-1- Brutus (in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar)

 

There is a tide in the affairs of men.
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.

Do “the times AUTHOR the man”? … or, “does the man AUTHOR the times”?

-2- 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.

Do we actually AUTHOR anything?  Or are we simply BREWMASTERS doing some stirring up within the unfolding?

-3- Chuang Tzu

“They were upright and correct without knowing that to be so was righteous. They loved one another without knowing that to do so was benevolence. They were sincere without knowing that to do so was loyalty. They kept their promises without knowing that to do so was to be in good faith. They helped one another without thought of giving or receiving gifts. Thus their actions left no trace and we have no records of their affairs” – Chuang Tzu

How many ‘quiet supporters’ have contributed to the comforting and nurturing (or otherwise) ambiance in which our life experience unfolds?  How can we claim that we are the AUTHORS of our own lives without including this NONLOCAL support?

4- David Bohm on the MYTH of the concept of AUTHOR

“Bohm felt that an effect could have an infinite number of causes. For example, if you asked someone what caused Abraham Lincoln’s death, they might answer that it was the bullet in John Wilkes Booth’s gun. But a complete list of all the causes that contributed to Lincoln’s death would have to include all of the events that led to the development of the gun, all of the factors that caused Booth to want to kill Lincoln, all of the steps in the evolution of the human race that allowed for the development of a hand capable of holding a gun, and so on, and so on. Bohm conceded that most of the time one could ignore the vast cascade of causes that had led to any given effect, but he still felt it was important for scientists to remember that no single cause-and-effect relationship was ever really separate from the universe as a whole.” – Michael Talbot, ‘The Holographic Universe’.

The concept of AUTHOR of the death of Lincoln is blurred to the extreme by this MODERN PHYSICS understanding of the Wave-field basis of reality.

-5- The Taoist Tale of the Farmer’s Horse

There is a story of a farmer whose horse ran away. That evening the neighbors gathered to commiserate with him since this was such bad luck. He said, “May be.”

The next day the horse returned, but brought with it six wild horses, and the neighbors came exclaiming at his good fortune. He said, “May be.”

And then, the following day, his son tried to saddle and ride one of the wild horses, was thrown, and broke his leg. Again the neighbors came to offer their sympathy for the misfortune. He said, “May be.”

The day after that, conscription officers came to the village to seize young men for the army, but because of the broken leg the farmer’s son was rejected. When the neighbors came to say how fortunately everything had turned out, he said, “May be.”

The yin-yang view of the world is serenely cyclic. Fortune and misfortune, life and death, whether on small scale or vast, come and go everlastingly without beginning or end, and the whole system is protected from monotony by the fact that, in just the same way, remembering alternates with forgetting. This is the Good of good-and-bad.

Alan Watts
Tao: The Watercourse Way

 

What is called into question in this story is the very nature of AUTHORING of actions and developments since one event seems to BUMP INTO another event creating a CASCADING of events wherein there is no way to understand an event as being LOCALLY AUTHORED.  What appears to be a LOCALLY AUTHORED EVENT can have its whole meaning changed by way of its inclusion within the transforming relational continuum, raising questions as to the legitimate REALITY of the notion of LOCAL AUTHORSHIP.  The reality of as social collective’s AUTHORING of a BALLROOM DANCE is called into question when it transpires on the TITANIC during its crossing of the North Atlantic.  The concept of the AUTHOR or AUTHORING is ideal for abstractly BREAKING IN to the transforming relational continuum which is INEFFABLE-because-NONLOCAL-and-IMPLICIT, … and using the AUTHOR ploy to come up with something EFFABLE-because-LOCAL-and-EXPLICIT.  Understood in this way, the AUTHOR is an expedient abstract concept used for BUTTING IN and generating EFFABLE SUBSTITUTE REALITY REPRESENTATION from the INEFFABLE-because-AUTHORLESS transforming relational continuum.

 

-6- THE POTLATCH UNDERSTANDING IN PLACE OF ‘AUTHORING’.

Chief Maquinna of the Nootkas did not see the world dynamic in a producer-product LOCAL AUTHORING context, but saw humans as humanings within the Great Harmony. Meanwhile, immersion in the Great Harmony aka the transforming relational continuum aka the Wave-field, is ineffable-because-nonlocal.  In this understanding, because there is nothing LOCAL, there is no ATTRIBUTION of actions and developments since ATTRIBUTION is the inferring of a LOCAL SOURCE or LOCAL AUTHOR.

“ATTRIBUTION” — the action of regarding something as being caused (AUTHORED) by a person or thing.

In indigenous aboriginal (Potlatch) society, NON-ATTRIBUTION prevails as naturally associates with NONLOCALITY.  NON-ATTRIBUTION means NON-AUTHORSHIP.

“Once I was in Victoria, and I saw a very large house; they told me it was a bank and that the white men place their money there to take care of, and that by-and-by they got it back, with interest. We are Indians and have no such bank; but when we have plenty of money or blankets, we give them away to other chiefs and people, and by-and-by they return them, with interest, and our hearts feel good. Our potlatch is our bank.” [for the full letter and associated context (jailing of first nations people for continuing with the potlatch tradition) see ‘First People First Voices’, edited by Penny Petrone, University of Toronto Press, 1991]

The POTLATCH tradition is consistent with the understanding of ‘mitakuye oyasin’ (everything is related) as in a game of BUMPER CARS individuals may rise up out of the dynamic ‘looking good’ as if THEY were the AUTHOR of their bumper crop as our WESTERN CULTURE DOUBLE ERROR of NAMING and GRAMMAR based language can ‘make them appear’, but THEIR AUTHORSHIP is transparently BOGUS, although the ‘skilled farmer’ is like a ‘skilled brewer’ who gets everything ready in case the magic of NATURE does show up with the warm sun and gentle rain and winds all in the right proportions for harmonious synthesis.  As was the case with the honey bee, the BREWER is NOT the AUTHOR of what transpires but is an INCLUDED PARTICIPANT that is ‘stirring things up’ within the TRANSFORMING RELATIONAL CONTINUUM (the gnat is NOT the AUTHOR of the fermentation of the grape juice it has fallen into any more than CAR 17 is the AUTHOR of the CRASH in which CAR 51 has suffered injury; i.e. why insert a LOCAL JUMPSTART AUTHORING into the transforming relational continuum?).

 

-7- The BUMPER-CAR DYNAMIC wherein “AUTHORSHIP” is IMPOSED

In the game of BUMPER CARS, we SAY THAT WE SEE CAR 17 smash into CAR 51. We can say this because we have access to language which constructs representations of reality using the DOUBLE ERROR of NAMING and GRAMMAR which allows us to construct SUBSTITUTE REALITIES featuring BINARY LOGIC based RE-PRESENTATION in terms of an AUTHORING SUBJECT and a RECIPIENT OBJECT (aka a PERPETRATOR and VICTIM).   In this “SUBSTITUTE REALITY”, it APPEARS as if the NAMING-imputed THING-IN-ITSELF (SUBJECT) is the “AUTHOR” of the action, relieving us of the insoluble problem of tracing back through all of the LONG SUCCESSION OF BUMPINGS to identify an ultimate ORIGINATING AUTHOR-SOURCE of the action.  In other words, the DOUBLE ERROR of NAMING and GRAMMAR INJECTS A LOCAL JUMPSTART AUTHOR of the dynamic (CAR 17) so as to TRUNCATE and TERMINATE our backward-looking search for the ultimate AUTHORING SOURCE which might have implicated many other influences including the heavy THUNDERSHOWER that reduced visibility to near ZERO.

When we say that CAR 17 smashed into CAR 51, we are demonstrating Goedel’s Theorem which says that all finite systems of BINARY LOGIC are INCOMPLETE.

The EXPLICITNESS we have harvested by imputing LOCAL AUTHORING clearly comes AT THE PRICE OF INFUSING INCOMPLETENESS IN ORDER TO “PURCHASE” THE DOUBLE ERROR ABSTRACTION BASED PRECISION OF LOCAL AUTHORING.

