This is a philosophical discussion that explores the fundamental (mind-splitting) flaw in ‘reason’, as has been pointed out by Nietzsche.  This faith in ‘reason’ is the ‘craziness’ that permeates Western culture adherency.

I realize that ‘reason’ is a ‘respected concept’ in Western culture, but I am of the same mind as Nietzsche that ‘reason’ is a ‘crazy-maker’ (the source of a foundational ‘schizophrenia’ in Western culture).

* * * FIRST, … A REVIEW OF  FOUNDATIONAL CONCEPTS * * *

“Reason is the effable-izer of the ineffable Tao, the language and grammar splitter of the figure-ground-unum so that reason gives more  reality to the construction of a city (figure) than to the transforming of the (ground).  We and all our relations belong to the ineffable, undivided Tao.  In our Western culture adhering, the effable-izing tool of reason is running away with the worker, the effable human with the ineffable divine.  The alternative effable-izer of poetic inference is a more transparent effable-izer than reason and is without the reason-based exposure to schizophrenia that comes with reason’s hard figure-ground split and the associated ambiguity as to whether  figure sources transformation of ground or whether ground sources transformation of figure’.  In modern physics, the ambiguity does not arise because the concept of ‘sourcing’ is not necessary where there is ‘resonance’; i.e. we do not have to decide whether the dune moves by way of the peak asserting into the trough, or by way of the trough seducing entry of the peak.  That is, in modern physics there is only the resonance-dynamic (wave-field) of ‘duning’, there are no ‘dunes’ with ‘peaks’ and ‘troughts’.   The understanding of the ‘forms’ of nature as resonances within the wave-field (Tao) so that the ‘figure and ground’ are ‘one with one another and everything’, an allusion not only to the one-ness of the Tao but which also recalls the Gospel of Thomas citation;

Again when Jesus saw infants being nursed by their mothers he said, “These infants being suckled are like those entering the Kingdom.” And the disciples asked, “Shall we, then, as little children, enter the Kingdom?” He answered them, “When you make two one, and when you make the inside the outside and the outside the inside, and the above like the below, and when you make the male and female one and the same…then you will enter (the Kingdom).” —The Gospel of Thomas

My citing from the Gospel of Thomas was simply to show that the understanding of reality in terms of what modern physics researchers have called QUANTUM LOGIC; i.e. the BOTH/AND (figure-in-ground) logic of the included medium, has been ‘around’ in early Christian philosophy and not just in indigenous aboriginal, Taoist/Buddhist and Advaita Vedanta philosophy.  However, Western culture ‘reason’ is based on the EITHER/OR (figure-and-ground) logic of the excluded medium which opens the way to the ‘doer-of-deed’ abstraction, the abstract basis of ‘reason’ that Nietzsche is rejecting, and which is the source of schizophrenia in that ‘reason’ is ambiguous where it comes to whether the figure-dynamic is sourcing the transformation of the ground, or whether the ground dynamic is sourcing the transformation of the figure.  This schizophrenia-inducing ambiguity does not even emerge in the Tao or in ‘quantum logic’, but is an artefact of our effable-izing kluge of splitting the figure out from the ground and reducing the relational dynamics of our experience of inclusion in the Tao, to voyeur observer ‘double error’ based (reason-based) terms.

Our reduction to ‘reason’ based terms is where, for example, the ineffable (non-local, non-material) wave-field dynamic of resonance (which manifests as ‘duning’) is reduced by naming to ‘the dune’ (a notional local, thing-in-itself), the first error, which is conflated by the second error of grammar that imputes the power of sourcing actions and developments to the naming-instantiated thing-in-itself (first error).  In this ‘double error’ manner, the ineffable Tao (wave-field) is reduced to something ‘effable’, which is of great benefit in that it allows us to articulate and share at least some semblance of our unique and ineffable experiencing of inclusion in the Tao, so that we can learn from one another.

However, the reduction of ineffable to effable is a reduction of sensory awareness of inclusion in the Tao to the voyeur visualizations of ‘reason’ and while the virgin teenager may acquire a reason-based understanding of sexual relations that far surpasses the reason-based understanding of her sensory-experienced informed parents, such ‘reason’-based understanding, being a radical reduction from sensory experiencing of inclusion in the Tao, only qualifies for use as a ‘support tool’, so that it is problematic, as Emerson points out, where ‘the tool [of reason] runs away with the workman, the human with the divine’.  In fact, this problem of ‘reason’ running away with the ‘reasoner’ is the schizophrenia-breeding signature property of Western culture adherence.

* * * END OF REVIEW OF FOUNDATIONAL CONCEPTS * * *

With these ‘foundational concepts” in hand (in mind), we can go straight to the heart of the matter, in the same vein as Nietzsche, in pointing out that ‘reason’ is served up in terms of ‘doer-and-doing’.  Nietzsche refers to this as the ‘double error’ of language and grammar and to the belief in ‘sorcery’ [i.e. ‘the ‘sourcing of actions and developments’].  In other words, ‘reason’ is the ‘cover’ that Western culture puts on ‘sorcery’ that makes it ‘respectable’ to us Western culture adherents.  The ‘sorcery’ of Western culture yore has never ‘gone away’, it has simply been cloaked in new terminology such as the ‘producer-product dynamic’ and/or the ‘cause-and-effect’ of Newtonian science (which as Benjamin Whorf has shown, was informed in its development by Alchemy).

‘Reason’ would have it that we are (name-instantiated) independent beings with powers of sourcing actions and developments.   In fact, we don’t exclusively reserve such (name-instantiated) local action and development instantiating powers to ourselves as ‘human beings’, our ‘grammar’ imputes such powers to name-instantiated things-in-themselves, whether ‘humans’, ‘nations’, ‘corporations’ or pretty much anything we want to attribute ‘sorcery’ to; e.g. “the dune is growing higher and longer and is shifting across the desert floor”.  “The volcano is erupting and flooding ‘its surroundings’ with molten lava”.  “The hurricane is devastating New Orleans.”

It is ‘hard to keep ‘seeing’ transformation in one’s mind’s eye as we busy our minds with converting these words into visual imagery.  That is, while I am ‘seeing’ ‘the dune moving across the desert floor’, I am splitting apart the ‘dune’ from the ‘desert floor’, ECLIPSING AND BURYING  our primary sensory understanding in terms of relational transformation that includes everything, including ourselves.  That is, our voyeur visualizing of resonance based form not only splits apart the ‘figure’ (the so-called dune) we are focusing on from the ‘ground’ (the so-called ‘desert floor’), it splits apart the observing self or ‘subject’ from the ‘observed other’ or ‘object’.  Logical consistency (EITHER/OR logic of the excluded medium) would demand it.

This ‘splitting’ apart of the ineffable Tao into ‘dune’ and ‘desert floor’ which splits out, at the same time, ‘observing subject’ and ‘observed object’, reduces the ineffable to something ‘effable’ that is then ‘expressible’ in language and grammar and thereby ‘shareable’.  The effable reduction that we can share as in ‘reason’ based rhetoric is hugely useful, so long as we don’t confuse it for ‘reality’ whereupon our ‘reason’ based abstraction could hijack the natural primacy of our sensory experience of inclusion in the Tao.

BIT, … how ‘real’ are these ‘things-that-do-stuff declarations concocted by ‘reason’?

As Nietzsche says about ‘reason’; ‘everywhere it sees a doer and doing’.  Is this ‘reasonable’? (by ‘reasonable’ I am really asking about the ‘reality’ of ‘reason’, but our common language usage tends to substitute ‘reason’ for ‘reality’).

“In its origin language belongs in the age of the most rudimentary form of psychology. We enter a realm of crude fetishism when we summon before consciousness the basic presuppositions of the metaphysics of language, in plain talk, the presuppositions of reason. Everywhere it sees a doer and doing; it believes in will as the cause; it believes in the ego, in the ego as being, in the ego as substance, and it projects this faith in the ego-substance upon all things–only thereby does it first create the concept of “thing.” Everywhere “being” is projected by thought, pushed underneath, as the cause; the concept of being follows, and is a derivative of, the concept of ego. In the beginning there is that great calamity of an error that the will is something which is effective, that will is a capacity. Today we know that it is only a word.” – Nietzsche, Chapter 5 (Reason in Philosophy) of Twilight of the Idols.

My sense is that ‘reason’ that everywhere sees a doer and doing is NOT reliable and here I use ‘reliable’ in the sense of ‘supportable by our sensory experience.  The point is that ‘reason’ is something beyond the earthy groundedness of our sensory experience; i.e. ‘reason’ is something we treat of as being ‘more profound’ and ‘celestial’ in its absolute foundations of cut and dried logical certainty of EITHER ‘is’ OR ‘is not’.

Reason is what they use on the TV show CSI – Crime Scene Investigation.  Reason, supported by DNA evidence etc. is going to prove, … without a shadow of a doubt (i.e. with absolute certainty) that Jean Valjean stole that loaf of bread.  Of course, that certainty has absolutely nothing to say about the child on the edge of death by starvation, that was given a reprieve on being the recipient of that loaf of bread which Jean Valjean moved from regions of surplus nourishment to regions of deficient nourishment.  Of course, reason moves in the other direction, away from the uncertain fluid relations of sensory experience of inclusion in the Tao to the crisp logical certainty of intellectual abstraction.

Reason is not something that can deal with the Zen story of the man whose horse runs away (maybe bad, maybe good) but later returns with a small herd of wild horses (maybe good, maybe bad) which the man’s son’s effort in training them results in his breaking a leg (maybe bad, maybe good) and the son is, as a result of his broken leg, passed over by the Emperor’s military recruiting of soldiers for an ensuing war (maybe good, maybe bad) wherein all those recruited go to their deaths in a battle against insurmountable odds. Likewise, the Tao that we do not reduce via the intellectual device of abstracting out ‘doer-deed’ based ‘reason’ remains ‘operative’ even while we are constructing our reason-based pseudo-realities that we may employ NOT JUST AS A SUPPORT TOOL FOR OUR SENSORY-EXPERIENCE INFORMED RELATIONAL REALITY, …. BUT INSTEAD, AS A SUBSTITUTE REALITY.  This is what Emerson means by ‘the tool (of reason) running away with the worker, the human with the divine.

‘Reason’ has to do with reducing our experience of inclusion in the Tao to intellectualized terms of discrete events that are local in space and time.  Reason re-srender the ineffable Tao (in a very reduced since) in ‘effable’ (and therefore shareable) terms and that can be very useful even though ‘reason’ falls far short of capturing the reality of our relational experience, as Nietzsche is pointing out.  Nevertheless, the truth is that Jean Valjean ‘stole a loaf of bread’ and the farmer’s horse ran away.  What we call ‘the truth’ can only be ‘piecemeal’ since reality aka ‘the Tao’ is ineffable and cannot be told.  ‘Reason’ is an intellectual-abstracting device for reducing reality (the Tao) in a piecemeal fashion as a means of rendering the ineffable (in some crude reductive fashion) effable.

‘Reason’ is based on the ‘double error’ of language and grammar that gives rise to the ‘doer-and-deed’ abstraction, which in turn ‘legitimizes’ the intellectual abstraction of ‘sourcing’ actions and developments as in ‘doer and deed’.

‘Reason’ is innately incomplete and leads to logical ‘antimonies’ (contradictions).

‘Feminism’, for example, associates with the reasoning that women are the source of positive contributions to society that they are not being given credit for.  Males, on the other hand, seem to be given (to have the power to give themselves) abundant credit (some would say disproportionate) for what males do.   This ‘imbalance’ (in how we perceive male and female sourcing of actions and developments) has been captured in reasoning of the following sorty;

My father was a famous engineer, my mother had no name’ (Claribel Alegria, El Salvadoran poet)

The common Western-culture-adherent interpretation of this ‘complaint’ in underestimating the female contribution in the sourcing of social actions and developments relative to the male contribution in the sourcing of social actions and developments is voiced as a complaint with the aim of establishing a more reasonable and balanced assessment of male and female sourcing of actions and developments beneficial to society.

However, in modern physics, as in indigenous aboriginal cultures, Taoism/Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta, there is no such thing as the ‘sourcing of actions and developments’, there is only relational transformation (the Tao).  The concept of sourcing of actions and developments is a language and grammar based ‘double error’ as is also the underpinning of binary logic based ‘reason’.

If there is no such thing as ‘sourcing’ of actions and developments’. Why, then, are males and females and various other ‘categories’ we give to ourselves argue over inequities in how society acknowledges, rewards (and punishes) individuals and groups for ‘their sourcing of actions and developments’?  Note that while ‘reason’ supports such claims of ‘sorcery’, there is no such thing as ‘sorcery’ in the Taoist understanding (and modern physics understanding) of our inclusion in a transforming relational continuum.

Evidently, Western culture adherents BELIEVE in the TRUTH of the DOUBLE ERROR aka THE NAME-INSTANTIATED SOURCING OF ACTIONS AND DEVELOPMENTS, not just as a useful inference tool or ‘throw-away Wittgenstein ladder’, but as being fit for use in a reason-based ‘operative reality’.  Not only do we Western culture adherents’ believe in our own, and our nations, and our corporation’s ‘powers of sorcery’, such belief manifests as ‘ego’.

At this point, the reader will possibly be coming to the conclusion that I am crazy or Western culture is crazy.  If it is me that is crazy, I am not alone; i.e. also on this same understanding tack are modern physics, indigenous aboriginal cultures, Taoism/Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta.

For anyone reading this that believes that reason SHOULD have precedence over sensory experience; i.e. that the reason based findings of Crime Scenes Investigation in the case of Jean Valjean SHOULD take precedence over natural sensory experience wherein our behaviours are in the service of sustaining relational harmony (within the transforming relational continuum), such opting to put ‘reason first’ would fit the Western culture majority behaviour.  However, one might prefer to put the sensory influence first and reason second (i.e. if you were the sensory experience-attuned prosecutor of Jean Valjean, you might choose to leave his jail cell door ajar when you go for a lunch break).

However, in today’s world, technology facilitates increasingly monitoring everything so it is very difficult to find ways to slack off the hard-line reason based approach, without taking a hit for doing so.

One might ask; if Western culture is so screwed up, how has it managed to do so well, to make so much progress, to improve the condition of the people and to make so many technology-based improvements to the land?

The answer can be found by considering the many impressive structures that modern Western culture civilization has constructed, e.g. air transportation systems, freeways, seaways, agricultural projects etc.

The reality is that THESE DEVELOPMENTS ARE NOT REAL!  Ok, wait a sec to consider what I am intending here.

Reality is the transforming relational continuum (the Tao).  The ‘modern skyscraper’ is NOT REAL in the following sense; the landscape has been transformed and the ‘new development’ is included in the relational transformation.  Transformation is the primary reality; i.e. the continually transforming landscape now includes a skyscraper.  It may appear more sophisticated than a bunch of holes dug out of a cliff face, or a an arrangement of poles covered with hide to form a tipi, but it nevertheless fails to achieve ‘figure-OR-ground’ separation but remains a ‘figure-IN-ground’ phenomenon, the only contradiction being in the abstracting powers of language and grammar.

That is, the double error of language and grammar lets us use naming to impute thing-in-itself being, and to conflate this by using grammar to impute the power of sourcing action and development to the name-instantiated thing-in-itself.  One may say; ‘the skyscraper is rising high above the prairie’ (implying two separate things-in-themselves, ‘skyscraper’ and ‘prairie’) but the reality is that the landscape is undergoing transformation and it is not possible to ‘localize this’ in space and time as it is part of the transforming relational continuum, and this relational transformation is the Tao and it is ineffable.  The reduction of the ineffable Tao to effable descriptions of local material entities such as a mountain which is like a goose-pimple on the skin of a moose in the forest on the planet in the transforming relational continuum aka wave-field (see Carlo Rovelli’s description of modern physics implications in Quantum gravity).

CLOSING COMMENT:

The point is, once again, that the Tao or wave-field we are inclusions in is ineffable (beyond capture in the abstract intellectual reductions of language) yet the sharing of experience is of enormous utility so that it ‘makes sense’ to reduce our ineffable experience so that we can at least share some ‘inference’ of our ineffable experience of inclusion in the Tao.  Once again, while we Western culture adherents are in the habit of using the ‘double error’ based reduction, we also have available to us, the popular method of relational inference described in modern physics as ‘the surprise version of the game of Twenty Questions’ which is also known as poetic inference and employed by indigenous aboriginal cultures.

David Bohm proposed the development of a ‘flow-based language’ which he termed ‘rheomode’ to provide a better means of articulating, or at least improving our ability to infer the ineffable Tao, but discovered that the indigenous aboriginal culture had already ‘been there’;

A few months before his death, Bohm met with a number of Algonkian speakers and was struck by the perfect bridge between their language and worldview and his own exploratory philosophy. What to Bohm had been major breakthroughs in human thought — quantum theory, relativity, his implicate order and rheomode – were part of the everyday life and speech of the Blackfoot, Mic Maq, Cree and Ojibwaj.” – F. David Peat, ‘Blackfoot Physics’

One can regard these languages as improved means of using inference to share understandings of inclusion in the Tao; i.e. as improvements over the ‘double error’ based (reason-based) reduction of reality employed by we  Western culture adherents, which has become ‘the tool’ that has ‘run away with the workman’, the human with the divine’.

Finally, it needs to be pointed out among those of us who are Western culture adherents, that we are constantly using the tool of ