of the contrived activity that the central authority aims to force us to become partisans of, whether it is an accelerated pace of exploiting of natural resources that is oblivious to environmental damage, or joining with the world colonial powers in disciplining peoples and states that are resisting becoming member-clones in the one-world order of sovereigntism/colonialism.  

As an experiment as to whether there might be local support for ‘suspending the Ottawa fart-force’, I posed the following question to Elizabeth May, leader of the Green Party of Canada at one of her recent ‘townhall’ meetings here on Pender, attended by about 100 locals, and was surprised to find strong support for this ‘essentially anarchist [in my above definition]’ proposal.  Elizabeth May responded that ‘it sounded great’ but added that she had ‘no idea how to get there from where we are at present’.

Question to Elizabeth May     Townhall Meeting on Pender Island, Jan. 24, 2014

As law historians have noted, the central authority directed sovereigntist state is a ‘secularized theological concept’ which came about as the necessary instrument of Europe’s colonial expansion. [1, 2, 3, 4]

How would you respond and how do you think Ottawa would respond to the proposition of removing the ‘secularized theological’ aspect that grants absolute power to central politicians, so that our democracy could be reformed as a confederacy of stateless peoples, such as would overlay the region known as Canada [The Confederacy of the stateless peoples of Canada] but which could also include or conjoin a Salish sea Confederacy, a Cascadian confederacy, a Northern Turtle Island Confederacy, and other confederacies forming from social resonances and empathies rather than from colonizing strategies and corporatist goals?

ted lumley

[1] The emergence of the sovereign state was … the necessary instrument of Europe’s colonial expansion.” Camilleri, Joseph A. “Rethinking Sovereignty in a Shrinking, Fragmented World.”

[2] The notion of “absolute, unlimited power held permanently in a single person or source, inalienable, indivisible, and original” is a definition of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God. This “God died around the time of Machiavelli…. Sovereignty was … His earthly replacement.” Walker, R. B. J. and Mendlovitz, Saul H. “Interrogating State Sovereignty.”

[3] All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts, not only because of their historical development … but also because of their systematic structure. Bartelson, Jens. A Genealogy of Sovereignty.

[4] State sovereignty “is a ‘religion’ and a faith.” Lombardi, Mark Owen. “Third-World Problem-Solving and the ‘Religion’ of Sovereignty: Trends and Prospects.”

My point in reproducing this, and noting the support for it, is to suggest that mention of the ‘collapse’ of the ‘supreme central authority’ without qualification, raises in the mind an impression of the total collapse of order in the land.   However, the idea of natural and spontaneous development as arises in a self-organizing relational collective resuming its natural precedence over ‘artificial, contrived activity’ imposed by a supreme central authority, does not elicit the notion of a ‘collapse’ into chaos and anarchy, even if such un-author-ized self-organizing is the very definition [wu-wei] of ‘anarchism’.

 * * *

The CORE of the CREDO [mine]

All of the above mentioned ‘attacks’ on Western civilization ‘practices’ such as ‘moral judgement’ and law-based social regulation, for which there are, in all cases, demonstrated workable alternatives [e.g. the circle processes of indigenous restorative justice, the re-orientation from ‘purification’ by rewarding/replicating ‘good’ and punishing/eliminating ‘bad’ to cultivating and sustaining relational balance and harmony] come from a ‘core credo’.

The core credo is ‘my own’ in the same sense as Montaigne describes it.  I can go farther and describe the ‘learning approach’ that I have been using, which is ‘relational’, which is implicit in Montaigne’s essay, but which has been described by Einstein in the context of shifting from Euclidian space based thinking to non-Euclidian aka ‘relational’ space based thinking.   The relational method of learning is to reflect on one’s large collection of observations and experiences and to search for ‘coherencies’ in the various ways of bringing those data together to make sense of them.  This is very different from the common alternative approach of guessing at a theory constructed to predict future states from an initial state and then trying to fit it to the data so that one ‘believes’ in the theory if one can get it to ‘fit the data’.  The relational approach, which is suggestive wavefield imaging, is described by Einstein as follows;

“First of all, an observation of epistemological nature. A geometrical-physical theory as such is incapable of being directly pictured, being merely a system of concepts. But these concepts serve the purpose of bringing a multiplicity of real or imaginary sensory experiences into connection in the mind. To “visualize” a theory therefore means to bring to mind that abundance of sensible experiences for which the theory supplies the schematic arrangement.” – Albert Einstein, ‘Geometry and Experience’

In my own case, in buzzing around in, and plundering the flowers of philosophy and science, what has ‘imaged’ for me from the coherency in which so many observations and experiences come into connective confluence [make coherent sense] in one fell swoop, is the understanding that ‘relations are all there is’, which happens to be a leading contender for the most meaningful interpretation of modern physics investigations/findings;

“What we observe as material bodies and forces are nothing but shapes and variations in the structure of space. Particles are just schaumkommen (appearances).” – Erwin Schroedinger

 “By the principle of Occam’s razor, physicists and philosophers prefer ideas that can explain the same phenomena with the fewest assumptions. In this case you can construct a perfectly valid theory by positing the existence of certain relations without additionally assuming individual things. So proponents of ontic structural realism say we might as well dispense with things and assume that the world is made of [relational-spatial] structures, or nets of relations.” – Meinard Kuhlmann, ‘What is Real’, Scientific American, August 2013

As in both Montaigne’s and Einstein’s description of ‘relational theory development’, it is by the fact that the same theory keeps popping up as an explanation for different, diverse and varied collections of observations and experiences that brings one intuitive confidence in the theory.  This is very different from starting with an explicit theory and imposing it on the data to see if one can get a fit.  In the relational interference/coherency approach, resolution builds as in holography; i.e. a few data points bring a low resolution image, many data points bring a high resolution image.  The ‘relations-first, things-last’ theory captures all data points in one burst of coherence as in a high resolution hologram.  The ‘things-first, relations-last’ theory can be ‘fitted’ to a great many different datasets, but there is no overall build of coherency or ‘holographic resolution’ as in the relational approach.

I would compare this to the difference between a ‘learning circle’ and a standard Western meeting.  In the former, everyone is speaking from the heart and sharing their experiences [non-indigenous people new to the circle experience have commented; we are speaking the truth.  We don’t usually do this!]  This is a yin/yang sharing of inner-and-outer, inhabitant-habitat relational experience. 

As more people speak, because each experience brings in relational information in regard to the common habitat, a holographic image of the common habitat in which all are included emerges from initially low resolution and continues to build resolution.  In the latter, standard discuss where the default is for each person to speak from the head and giving their analytical yang assessment of what is going on, there are repeated Gods-eye voyeur observer views of the same scenario, some more detailed than others, as where many people in an art class are sketching the same model so that a team of judges might rank them from ‘best to worst’.  This is how analytical assessments also come across and how the best articulators or ‘sharpest analytical minds’ become the default spokespersons while the presentations of stutterers and poor articulators are habitually ignored or flatly bypassed.

In the circle process, every sharing of experience is a true experience and it can be felt by everyone as true, and different, but yet carrying within in it implicit information pertaining to the common habitat, and as each person speaks the relational coherency continues to build in the sense that a spatial relational [holographical] image of the common living space is involuntarily/unintentionally building; ‘so this is what our community is like’.  The stutterer’s story is valued, like everyone’s is because ‘it is the truth’ and because these true experiences relationally-interfere and build imagery of the common living space dynamic.

In the other standard meeting discussion instead ask each person for their intellectual assessment as to what is going on and by and by the same, most articulate speakers are the only one’s speaking and most of the rest remain silent.  The people in the ‘learning circle’ are getting a far richer greater understanding of the community space than could ever be gleaned from the best analytical, ‘what things are doing’ based assessment in the standard meeting.

This relational build that does not depend on ‘what things do’ has been described by physicist John Wheeler in terms of ‘the surprise version of the game Twenty Questions’ which is a way of describing ‘how quantum physics works’.  No-one knows the answer to the game [no object is secretly picked in the beginning] but people answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to questions in the manner that progressively moves towards resolving what it is, without there being ‘anything there’; i.e. the progressive resolving is purely relational [relations-first, things-last].  The ‘learning circle’ builds imagery in this manner; i.e. in a purely relational-interferential manner [as in wavefield imaging]. What is resolved is kind of like ‘ball-lightning’ or a ‘plasma ball’ or ‘convection cell’ which is not asserting itself out of its own centre but is a purely relational feature in the continually forming relational spatial plenum.

So, in the relational approach, the theory is never explicit; i.e. to say that ‘relations’ are in precedence over ‘things’ means that we are not modeling in terms of ‘what things are doing’ and ‘what they are going to do’, but are instead developing a sense of how the transforming relational space is ‘unfolding’ and how we might serve as ‘agents of transformation’ in such ‘unfolding’. 

In Newtonian physics, our theories are all positivist [all yang and no yin, things-first, relations-last] and we start off with ‘initial conditions’ which describe the independent things-in-themselves that are involved, their present conditions [location and momentum] and use our theory to predict the state of the world [described first by initial conditions] at some future time.  Space is not a participant, it is an infinite emptiness [Euclidian space].  There is no ‘outside-inward orchestrating influence’ in this newtonian picture; i.e. there is no sense that this ‘system’ described by ‘initial conditions’ is included in a relational suprasystem [which the systems sciences claims is inevitably/always the case] as follows from an understanding of the world as a dynamic unum, a continually transforming relational spatial plenum.

In the theory of ‘relations first, things second’, the imagery is that the ‘relational field influence’ outside-inwardly orchestrates and shapes the inside-outward asserting material dynamic.  A mental image for this could be the sun bringing forth a beansprout or sunflower fostered by sun-warmed fluid upwellings in the earth. Since the world is one dynamic unum, the solar outside-inward orchestrating influence and the inside-outward asserting embryonic dynamic are conjugate aspects of ONE dynamic, that of relational-spatial transformation.

This yin/yang dynamic of relational transformation suggests itself in all kinds of datasets.  As Emerson says; ‘the genius of nature not only inhabits the organism it creates it’.

In studying variations on the theme of organizing in ‘exceptionally performing teams’, I came upon this ‘relations first, things second’ topology of the team dynamic.  Where ‘normal teams’ had started from strongly establishing ‘their own identity’ as a ‘yang machine’ that ‘knew what it was doing’ and asserted itself strongly, setting itself clear goals and objectives,… the ‘exceptionally performing teams’ had let their individual and collective inside-outwards asserting behaviours be outside-inwardly orchestrated by the relational spatial dynamics of the relational web of customers, suppliers, services, host community and families they were situationally included in.   Their dynamics were ‘yin/yang’ and not simply ‘yang’; i.e. in ‘yang mode’, the team asserts forth from out of itself like a powerboater that does not need to ‘attune’ to the spatial relational dynamics it is included in.  In yin/yang mode, the team is like the sailboat that derives its drive and steerage from the relational spatial dynamics it is included in; i.e. it allows its inside-outward asserting behaviour to be shaped by the outside-inward-orchestrating influence it is included in.

It is important to take note here, that mainstream science does NOT accommodate the yin/yang understanding of dynamics since mainstream science imposes an absolute space and absolute time measurement/reference frame that serves as an idealized ‘operating theatre’ that NOTIONALLY GETS RID OF the dynamic web of relations that is the source of outside-inward orchestrating influence; i.e. mainstream science attributes the sourcing of dynamics FULLY AND SOLELY to the visible material agents seen as ‘doers-of-deeds’ in an empty space rather than as ‘agents of transformation’ in a transforming relational spatial continuum as in the yin/yang view.

 * * * BEGIN DIGRESSION ON TEAM STUDY INSIGHTS * * *

In the yin/yang view of the ‘exceptionally performing teams’, there were two aspects to dynamics as in ‘hitting’ and ‘fielding’ in baseball.  What is manifest is the ‘hitting performance’ but the ‘hitting performance’ is not just due to the ‘hitter’ as in the mainstream science ‘yang’ view of dynamics, the hitting performance can be amplified by making the fielding ‘more accommodating’, and this was what was done.  But as far as outside observers were concerned, because they imposed the mainstream science yang model of dynamics, the ‘team’ was fully and solely responsible for its own behaviour.  This yang view is the predominating view of Enlightenment European thinking, and constitutes the ‘archetype’ for man, organism and organization [e.g. ‘the team’ as an ‘independent reason-driven system’]. 

One of the exceptionally performing teams I studied had 150 members whose jobs were about to be liquidated because their operations were persisting ‘in the red’ due to a collapse in product prices, even after several years of overhead lowering and operations-optimizing initiatives by the very best in their fields.  Helped by the fact they were young confident, innovative people [trusted by their local salty-dog management] who liked where they were living [Bakersfield California], they were ready to pull out all the stops to have a go at doing the impossible and putting their operations back into the black, and they were given the freedom to have a go for a year, prior to being liquidated and their operations sold for scrap.

The team, which incorporated multiple highly-specialized skills in engineering and geology along with hourly workers, welders, fitters, labourers  started off with a radical dissolving of internal identities.  Renting a vacant aircraft hanger that would accommodate meetings of all 150 of them at once, they mutually agreed to put away, as far as internal relations were concerned, their business cards and position descriptions, develop a easy-to-understand overall model their operations including the financial/economic aspects and make it available to, and UNDERSTOOD by everyone, providing training where needed.  Unionized hourly wage labour was brought in as full-fledged team members in the now flat peer-to-peer operations and were taught all of the aspects of the operation [formerly, field labour was frustrated by seeing things that seemed ‘wrong’ but had no entrée into the management of the operations. Later, labourers gathered around the engineering computer displays and kibitzed with the engineers and geologists on what was going on. One union leader commented at a team party; “This reorganizing has put my head back on my shoulders, and I am extremely grateful for it”]. 

The ‘vital signs’ of the operation were captured by meters and sensors and monitored continuously, these vital signs being made available to all team members through a PC network that everyone had access to.  When operational ‘vitals’ in the complex operation took a positive surge, back in the aircraft hangar meetings, all 150 were asked for a show of hands if they had an idea why this was so, and those who raised their hands formed an ad hoc sub-team to work on sustaining it, and when operations took a negative dive, all 150 were asked for a show of hands if they had an idea why this was so, and those who raised their hands formed an ad hoc sub-team that worked on eliminating it.  All of their inside-outside relations with customers, suppliers, service providers, host community and families were fully explored like never before and the interfacing was continuously monitored, giving them a sense of how their inside-outward hitting performance was being outside-inwardly affected by the accommodating [or disaccommodating] influence of the ‘fielding’ they were ‘hitting into’.

  * * * END DIGRESSION ON TEAM STUDY INSIGHTS * * *

The insight as to ‘what was going on’ in the ‘exceptionally performing teams’, was that the team had transcended its standard yang-based dynamic mode and gone into ‘yin/yang’ mode which understood that dynamics were comprised of two conjugate aspects as in a baseball metaphor where ‘hitting’ and ‘fielding’ are conjugate aspects of the one dynamic of continuing relational transformation.  The ‘relational suprasystem’ of community is the mother system that engenders and incorporates industrial/commercial activity that includes a multiplicity of ‘local systems’.  ‘Teams’ normally think of themselves as ‘local systems-in-themselves’ but in the more comprehensive view wherein all systems are understood as being included in a relational suprasystem in which they can be understood as being engendered in fulfilling some need, the awareness of the yin/yang or hitting-fielding nature of dynamics surfaces.  While the team in its earlier standard ‘incarnation’ had spent years perfecting the ‘yang aspect’ of their dynamic, their ‘hitting performance’, what opened up for them was the prospect of improving the ‘coniunctio’ of hitting-and-fielding whereby a more accommodating fielding could manifest via improved hitting performance.  It worked, and the operation was brought back ‘into the black.’

Mainstream science DOES NOT acknowledge the yin/yang nature of dynamics although modern physics insists on it.

This is an important issue since all of the above noted ‘intellectual premises of Western civilization, Sovereigntism/Colonialism that I have ‘been attacking’ are based on the nature of dynamics being ‘purely yang’; i.e. the Enlightenment European archetype for man, organism and organization is a purely yang, ‘independent reason-driven system’, that operates in a notional absolute space and absolute time reference-frame-seen-as-operating-theatre.

Our models of ‘self’ and ‘sovereign state’ and ‘corporation’ etc. rest dependently on the notion of dynamics being ‘purely yang’ and NOT yin/yang.  And our models of justice and law-based social regulating are likewise dependent on the notion of dynamics being ‘purely yang’ and NOT yin/yang.

Since dynamics are seen, not only by modern physics but by indigenous aboriginals, Buddhists, Taoists as ‘yin/yang’ rather than ‘yang’, there are many clues as to how ‘yin/yang’ gets reduced to ‘all-yang-no-yin’.

This topic is covered in a number of my essays, but to summarize; — understanding dynamics as yin/yang equates to understanding space as ‘relational’ or as understanding ‘relations first, things second’ rather than ‘things first, relations second’.   The elevating of ‘things’ over ‘relations’ is accomplished through our noun-and-verb European/Scientific language-and-grammar, by imposing on a relational form in the continually transforming relational spatial plenum, … ‘subjecthood’ and imputing to this subject the God-like powers of jumpstart sourcing of its own behaviour [achieved in language by having the subject/noun inflect a verb]. 

The following three comments by Nietzsche all speak to this artificial reduction of yin/yang dynamics to all-yang-no-yin dynamics by way of language.

“In Reason’ in language! … Being is thought into and insinuated into everything as ‘cause’; from the concept ‘ego,’ alone, can the concept ‘Being’ proceed. … – 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.” – Nietzsche, ‘Twilight of the Idols’

“Our judgement has us conclude that every change must have an author”;–but this conclusion is already mythology: it separates that which effects from the effecting. If I say “lightning flashes,” I have posited the flash once as an activity and a second time as a subject, and thus added to the event a being that is not one with the event but is rather fixed, “is” and does not “become.”–To regard an event as an “effecting,” and this as being, that is the double error, or interpretation, of which we are guilty.” – Nietzsche, ‘Will to Power’, 531

“[Descartes’ ‘I think therefore I am’ reflects] … our grammatical custom that adds a doer to every deed. In short, this is not merely the substantiation of a fact but a logical-metaphysical postulate” … “That which gives the extraordinary firmness to our belief in causality is not the great habit of seeing one occurrence following another but our inability to interpret events otherwise than as events caused by intentions. It is belief in the living and thinking as the only effective force–in will, in intention–it is belief that every event is a deed, that every deed presupposes a doer, it is belief in the “subject.” Is this belief in the concept of subject and attribute not a great stupidity?” – Nietzsche, ‘Will to Power’ 484

Now, since mainstream science also portrays dynamics as purely yang, thanks to the imposing of absolute Euclidian space framing on the data of our experience and observations, one might suppose that both language and science are pointing to this same view of dynamics as purely yang [all hitting and no fielding; i.e. when Al Capone makes swift passage through the crowd, his performance is fully and solely due to him in the view of dynamics as ‘all-yang-no-yin’ [all hitting no fielding], but if one acknowledges that the crowd opened up before him like the Red sea opened up for Moses, we would have to say that it was the accommodating quality of the ‘fielding’ that amplified the ‘hitting performance’ in which case the dynamic must be seen as ‘yin/yang’ rather than ‘yang’.

So, where did Newton get his ‘all-yang-no-yin’ conception of dynamics from.  Yes, he made use of Euclidian geometry which frames ‘things’ in empty space so that only ‘things’ can be the source of dynamics, but is it possible that he started with the thought of yang dynamics and put his [overly] simple model together on that basis?

Linguist Benjamin Whorf argues that this is the case, and since Newton was accustomed to using noun-and-verb European language-and-grammar as the basis for his work, it is an argument that makes much sense;

“From the form-plus-substance dichotomy the philosophical views most traditionally characteristic of the “Western world” have derived huge support. Here belong materialism, psychophysical parallelism, physics–at least in its traditional Newtonian form–and dualistic views of the universe in general. Indeed here belongs almost everything that is “hard, practical common sense.” Monistic, holistic, and relativistic views of reality appeal to philosophers and some scientists, but they are badly handicapped in appealing to the “common sense” of the Western average man–not because nature herself refutes them (if she did, philosophers could have discovered this much), but because they must be talked about in what amounts to a new language. “Common sense,” as its name shows, and “practicality” as its name does not show, are largely matters of talking so that one is readily understood. It is sometimes stated that Newtonian space, time, and matter are sensed by everyone intuitively, whereupon relativity is cited as showing how mathematical analysis can prove intuition wrong. This, besides being unfair to intuition, is an attempt to answer offhand question (1) put at the outset of this paper, to answer which this research was undertaken. Presentation of the findings now nears its end, and I think the answer is clear. The offhand answer, laying the blame upon intuition for our slowness in discovering mysteries of the Cosmos, such as relativity, is the wrong one. The right answer is: Newtonian space, time, and matter are no intuitions. They are receipts from culture and language. That is where Newton got them.” – Benjamin Whorf; ‘The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior to Language’

Religion comes in to play here, also, in reducing the yin/yang nature of dynamics to all-yang-no-yin, … with the myth of Creation of the three Abrahamic religions [Christianity, Judaism, Islam] as an absolute jumpstart beginning along with the predictions of an absolute terminal ending [Judgement Day] and again with the Biblical model of a material world framed in split apart ‘space’ and ‘time’ [the universe being constructed by the assembling of different components in an otherwise fixed and empty space, in a time progression].  This religious teaching sets up the archetype for man, organism and organization as ‘independent reason-driven systems’, in full agreement with mainstream science, … perhaps NOT a coincidence since, as Whorf contends, Newton’s model of space, time and matter are “receipts from culture and language”.

Summary of the Source of ‘My Credo’

Everything I have studied, and all of my life experience, invites me to understand the world I live in, as suggested by the relations first, things second’ view of modern physics. Or to be more precise ‘relations first and that’s all she wrote’ since ‘things’ can be intuitively understood as ‘appearances’ forming at relational nexa; i.e. ‘things’ are ‘relational forms in the continually transforming relational spatial plenum’ [how else could the world be a dynamic unum?];

 “What we observe as material bodies and forces are nothing but shapes and variations in the structure of space. Particles are just schaumkommen (appearances).” – Erwin Schroedinger

To me, it is ludicrous to consider a human, my self, to be a disconnected [independently-existing] thing-in-itself that interacts with other disconnected things-in-themselves within what??… an absolute space and absolute time reference frame???  The way I have always been experiencing it is that the world is a relational activity continuum that people are continually bubbling up into and dissolving back into, as in a fluid dynamic.  I am ‘with Nietzsche’ on this;

“The new world conception. —The world exists; it is not something that becomes, not something that passes away.  Or rather: it becomes, it passes away, but it has never begun to become and never ceased from passing away — it maintains itself in both. —It lives on itself: its excrements are its food.” —Nietzsche, ‘Will to Power, 1066′

And do you know what “the world” is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself; as a whole, of unalterable size, a household without expenses or losses, but likewise without increase or income …” –Nietzsche, ‘The Will to Power’, 1067

Furthermore, I am only too aware of how we use language to reduce ‘relational forms’ like the hurricane or convection cell, to notional ‘independently-existing things-in-themselves’ and start talking about them as if they possessed God-like powers of ‘internal-process directed development and behaviour’, as in ‘Katrina is growing larger and stronger’, .. ‘Katrina is heading for the Gulf Coast’, … ‘Katrina is ravaging New Orleans’, … ‘Katrina is dissipating’.   All of this without mentioning the obvious yin/yang nature of the dynamics wherein the outside-inward accommodating aspect of the relational space is orchestrating the inside-outward asserting actions, the yin/yang coniunctio constituting Katrina as relational form in relational plenum.  Katrina, rather than being a yang doer of deeds can instead be understood as an ‘agent of transformation’, the MANNER IN WHICH the ‘continually transforming relational spatial plenum’ MANIFESTS to us.

Now, when it comes to a ‘human’, on what grounds should one impute ‘independent being’ to a human, a relational form that appears to be included in the continually transforming relational spatial plenum.  Sure, I know how science works and that we can use analytical inquiry to delve down inside a form and notionally break it down into components and processes and describe the thing fully in yang terms of inside-outward asserting.  We can do that with anything; e.g. with a ‘university’ but as systems sciences pioneer Russell Ackoff points out, to give us a real physical meaning of ‘what it is’, we have to ‘ground analytical inquiry in synthetical inquiry’ which is, to say, we must acknowledge that every ‘system’ is included in a relational suprasystem that it is fulfilling some need in. 

The suprasystem of the relational dynamics of community, in the case of the university, orchestrates within its relational dynamic, a relational pattern that we come to call ‘a university’ at which point we can investigate it AS IF IT WERE A LOCAL INDEPENDENT SYSTEM-IN-ITSELF, in which case we employ ‘analytical inquiry’ to describe it as if it were a local, independently-existing thing-in-itself with its own internal components-and-processes-driven-and-directed development and behaviour that ‘operates’ in a notional absolute space and absolute time measurement/reference frame [the grid we INTERPOSE that allows us to isolate the relational form and measure it relative to the grid, so that we don’t have to deal with the outside-inward orchestrating influences that are continually shaping its inside-outward asserting actions].  By just using ‘analytical inquiry’, we come away with a notional purely yang system whose hitting performance depends fully and solely on its ‘self’ and whose development and performance is fully inside-outward asserting without being outside-inwardly influenced by ‘need’ within the relational dynamics of community.

Of course I can see the ‘convenience’ and ‘economy of thought’, as Mach puts it, of the purely yang model, but like Mach and others, I am not going to confuse the yang view for ‘reality’.  As Mach says, without using the words yin/yang, dynamics are yin/yang; i.e.

“The dynamics of the inhabitants are conditioning the dynamics of the habitat at the same time as the dynamics of the habitat are conditioning the dynamics of the inhabitants”  –Mach’s principle

In the yin/yang view of dynamics of Mach, Bohm, Schroedinger, Nietzsche, … we, as relational forms in the continually transforming relational spatial plenum, must understand ourselves as yin/yang ‘agents of transformation’ rather than as yang ‘doers-of-deed’ operating in empty space.

There are thus two views of our ‘self’ available to us here, one, the more comprehensive yin/yang view and the other, the more simple and convenient ‘economy-of-thought’ ‘yang’ model, … but we have a mischievous tendency, as Emerson puts it, to reduce our yin/yang ‘agent of transformation’ view of self to a yang ‘doer-of-deeds’ view of self;

“Whilst a necessity so great caused the man to exist, his health and erectness consist in the fidelity with which he transmits influences from the vast and universal to the point on which his genius can act. The ends are momentary: they are vents for the current of inward life which increases as it is spent. A man’s wisdom is to know that all ends are momentary, that the best end must be superseded by a better. But there is a mischievous tendency in him to transfer his thought from the life to the ends, to quit his agency and rest in his acts: the tools run away with the workman, the human with the divine.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘The Method of Nature’

Many things ‘fit together relationally’ here that support the ‘yin/yang’ nature of dynamics and the understanding that human forms are relational forms in the continually transforming relational spatial plenum; … so many things, that is very hard, in my view, to make any sort of case for a human form or an organism being an ‘independent reason-driven system’ as is the predominating Western culture understanding that is foundational to Sovereigntism/Colonialism and its belief in moral judgements and law-based regulations of the notional ‘independent reason-driven forms called human ‘beings’’.  I can understand the convenience and ‘economy of thought’ in such absolutist constructs, but I cannot see the case for treating these yang views as ‘real’ and using belief in them to ‘guide our individual and collective behaviours, as is currently the case in the globally dominating Western civilization.

It is true that our visual sensing observation makes ‘man’ look as if he is independent of the space he is in; i.e. it does ‘appear’ as if the ‘inhabitant’ is independent of the ‘habitat’ which would then lead on to postulating that his ‘internal reasoning’ is the FULL AND SOLE source of his behaviour, but so does it appear as if tornadoes are independent things, and ball lightning and Saint Elmo’s fire, and I could more easily imagine a tornado with a fedora and raincoat as a model for a man than I could imagine a man as absolute disconnected from the continually transforming habitat/universe he is included in, and explain his development and behaviour as if it were a purely inside-outwardly asserting ‘yang’ dynamic.

I do realize that Darwinian theory holds this to be the case, but the older yin/yang theories of evolution have simply been politically crushed by the predominating political power of yang science that hold yang science to be ‘reality’ rather than a finger pointing to the moon.  Lamarckian evolution [a yin/yang theory] is enjoying an upsurge because cell research suggests that cell evolution is deriving from the conjugate relation of outside-inward epigenetics and inside-outward asserting genetics.  Lamarck’s theory was based on the yin/yang dynamics of the outside-inward orchestrating influence of ‘les fluides incontenables’ [gravity, thermal, electromagnetic field influence; i.e. the fluids that can contain but cannot themselves be contained] exciting the inside-outward asserting actions of ‘les fluides contenables’ [water and fluid containing dissolved salts/minerals].

This yin/yang view of evolution applied to the entire world and did not split apart the organic world and inorganic world. It was also held by Nietzsche, Rolph, Ruedimeyer and Roux;

“In developing this aspect of the will to power, Nietzsche drew heavily on the ideas of an obscure Anglo-German zoologist, William Rolph (‘Biologische Probleme’). … Rolph denies the existence of an instinct for self-preservation – or at the very least rejects the notion that such a drive represents the principle motivation of animal behaviour. Rather, life seeks primarily to expand itself. This elementary proposition is expressed as a law of assimilation, a law operative in both the organic and inorganic world. Growth, Rolph argues, is determined by a process of diffusion, in which endosmosis predominates over exosmosis. All organic functions, from nutrition and reproduction right up to evolution, can be explained by, and reduced to, this fundamental activity; they are not, as most contemporary biologists assumed, a manifestation of the instinct of self-preservation.” – Gregory Moore, ‘Nietzsche, Biology and Metaphor’.

These models of evolution of Lamarck, Nietzsche, Emerson are all yin/yang and do not split apart the inhabitant from the habitat, nor do they split apart the organic and the inorganic.

On the other hand, Darwinism goes back to the same yang model of the human inhabitant that has been extant since the Western Creation myth and Noah’s Ark.  There is no incorporating of the effects of field as in Lamarck’s model; there is not even any mention of it, even though the presence of outside-inward field influence which is ‘everywhere at the same time’ [gravity, thermal, electromagnetic] opens the door to more comprehensive ways of viewing phenomena which were not previously available;

“We cannot build physics on the basis of the matter-concept alone. But the division into matter and field is, after the recognition of the equivalence of mass and energy, something artificial and not clearly defined. Could we not reject the concept of matter and build a pure field physics? What impresses our senses as matter is really a great concentration of energy into a comparatively small space. We could regard matter as the regions in space where the field is extremely strong. In this way a new philosophical background could be created. Its final aim would be the explanation of all events in nature by structure laws valid always and everywhere. A thrown stone is, from this point of view, a changing field, where the states of greatest field intensity travel through space with the velocity of the stone. There would be no place, in our new physics, for both field and matter, field being the only reality. This new view is suggested by the great achievements of field physics, by our success in expressing the laws of electricity, magnetism, gravitation in the form of structure laws, and finally by the equivalence of mass and energy.”  — Einstein and Infeld, ‘The Evolution of Physics’

Over and over and over again, observations and experiences point to the yin/yang view of dynamics wherein ‘things’ are ‘relational forms in a continually transforming relational spatial plenum’. 

Over and over and over again, observations and experiences expose our yang worldview of independently-existing things-in-themselves that operate in an absolute empty space, as ‘schaumkommen’ (‘appearances’), ‘economy of thought’, Maya (illusion), the ‘shadow’ of non-local, non-visible, non-material relational [field] dynamics.

When science removes the ‘yin’ from ‘yin/yang’, humans can no longer be understood as relational forms in the continually transforming relational spatial plenum since, in the yang view, they live and operate in empty space and this is where the archetype comes in, of the ‘independent reason-driven system’ that operates in a notional absolute space and absolute time reference-frame seen as operating theatre. [which, again, is foundational to the concepts of moral judgement and law-based social regulation and to Sovereigntism/Colonialism].

The biological sciences just cannot ‘let go’ of the archetype of the ‘independent reason-driven system’ that operates in absolute space and absolute time, which they apply not just to organisms and organization but to biological cells, even though their own increasingly detailed data is screaming out to them, saying; “this sort of complexity is so easily understood when dynamics are understood as yin/yang but so impossible to explain when we hold on to the view of dynamics as all-yang-no-yin’. 

For example, cooperation amongst different species of plants can now be seen to be so clever and enabling so many beneficial adaptations that plant biologists are scratching their heads as to where to ‘locate’ the source of reasoning in these clever plants [seen as independent reason-driven systems] since they don’t even have central nervous systems.  Of course, if they were seen as a relational web forming within an energy-charged spatial plenum, as fits with modern physics, they wouldn’t have to model these relational dynamics as ‘cooperation’ jumpstarting out of the ‘reasoning centres’ of individual plants seen as independent things-in-themselves.    As in the citation from Kuhlmann’s ‘What is Real?’, relations are first, things last’ i.e. the web of relations is primary, as in fluid flow and relational forms develop as the nexa of relational influences.

Now, the relational forms can be identified as ‘species-in-themselves’ and will be, if one starts with the notion that space is an absolute fixed empty container inhabited by a diverse collection of independently-existing things-in-themselves.  Of course one is going to have an impossible task of explaining complex cooperative actions amongst this diverse multiplicity of ‘independent things’, and the only means of ATTEMPTING to explain it is by way of the notional ‘reasoning centres’ that have notionally been put into these notionally independent things to explain dynamics that can not be explained via outside-inward ‘yin’ influences, since mainstream science [thanks to our noun-and-verb European/Scientific language-and-grammar as explained above] has imposed ‘subjecthood’ on the relational forms in the continually transforming relational spatial plenum, reducing the yin/yang dynamic to an all-yang-no-yin dynamic [removing the inhabitat-habitat conjugate relation and portraying the habitat as empty space inhabited by, in the case of man, organism and organizations, ‘independent reason-driven systems’].

In the following two examples one can see biologists struggling with how to explain the amazing intelligence of plants without having any idea as to where to position or locate the seat of this amazing intelligence;

1.  The David Suzuki ‘Nature of Things’ video called ‘Smarty Plants’ documents the efforts by scientist in trying to figure out where this ‘plant intelligence’ is coming from, since plants don’t even have a nucleus or central nervous system into which we can impute a centre-of-intelligence.  

2. In a Nova documentary entitled ‘Slime Mold Smarts’ we hear the following absurd statement;

“The slime mold Physarum polycephalum is a single cell without a brain, yet it can make surprisingly complicated decisions. In this animated video short, watch as a slime mold navigates through a maze and solves a civil engineering problem.” — Nova, ‘Slime Mold Smarts’

All of the observations and experiential data, in my view, undermines the premises of the all-yang-no-yin ‘things first, relations second’ worldview and instead supports the yin/yang ‘relations first, things secondary’ [appearances] view.

Of course, biologists are ‘locked-in’ to the yang model by so many socio-political pillars that support Western scientific thinking.  Darwinism would fall [Lamarckism would rise in its place] if the yin/yang nature of dynamics were acknowledged and the social sciences including psychology would all be turned upside down.  In case one is struggling with the ‘scale’ of this transformation of ideas, none of these effects would exceed the shift from that constituted by the difference between how indigenous aboriginal traditionalists are understanding things and the corresponding manner in which they would like to live [in a decolonized fashion as in the question to Elizabeth May cited earlier].  Of course the use of science and technology, in the yin/yang world view, has to comprehend that actions are ‘transformation of spatial relations’ rather than ‘what things do’ [actions are relations first, things last, and not things-first, relations-last] and this reorients those with a yin/yang worldview away from moral judgements and law-based social regulation to the sustaining of balance and harmony in relations. 

There is much more that can be spoken about here; e.g. the yin influence as spirituality/consciousness that permeates the universe, the ‘shadow of which’ are the ‘appearances’; i.e. the local, visible, material forms and their dynamics.

When we model the world of our observations/experiences starting from those ‘appearances’; i.e. the local, visible, material relational forms in the non-local, non-visible, non-material transforming relational spatial plenum, we are constructing a whole ‘economy-of-thought’ world based on ‘independently-existing things-in-themselves’ and ‘what these things do’.  It is a convenient view but it is not physical reality and we ‘intuitively know it’ [it is evident to indigenous aboriginal traditionalists and to Buddhists, Taoists and practitioners of Advaita Vedanta].  We know that the falling rock is the small view and the reduction of the hill and filling in of the valley [relational spatial transformation] is the more comprehensive view; i.e. it is ‘relations first, things second’.  If we are in an observation post keeping a spread sheet on every rock that falls from the hill into the valley, when the rocks cease falling, there will be nothing captured in our spread sheet that informs us that the hill and valley have morphed into one flat plane.  Like the crest and trough of ocean waves, the yang asserting of the crestal water into the valley and the accommodating influence of the valley that orchestrates its fall are conjugate aspects of the one dynamic of relational spatial transformation, the yin/yang dynamic the world is made of.

Finally, I am hoping that the above discussion sheds some light on why my present ‘credo’ has come to replace the start-off ‘credo’ that I was given as a child, and why my various essays and actions have so often rejected the commonly accepted Western civilization and Sovereigntist/Colonialist standards of ‘moral judging of individuals’, ‘law-based regulating of social dynamics’, both of which lead to authoritarian structures to ‘morally judge’ as in Western retributive justice, and to ‘regulate social behaviour’ as in Western law enforcement, approaches which are, in the relations first, things last yin/yang world view, dealt with INSTEAD by the full community by way of circle processes which assume that conflict arises relationally and manifests materially [the organism is not only inhabited by relational spatial dynamics it is engendered by them].  “It takes a whole community to raise a [rogue] child”  and “It takes a whole global community of nations to raise a [rogue] nation”.

My ethic, which flows naturally and spontaneously from these understandings, is try to assist in restoring cultivating and sustaining balance and harmony in the relational spatial dynamics we all share inclusion in.  My interpretation, like Taiaiake Alfred’s and others, is that it is important to ‘undermine the intellectual premises of colonialism’.  This is part of the ‘indigenous anarchism’ of the aboriginal decolonization initiatives.

This is also why I participate in anarchist forums and support anarchism in the sense that;

“Just as ‘an-archos‘ in Greek means absence of a ruler, wu-wei means lack of wei, where wei refers to ‘artificial, contrived activity that interferes with natural and spontaneous development’. From a political point of view, wei refers to the imposition of authority. To do something in accordance with wu-wei is therefore considered natural; it leads to natural and spontaneous order. It has nothing to do with all forms of imposed authority.” – Peter Marshall, ‘Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism

Holding the views that I hold implies ‘resistance to artificial contrived activity’ where it is being imposed.  How far one goes in this resistance, while being ‘embedded’ in a Colonial system that lives and breathes authority, moral judging and the authority-justified imposing of artificial, contrived activity, is not something that can be cranked out of a formula.  In this respect, ‘resistance’ differs radically from the assumption of ‘moral authority’, one of the intellectual premises of colonialism that needs to be undermined.  To be drawn into binary win/lose strife would be to contradict one’s own rejection of moral judging.

It is my view that the ‘decolonizing initiatives’ of indigeneous aboriginals [anarcho-indigenism] around the world as has been manifest in the Zapatista [EZLN] decolonizing initiative in Chiapas, Mexico, are so far managing this ‘resurgence’ with a sensitivity that seems to me to have the best chance to excite transformation [while sustaining relational balance and harmony] without inciting ‘civil war’.   It is my hope that ‘undermining the intellectual premises of colonialism’ will accelerate from its current snail’s pace, since it has the potential to cultivate transformation and lower the risk of bloody ‘civil war’. In other words, the collapsing of intellectual premises is the ‘fielding’ aspect of the hitting-fielding dynamic UNUM of ‘transformation’; the more accommodating the fielding, the less ferocious the hitting [A strong incentive, for me, to do my best in ‘collapsing the intellectual premises of colonialism’]

And no, I do not see how Sovereigntism/Colonialism with its moral judging and law-based social regulation can continue on indefinitely given its crumbling foundations.  The ‘Emperor’s new clothes’ are showing in too many places.  Hopefully, as this transformation continues to unfold, the fielding will accommodate more of the transformation than the hitting.  That is, as conflict rises, restorative justice will hopefully predominate over retributive justice.

  * * *

 Footnote: The Problem with God as Creator of the World

The problem with ‘God as Creator of the World’, which was in the starter-belief-kit given me by the priest-instructors in whose pedagogical hands my parents put me in, was that it gives a view of dynamics in terms of ‘what things do over time’. 

My initial rather blurry intuitive aversion to this teaching centred on the notion of ‘something-from-nothing’ which slowly became the crisper concept of ‘splitting apart creation and destruction’.  If we build a house in the forest, it is impossible to do so without destroying some forest.  It is just our personal subjective focus that has us focusing on the ‘creation aspect’ and ignoring the ‘destruction aspect’.  The same for a farmer planting a field of wheat [hey, what about that beautiful diversity of prairie grasses and plants, where did it go?], and the same for all dynamics.  

One might argue that this act of God’s that was purely creative, was possibly only by God, but in that case, the priests should not have advised humans to ‘do good works’ etc. as if they, like God, were capable of splitting apart ‘creation’ from ‘destruction’.   Was it ‘good’ to ‘create’ a Cathedral and ‘destroy’ a meadow?  It was not the ‘tread lightly’ ethic of indigenous aboriginals who, like modern physics does, would see ‘dynamics’ as ‘transformation of the relational space of nature’; i.e. as one dynamic in which ‘creation’ and ‘destruction’ were conjugate, ‘contraria sunt complementa’.   For man to ‘pretend’ that he is capable of creative acts in their own right, the insanity called the Western worldview, brings with it ‘the shadow’ of knowing yet denying the ghostly reality that one’s dynamics are NEVER creative but are ALWAYS transformative.

How this aberrant view of dynamics as EITHER ‘creative’ OR ‘destructive’ instead of ‘transformative’ [and therefore how acts can be differentiated as being EITHRE ‘good’ OR ‘bad’] comes about and is being sustained is the focus of this footnote. 

Nietzsche has ‘done a lot of work on this’ which I have already referenced in this Credo, and a particularly important ‘hinge’ is the synthetic concept of ‘intention’.  If we are relational forms in a continually transforming relational spatial plenum, as in the view from modern physics, and indigenous aboriginal traditions, then by imputing ‘intention’ to be jumpstarting from ourselves as ‘subject’, we are dropping out the ‘intention’ of the transforming relational spatial plenum in engendering us.  Even the systems sciences would say that every ‘system’ in included in a ‘suprasystem’ and one cannot fully understand ‘what a system does’ without understanding the need within the ‘suprasystem’ which engenders and sustains the ‘system’. 

This ‘problem’ with ‘intention’ stems from our psychological acceptance of imputing ‘subjecthood’ to ‘activities’ within ‘the activity continuum’; i.e. to relational forms within the transforming relational spatial plenum; i.e. to ‘systems’ within the ‘suprasystem’.  The suprasystem of atmosphere engenders systems called hurricanes to disperse thermal energy that has building non-uniformly within the atmosphere.  Once the hurricanes are visible emergent forms, our noun-and-verb European/Scientific language-and-grammar affords us the ECONOMY OF THOUGHT [Mach] to portray these activities within the activity continuum as ‘subjects’ and impute to them ‘their own intentions’.  Space as a [continually transforming relational-spatial] plenum disappears from our mental mappings and we are left with the mental imagery of ‘independent things or ‘subjects’ with their own internal ‘intention’ directed behaviour.  Instead of the organizational savvy coming from the suprasystem aka relational spatial plenum, … we shift it over to these ‘subjects’ we have created and to what we say is their ‘reason’ and ‘intention’.  Nietzsche ‘picks up on this’ in his writings, e.g;

 

“[Descartes’ ‘I think therefore I am’ reflects] … our grammatical custom that adds a doer to every deed. In short, this is not merely the substantiation of a fact but a logical-metaphysical postulate” … “That which gives the extraordinary firmness to our belief in causality is not the great habit of seeing one occurrence following another but our inability to interpret events otherwise than as events caused by intentions. It is belief in the living and thinking as the only effective force–in will, in intention–it is belief that every event is a deed, that every deed presupposes a doer, it is belief in the “subject.” Is this belief in the concept of subject and attribute not a great stupidity?” – Nietzsche, ‘Will to Power’ 484

Nietzsche saw the world as never-beginning, never-ending transformation [Will to Power 1067] as in the relational space view of modern physics [Mach, Bohm, Schroedinger]; i.e. as a continually transforming relational spatial PLENUM, … and as in the indigenous aboriginal, Taoist/Buddhist and Advaita Vedanta cosmology.  The elemental dynamic in transformation is ‘yin/yang’ [Neils Bohr, when knighted for his work in science, chose the yin/yang symbol and the motto ‘contraria sunt complementa’ (‘opposites are complementary’).  For example, in spatial relational transformation, ‘creation’ and ‘destruction’ are conjugate aspects of the one dynamic of transformation.  ‘Creation’ does not exist independently of ‘destruction’, similarly for ‘life’ and ‘death’; i.e. in a yin/yang world there are no binary polar opposites, there is only transformation.  As Schroedinger says in ‘What is Life?’, we are ‘Atman’ (our temporal selves) at the same time as we are ‘Brahman’ (the eternal plenum).  We are like the hurricane in the flow of the atmosphere; we are the continually transforming atmospheric flow-plenum at the same time as we are the relational form that is being engendered within it.  The relational form is an ‘agent of transformation’ and not an ‘independent thing-in-itself’ [see body of this ‘Credo’].

Meanwhile, the ‘Creation Myth’ of the Abrahamic religions; Christianity, Judaism and Islam, is the archetype that synthetically reduces yin/yang dynamics to one-sided all-yang-no-yin dynamics, which SPLITS APART ‘creation’ and ‘destruction’.   Since there was ‘nothing there’ when God started to create the world [note also that God creates ‘over time’ whereas the transformational world is timeless; i.e. change is purely relational], there was nothing to destroy.  His ‘Creation’ is ‘all creation, no destruction’.  This is ridiculous to those who understand ‘God’ as the ultimate animating source in a continually transforming relational spatial plenum; i.e. ‘God’, the ‘Great Mystery’ is ‘self-organizing principle’ or ‘logos’, and being purely relational is non-local, non-visible and non-material.  Indigenous aboriginals call it ‘spirituality’ which manifests as materiality.  Schroedinger calls it ‘consciousness’ where consciousness is the basic stuff the universe is made of.  The Celts called it the ‘otherworld’ that is conjugate with the manifest world;

 

. “The Celts do not seem to have had a hierarchy of divinity in the sense of a coherent pantheon dwelling in some remote place. The human world and the Otherworld formed a unity in which the human and divine interact. Each location has numinous powers which are acknowledged by the people as we can see by their naming of mountains, rivers and other natural features many of which have associated deities. When the Celts invaded Greece in 278 BCE, Brennus entered the precinct of Delphi, saw no gold and silver dedications and only stone and wooden statues and he laughed at the Greeks for setting up deities in human shape.”  — Rowan Fairgrove, What We Don’t Know About the Ancient Celts

The Western God that ‘created heaven and earth’ is tied up with the ‘subject’ in noun-and-verb Indo-European language-and-grammar.   The ‘subject’ is, like God, a jumpstart creator of actions/results.  For example, we say ‘the man constructed house’, but it is impossible to construct a house without destroying some forest and meadow. In an indigenous aboriginal language which is relational, the house would be a verb rather than a noun, the ‘housing’, giving the impression of the house as a transient relational feature in the continually transforming habitat-plenum; i.e. the plenum is everything and what we see are ‘relational forms’ developing within the plenum.  The ‘inhabitant’ and the ‘habitat’ are not mutually exclusive thing in the relational space view; i.e. as Mach’s principle captures it;

 

“The dynamics of the inhabitants are conditioning the dynamics of the habitat at the same time as the dynamics of the habitat are conditioning the dynamics of the inhabitants” – Mach’s principle

This is the relational space view of modern physics which sees the habitat/universe as a continually transforming relational spatial plenum within which relational forms are continually gathering and being regathered [the ‘self-organizing universe’].

One might say then, that the Western God-as-creator of the world is the archetype that justifies splitting apart ‘transformation’ into ‘creation’ and ‘destruction’.  This is the problem with our Indo-European and scientific languages; i.e. it constructs thoughts,  mental images and understanding which have us see the opposites, while in contention, as distinct and separate, and not as in Bohr’s ‘contraria sunt complementa’.

The problem for Western civilization, which ‘subjectizes’ relational forms [activities within the activity continuum] and gives the subjectized forms God-like powers [with grammar, by letting subjects inflect verbs] is that in using our language, we come to confuse our subjectized activities for ‘reality’.  When we say ‘Katrina is growing larger and stronger’ or ‘Katrina is ravaging New Orleans’, these constructs, the standard constructs in science, are as Mach says; ‘economies of thought’ which should not be confused for physical reality, BUT WHICH ARE CONFUSED FOR REALITY.  Nietzsche comments on how we construct ‘reason’ on this basis.

 

“In Reason’ in language! … Being is thought into and insinuated into everything as ‘cause’; from the concept ‘ego,’ alone, can the concept ‘Being’ proceed. … – 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.” – Nietzsche, ‘Twilight of the Idols’

“Our judgement has us conclude that every change must have an author”;–but this conclusion is already mythology: it separates that which effects from the effecting. If I say “lightning flashes,” I have posited the flash once as an activity and a second time as a subject, and thus added to the event a being that is not one with the event but is rather fixed, “is” and does not “become.”–To regard an event as an “effecting,” and this as being, that is the double error, or interpretation, of which we are guilty.” – Nietzsche, ‘Will to Power’, 531

The problems that Nietzsche are bringing up amount to this;

1. The world is REALLY (in his view and modern physics etc.) a continually transforming relational spatial plenum.

2. Therefore, the subject, … let’s say ‘man’, … is a ‘relational form’ [activity] within the continually transforming relational spatial plenum [activity continuum].  As Emerson says, nature not only inhabits the organism, it engenders it.  In other words, whatever man does, it does not jumpstart from him.  The farmer does not ‘really’ ‘produce wheat’, nature produces wheat since nature produces the farmer who produces wheat [by rearranging things, ripping out all the plants he is not interested in to make room for growing all kinds of the one plant he likes].

3. God (the Western creator of the world kind) had ‘intent’ and he acted on his intent to ‘construct the world).  The God who created the world is called ‘the intelligent designer’.  This gives the concept that it is ‘reason’ or ‘intelligence’ coupled with ‘intention’ that creates ‘results’.

4. But what if God put his hands dramatically forward, saying ‘voila!’ to announce his creation the way a magician does but instead of producing the earth, he produces a great pile of steaming dung?  We could not use this to justify calling God ‘intelligent’.  His power of ‘reason’ he uses to achieve his ‘intention’.

“That which gives the extraordinary firmness to our belief in causality is not the great habit of seeing one occurrence following another but our inability to interpret events otherwise than as events caused by intentions.”

5.  Western European humans see themselves as superior to other races because of their superior reasoning as manifests in the science and technology they use to fulfill their ‘intentions’.

 * * *

There is a huge problem here.  ‘Grammar’ gives Western man God-like powers of creation, but while God created things in an empty space, man is not only in a long-established space [never-beginning, never-ending], but he himself is a relational form; a gathering or relational nexus within that relational space so that it is impossible for any creative act to jumpstart out of him, since he derives his power and steerage from the continually transforming relational spatial plenum he is situationally included in and which is engendering him; i.e. ‘Katrina’ is the grammatical subject with God-like powers to jumpstart her own development and behaviour IN LANGUAGE/GRAMMAR, but in physical reality, ‘Katrina’ is a relational form in the continually transforming relational spatial plenum, as all ‘things are’, including ‘man’ in the relational space of modern physics.

So, what about this ‘intelligence’ and ‘reasoning power’ that man sees himself as having? 

Doesn’t Western man demonstrate his powerful ability to ‘reason’ all the time? 

Doesn’t man use his scientific reasoning and intelligent engineering to achieve his ‘intended goals’?

For example, his scientific reasoning which he is using to design and construct drones that fulfill his intention of eliminating known enemies?

Here we see the problem.   The drones are killing ordinary civilians and destroying homes and the public is enraged and people are being radicalized [the real dynamics are transformational].    The same problem is always there.  It is there with man using his reason to design technology to recover oil from tar sands.   Using the laws of physics and the sciences of chemistry and engineering, he can come good on his ‘intention’ to augment oil production by 50 kbd. 

The problem is that he doesn’t know what he is really doing because, while his mental model is using a non-relational, absolute space,  in a relational space, his dynamics can only be relational spatial transformation.  there is no such thing as ‘doer-deed behaviour’ or ‘cause-effect behaviour’ in a continually transforming relational spatial plenum.  That is ‘economy of thought’.

Now we see that what we are calling ‘reason’ is based on man being able to use it to fulfil his ‘intentions’.  But such ‘fulfillment of intentions’ is a subjective model that may bear little relation to what is actually physically going on.  Western man continues to use his ‘reason’ and ‘intelligence’ in fulfilling his ‘intentions’ and he is very successful in this.  Unfortunately, his successes are constrained to his own sythetic reality that bears little relation to the ‘real physical world’ of our common sensory experience.

That is, Western man has been progressively improving his scientific creations and successfully applying them to fulfil his ‘intended’ goals and objectives.

But all of this has little to do with what is really, physically going on.  He does not know what is really going on because he is situationally included in a continually transforming relational spatial plenum, and his actions can only be ‘transformative’ and NOT doer-of-deed.  Why should we credit his reasoning and his intelligent designs in the killer drone program to reflect positively on him in the area of reason and scientific prowess?  He puts his hands dramatically forward, saying ‘voila!’ to announce his creative achievement, but what he is producing out there is a steaming pile of dung.

His ‘fulfilling his intentions’ is wholly subjective.  Spanish colonizers of the America’s could have had a goal of using their technology to eliminate flies; i.e. blasting every fly they saw with a pistol shot.   To them, it mattered not at all if the flies were on the noses of indigenous aboriginals; i.e. their intentions were to reduce flies, and their reasoning and science and technology were being put to this purpose, as always and as always, justifying the esteem given to the European colonizers for their highly developed reason that allowed them to fulfill their intentions.

This is the story of Western civilization.   All of the talk of politicians and people in general is based on ‘reason’ which has scant to do with physical reality.

‘Reason’ is what we attribute to people and plants and cells to make the ‘all-yang-no-yin’ God-in-grammar model hang together.  ‘Reason’ is the necessary logical conceptual substitute when we synthetically split relational transformation apart into ‘creation’ and ‘destruction’.  ‘Reason’ is not something real, it crops up in the Enlightenment European archetype of man, organism and organization as ‘independent reason-driven system’.    Because we have synthetically split out the relational form [activity in the relational activity continuum], framed it in absolute space and absolute time and called it a ‘system-in-itself’, we have got to put a notional ‘centre of control and direction’ into it, and we call that its ‘reasoning centre’.  Why do people wandering in the desert radially converge towards the oasis.  In the modern physics relational space view, the outside inward orchestrating influences are always shaping individual and collective asserting actions.  In the Enlightenment European model of man as an independent reason-driven system, it is because ‘great minds think alike’.

Western civilization has ‘twisted off’ from physical reality, even as their superior reasoning and superior science and technology demonstrates progressive improvement in their capability of fulfilling their ‘intentions’.

There is a ‘shadow’ that we who participate in this Western culture cannot shake off that derives from intuitive awareness that our actions are transformative but claiming they are EITHER ‘constructive’ OR ‘destructive’ [claiming to be able to construct a house in the forest without destroying forest, … or at least claiming that it ‘makes sense’ to manage the social dynamic on the basis of ‘doing good works’ without acknowledging the physically real ‘transformative’ impact of one’s actions].  Our ‘intentions’ may be good in sending in a drone to eliminate a ‘bad guy’ but in a continually transforming relational space [an interdependent relational web-of-life], the radicalizing of others that develops in reciprocal complement to our ‘constructive act’ CONTRADICTS our basic Western belief system as to ‘how the world works’.

God clearly ‘made progress’ in his purely constructive project wherein the works of each day added to the works of prior days until he reached the point where his construction was ‘complete’ and ready for the operational phase. 

Of course, ‘progress’ makes no sense in a continually transforming relational spatial plenum where new relational forms are continually evolving via the relational interdependencies of everything with everything [to the point that the ‘things’ forming in the nexa of the relational interdependencies are secondary to the relational dynamics].

‘Progress’ can be recognized as a psychological artefact of the idealized concepts of ‘subject’ and ‘intention’; i.e. the notion of ‘progress’ associates with the ‘subject’ improving his ability to use his reason, intelligence and science and technology to fulfil his ‘intentions’.  This becomes a language game he plays with himself.  Before, an evil enemy could do his nasty dead and disappear into the hills.  Today, man can proudly announce that he has progressed to the point where he can track the enemy agent down anywhere in the world and send in a drone to eliminate him.  Perhaps along with a few dozen nearby villagers, a bit of collateral damage which in no way detracts from the fact that the intention has been fulfilled.  [i.e. if the intention of European colonizers was to kill flies by using one’s pistols to shoot them, the successful fulfilling of that intention is absolutely untouched by the fact the floor is covered with dead indigenous aboriginals who had the misfortune of flies landing on them while the colonizers had their pistols at the ready to ‘get rid of those annoying flies’.]

In other words, ‘progress’ refers to the increase in man’s capability of fulfilling his intentions.  The imagery is one of man becoming more like God in his creative act.  God achieved exactly what he wanted in ‘the Creation’; i.e. God fulfilled his own intentions through his creative acts.  Western man is trying to follow in God’s footsteps, to become more like God in the sense of being the shaper, if not the master and possessor of nature through his creative acts.   Western man sees himself as living in a yang-only world where assertive acts fashion the new state of the world from that which existed immediately before, and this transpiring in a continuing succession of time steps.   Western men are thus like ‘hurricanes’ or ‘storm-systems’ that have forgotten that the needs of the continually transforming atmosphere plenum [suprasystem] engendered them as agents of transformation to restore, cultivate and sustain balance and harmony in the continuing unfolding, … and who are believing, instead, that they are the authors and masters of the flow they are included in.

By psychologically splitting apart ‘creation’ and ‘destruction’,, existence [subjecthood, being] and non-existence [nothingness, non-being], they picture themselves as independently-existing ‘subjects’ with ‘intention’ that may be fulfilled through their jumpstart ‘creative acts’, leaving in the shadowy darkness of their intuition, like an aspect of themselves that they are forcefully keeping submerged, the physically real transformative influence of their actions.  The launcher of the drone that eliminates the person he has morally judged as ‘evil’ and thus deserving of ‘elimination’, intuits that his action is transformative and is at the same time orchestrating radicalization, within the living space understood as an interdependent web of relational connections.  But because he ‘trusts in God’ and believes that ‘good acts’ will ultimately prevail, he proceeds with the development of his ‘reason’, ‘intelligence’, ‘science’ and ‘technology’, bringing them to bear in the fulfilling of his ‘good’ intentions’, thus ‘progress’ equates to ‘feeding the shadow’, the growing shadow that will soon be a child large enough to consume its parents.

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Appendix I: How Western Sciences uses ‘language’ to generate Economy of Thought

Comment: Science generates ‘economy of thought’ by logically ‘doing away with’ the ‘outside-inward orchestrating influence on dynamics’ as are inherent in a ‘relational space’ [modern physics] where dynamics are nothing other than ‘relational spatial transformation’.  Instead of having the complicated task of comprehending that assertive actions or ‘hitting’ are in reciprocal complement to spatial rational accommodating aka ‘fielding’ [contraria sunt complementa], the hitter can be ‘split on his own’ and his actions measured by referencing them to an absolute space and absolute time reference frame.  Then the actions are seen as totally ‘his’ and the complex ‘fielding-hitting’ dynamics are synthetically reduced to purely ‘hitting’ dynamics.  For example, if Al Capone performs like an Olympian in navigating passage through a crowd, it is simpler to portray this in one-sided yang-only/hitting-only terms as if he is an independent subject and his navigating passage is his own creative act.  This is clearly a ‘reduction’ of the physical reality wherein it is clear that the crowd is opening up and ‘accommodating’ his passage in the manner of the Red sea opening up and accommodating Moses’ passage’.  The physical really dynamic is a ‘hitting-fielding’ or ‘yin/yang’ dynamic, but we use a ‘scientific language game’ to reduce and simplify [generate an economy of thought] this to an ‘all-yang-no-yin’, ‘all hitting-no-fielding’ dynamic thanks to our implicit interposing of an absolute space and absolute time reference frame, that allows us to split out the ‘relation form’ from the ‘relational space’ [split the hitting out of the fielding] and measure its actions against the absolute reference frames so that the actions will then appear to belong fully and solely to the now ‘apparently independent’ ‘subject’ aka ‘the hitter’.

This is an ‘economy of thought generating contrivance’ of ‘language’ and science has ‘built this contrivance’ into its language and we have come to use this language without thinking of the built-in-contrivance.  As Poincaré comments on this built-in language game;

 “Finally, our Euclidean geometry is itself only a sort of convention of language; mechanical facts might be enunciated with reference to a non-Euclidean space which would be a guide less convenient than, but just as legitimate as, our ordinary space ; the enunciation would thus become much more complicated, but it would remain possible. Thus absolute space, absolute time, geometry itself [the reference framing that reduces dynamics from yin/yang to yang], are not conditions which impose themselves on mechanics ; all these things are no more antecedent to mechanics than the French language is logically antecedent to the verities one expresses in French.” – Henri Poincare, Science and Hypothesis

 This reference framing facilitates the elimination of outside-inward accommodating influence [the ‘yin’ of ‘yin/yang’ or the ‘fielding’ of ‘hitting-fielding’] and RE-portrays dynamics as being fully and solely inside-outward asserting, as follows;

“Origin of Mathematical Physics. Let us go further and study more closely the conditions which have assisted the development of mathematical physics. We recognise at the outset the efforts of men of science have always tended to resolve the complex phenomenon given directly by experiment into a very large number of elementary phenomena, and that in three different ways.

First, with respect to time. Instead of embracing in its entirety the progressive development of a phenomenon, we simply try to connect each moment with the one immediately preceding. We admit that the present state of the world only depends on the immediate past, without being directly influenced, so to speak, by the recollection of a more distant past. Thanks to this postulate, instead of studying directly the whole succession of phenomena, we may confine ourselves to writing down its differential equation; for the laws of Kepler we substitute the law of Newton.

Next, we try to decompose the phenomena in space. What experiment gives us is a confused aggregate of facts spread over a scene of considerable extent. We must try to deduce the elementary phenomenon, which will still be localised in a very small region of space.  — Henri Poincaré, ‘Science and Hypothesis’, Chapter IX, Hypotheses in Physics”

Science, thanks to its language-and-grammar game facilitated by invoking ‘absolute space and absolute time reference framing’, generates ‘economy-of-thought’ [Mach] that reduces ‘dynamics’ that our real-life experience informs us are ‘relational-spatial’ aka ‘fielding-hitting’ aka ‘yin/yang’, making them appear as ‘all-yang-no-yin’.   This amounts to splitting apart ‘creation’ and ‘destruction’.  That is, in a yin/yang dynamic, the female or ‘yin’ aspect ‘accommodates’ or ‘self-annihilates’ to allow yang to assert itself.  In this, the ‘yin’ is the ‘leader of the dance’ and ‘yang’ is the follower.

In terms of the ‘relational space’ of modern physics, applying this to an ‘ecosystem’, space is an energy-charged plenum undergoing continual relational spatial transformation.  In the interdependent networks of relations [web-of-life], NEEDS-FOR-FULFILMENT are the reciprocal complement of ASSERTING CONSTRUCTIONS and it is the needs that prompt ‘rising to the occasion [relational situation].  We experience these calls to ‘rise to the occasion’ in the relational space that we are situationally included in; i.e. the child that has fallen into the raging stream that only we are spatially-relational situated so as to have a chance of rescuing her before she goes over the falls.   But if we are too much in the God-like creative act mode, we may reject the outside-inward orchestrating influence that calls us to rise-to-the-occasion; i.e. we may be too preoccupied with authoring ‘our own creative acts’.   Science [pre-modern-physics mainstream science which seems to have a headlock on the Western psyche] sees dynamics as nothing other than yang assertive acts [whether these are ‘constructive’ or ‘destructive’ is left to the ‘individual subject’ to decide ‘subjectively’; e.g. the European colonizer claims to have ‘constructed a wonderful new world in the Americas’ while the indigenous aboriginals, assessing the very same dynamics, claim that the colonizers ‘destroyed a wonderful established world on Turtle Island’.  These two inherently binarily opposing views are resolved in the transcendent view of dynamics as ‘transformation’, yin/yang, hitting-fielding.   It is impossible to construct a house without destroying forest and meadow.  In the relational space of our common living experience, there is only ‘transformation’.

In asserting, we destroy.  That is inevitable in a relational space.  In accommodating [self-annihilating] we allow creation to arise.  If, while in the flow of traffic, we let our assertive forward movement ‘die on the vine’ [annihilate] to open up a hole for someone else to assert into, this ‘accommodating’ or ‘self-annihilating’ is the flip side of the other’s asserting creative act [contraria sunt complementa].   If we reflect on this, it becomes evident that, in the real physical space we are situationally included in, ‘accommodating’ and ‘asserting’ are conjugate aspects of the one dynamic of ‘transformation’; i.e. the continually transforming relational spatial plenum in which we are situationally included relational forms.  That is, in the reality of our physical experience, there is no such thing as a ‘subject jumpstarted creative act’; i.e. there is no such thing as a ‘yang’ dynamic even though that is all that science allows.

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Appendix II:

Mach’s ‘Science of Mechanics: A Critical and Historical Account of its Development

Chapter V.  The Relations of Mechanics to other Departments of Knowledge