As Goedel’s Theorem reminds us, it is not that the proposition that “CAR 17 smashed into CAR 51” IS “NOT TRUE”.  IT IS “TRUE”, JUST NOT “COMPLETE TRUTH” and the reality is that TRUTH can never be COMPLETE within the transforming relational continuum (the Wave-field, the Tao) of our sensory experience of inclusion therein.  In other words, the concept of AUTHOR is abstraction that attributes JUMPSTART SOURCING POWER to CAR 17.

While our WESTERN CULTURE PRACTICE of CONSTRUCTING SUBSTITUTE REALITIES which are replete with LOCAL THINGS-IN-THEMSELVES-with their own (notional) powers of LOCAL AUTHORING of actions and development may be an expedient approach to SIDE-STEPPING the INEFFABLE-NESS of the all-including transforming relational continuum aka the Wave-field aka the Tao, it can only serve as EFFABLE-because-LOCAL-and-EXPLICIT “INFERENCE” of the INEFFABLE-because-NONLOCAL-and-IMPLICIT WAVE-FIELD REALITY AKA ‘THE TAO’ wherein ‘everything is in flux’.

As Emerson notes, in our WESTERN CULTURE social dynamic, the TOOL of NAMING-and-GRAMMAR, has been’ running away with the workman, the HUMAN with the DIVINE’ (i.e. the LOCAL, EFFABLE, “AUTHOR“ has been SUBSTITUTED for the INEFFABLE instead of being deployed as an INTUITIVE SPRINGBOARD for INFERRING the INEFFABLE).  In other words, CAR 17 is NOT the AUTHOR of a LOCAL “COLLISION” as is the WESTERN interpretation, but is INSTEAD, as in the EASTERN and MODERN PHYSICS understanding, a participant within NONLOCAL RELATIONAL DISSONANCE.

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REFLECTIONS ON THE ABOVE 7 OBSERVATIONS Exploring the (NON) REALITY of “AUTHOR”

My personal life-experience observations from ‘growing up’ within a WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENT SOCIETY, have been that we are placed under heavy social pressure to accept the concept of personal AUTHORING of actions and developments.

We are told that we must be RESPONSIBLE CITIZENS who will own up to being RESPONSIBLE for our AUTHORING OF BAD ACTIONS AND DEVELOPMENTS as well as working to support a system that delivers just rewards for our AUTHORING of GOOD ACTIONS and DEVELOPMENTS (and just punishments for our AUTHORING of BAD ACTIONS and DEVELOPMENTS).

In other words, we are placed under heavy social pressure to accept the TRUTH of the DOUBLE ERROR of NAMING and GRAMMAR which is where “THE AUTHOR CONCEPT” comes from.  That is, in REALITY we are like the honey bee, PARTICIPANTS WITH A COMPLEX RELATIONAL DYNAMIC akin to the BUMPER CAR GAME.

WE ARE NOT “AUTHORS” of ANYTHING.  THE “AUTHOR” concept comes from the DOUBLE ERROR of NAMING and GRAMMAR.  The AUTHOR concept REDUCTIVELY SIMPLIFIES by LOCALIZING our BUMPER CAR REALITY wherein the NONLOCAL and IMPLICIT prevail since ‘everything is in flux’ in the ALL-INCLUDING Wave-field aka the Tao.

The problem is that BUMPER CAR REALITY is INEFFABLE-because-NONLOCAL-and-IMPLICIT. Our WESTERN LANGUAGE (unlike EASTERN language and the language of MODERN PHYSICS which is RELATIONAL and thus INFERRING the NONLOCAL AND IMPLICIT) is EFFABLE-because-LOCAL-and-EXPLICIT.

In a relational language, we can speak of the HURRICANING IN THE ATMOSPHERING wherein everything is in flux, but once we reduce this to terms of NAMING and GRAMMAR featuring LOCAL THINGS-in-THEMSELVES with their own (notional) powers of “AUTHORING” actions and developments, we have moved ourselves into a rhetorical SUBSTITUTE REALITY based on ABSOLUTE SPACE and featuring FOREGROUND NAMING-instantiated things-in-themselves with GRAMMAR-given powers of sourcing actions and developments (e.g. the HURRICANE is stirring up the ATMOSPHERE and/or the ATMOSPHERE IS STIRRING UP THE HURRICANE, the conservative prefers the male assertive and the liberal prefers the female inductive).

Thanks to the abstraction of AUTHORING, we have moved out of FIGURE-and-GROUND-as-ONE reality into FIGURE-and-GROUND-as-TWO pseudo-reality.

So how about our examples such as “There is a tide in the affairs of men.
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune

The assumption of ‘AUTHORING’ is  basic to such thinking, but how can we be comprehending reality as an all-including TRANSFORMATION when we have such thoughts of being able to AUTHOR historical outcomes?

We can’t have it BOTH WAYS.  If we are included in a transforming relational continuum, we are in a FIGURE-and-GROUND-as-ONE situation, and if we are AUTHORS OF OUR OWN DESTINY, we have SPLIT OURSELVES OUT into a SUBSTITUTE REALITY wherein FIGURE-and-GROUND-are-TWO.

WESTERN CUTURE ADHERENCE comes with a commitment to believe in the SUBSTITUTE REALITY wherein FIGURE-and-GROUND-are-TWO and where BUMPER CAR 17 is the AUTHOR of the collision with BUMPER CAR 51.

READ MY LIPS: THE SUBJECT IS “CAR 17”, the OBJECT is “CAR 51”, the implied OPERATING THEATRE is ABSOLUTE EMPTY SPACE and the ACTION is a COLLISION wherein CAR 17 is the SUBJECT/AUTHOR/PERPETRATOR and  CAR 51 is the OBJECT/RECIPIENT/VICTIM.  This is a COMPLETE TRANSACTION which has STAND-ALONE meaning.  The DOUBLE ERROR of NAMING and GRAMMAR based imputing of a LOCAL AUTHOR and RESULT as in ‘CAR 17 crashes into Car 51’ precipitates out a LOCAL AUTHOR SOURCED EVENT-IN-ITSELF.

As pointed out, this AUTHORED EVENT transpires NOT IN REALITY (not in the transforming relational continuum) but in the SUBSTITUTE REALITY of ABSOLUTE EUCLIDIAN SPACE populated LOCALLY by NAMING-instantiated THINGS-IN-THEMSELVES with GRAMMAR-given powers of AUTHORING actions and developments.

 

-1- As in BRUTUS ‘tides in the affairs of man’, … Do “the times AUTHOR the man”? … or, “does the man AUTHOR the times”?

-2- the honeybee metaphor of Montaigne: Do we actually AUTHOR anything?  Or are we simply BREWMASTERS like the bees?

-3- Chuang-Tzu: – How many ‘silent and thus invisible AUTHORS’ have contributed to the comforting and nurturing (or otherwise) ambiance in which our life experience unfolds?

-4- David Bohm: – Did James Wilkes Booth AUTHOR the killing of Abe Lincoln, or was it the invention of gunpower or the invention of the pistol?

-5- The farmer’s good fortune of receipt of the Wild horses, were they the AUTHOR of his broken leg?

-6- The Potlatch is where the bounty of nature funnels into our lives and we keep funnelling it forward, not as AUTHORS but as conduits.

-7-The BUMPER CAR DYNAMIC, Was CAR 17 the AUTHOR of the injury to CAR 51 and its driver? 

Evidently, as in the above anecdotes, the concept of AUTHORSHIP always seems to be BREAKING IN to an ongoing continuum.  “Shall we dance” spoken on the Ballroom Dance floor of the Titanic seems to be AUTHORing something new, a Romance that may blossom into marriage and children and more, or are we instead getting a glimpse into the TRANSFORMING RELATIONAL CONTINUUM that is perhaps too much for language to capture?

The trouble with the BUMPER CAR DYNAMIC is that there is MORE TO IT than just the PERPETRATOR and the VICTIM.  That is just a TWO BODY REDUCTION of something far more complex like a three+ body dynamic.

“An exact solution for three bodies, exceeds, if I am not mistaken, the force of any human mind”

– Isaac Newton 

While there may not be an EXACT or EXPLICIT SOLUTION for the real BUMPER CAR DYNAMICS, that does not mean that we can DISCARD THE REALITY of the NON-EXPLICIT or INEFFABLE BUMPER CAR DYNAMIC.

THAT WHICH IS INEFFABLE IS NOT NECESSARILY UNREAL.  LANGUAGE HAS A LIMITED CAPABILITY as exemplified in its inability to deliver a REPRESENTATION of the transforming relational continuum, and instead enabling a SUBSTITUTE REALITY based on the DOUBLE ERROR of NAMING and GRAMMAR which serves up a TWO-BODY representation such as CAR 17 bashing into CAR 51.  The other cars involved in the cascading collisions are not mentioned even though they are included in the REAL DYNAMIC which did not take place in an EMPTY EUCLIDIAN SPACE FRAME of infinite extent, as the TWO car collision does.

The relational dynamics of the multiple BUMPER CARS cannot be explicitly solved as Newton pointed out, so the justification for accepting a reduction to TWO BODIES as in the PATHOGEN attacking the VICTIM is on the grounds of EXPEDIENCY in enabling an EFFABLE ACCOUNT of the INEFFABLE-because-NONLOCAL as is basic to the THREE-BODY-PLUS dynamic as in the BUMPER-CAR DYNAMIC and as in relational dissonance within the microbial assemblage, which WESTERN MEDICINE is in the habit of reducing to the TWO BODY terms of the ATTACK of the PATHOGEN.

The BINARY LOGIC based world of FIGURE-and-GROUND-as TWO based dynamics opens the way to thinking in terms of a NAMING-instantiated AUTHOR, a LOCAL THING-IN-ITSELF with ‘its own’ (GRAMMAR-GIVEN) powers of AUTHORING actions and developments.

The concept of the AUTHOR belongs to this SUBSTITUTE REALITY wherein FIGURE-and-GROUND-are-TWO, where the GROWING TOWN has been SPLIT OUT of its conjugate relation with the ACCOMMODATING WILDERNESS, as in the SPLITTING APART of MALE ASSERTIVE AGENCY from the GROUND of FEMALE ACCOMMODATING RECEPTIVITY.

AUTHORING is the dynamic of the MALE which implies the conjugate existence of the FEMALE even if it is reduced to a notional EMPTY ACCOMMODATING SPACE OF INFINITE EXTENT.

CONCLUSIONS:

-A-  REALITY is the all-including transforming relational continuum which is INEFFABLE-because-NONLOCAL-and-IMPLICIT (relational).

-B- WESTERN CULTURE SUBSTITUTE REALITY is EMPTY ABSOLUTE (EUCLIDIAN) SPACE populated by notional NAME-instantiated things-in-themselves with GRAMMAR-given powers of AUTHORING actions and developments.

-C- The BUMPER-CAR DYNAMIC is a metaphor that reminds us that the 3+ body dynamic is a more realistic conceptualization of the INEFFABLE-because-NONLOCAL dynamics of our sensory experience of inclusion in the Wave-field.  What Newton means by NOT BEING ABLE TO “SOLVE” the three-body (bumper-car like) dynamic, is that we can REDUCE IT to LOCAL AUTHORING TERMS.  CAR 17 that crashed into CAR 51 is not and open and shut story because CAR 17’s dynamic story can’t be separated from the complex matrix of BUMPINGS that make CAR 17 look more like a molecule in an energized gas than a LOCAL THING-IN-ITSELF with its own notional SELF-AUTHORED ACTIONS and DEVELOPMENT.

The notion of LOCAL AUTHORING is something we invent to reduce the INEFFABLE-because-NONLOCAL-and-IMPLICIT dynamics of our sensory experience to the LOCAL-and-EXPLICIT dynamics of our intellectual abstraction based SUBSTITUTE REALITY.

* * *

SYNOPSIS: What our WESTERN CULTURE language and grammar  is doing is building us a SUBSTITUTE REALITY based on the LOCAL-and-EXPLICIT and thus EFFABLE to overcome the INEFFABLE NATURE of our REAL Wave-field reality which is NONLOCAL-and-IMPLICIT.  Instead of NONLOCAL TRANSFORMATION, we speak in terms of LOCAL “AUTHORING” of GROWTH and PRODUCTION.  There is a psychological price to pay for employing this SUBSTITUTE REALITY as the OPERATIVE REALITY.

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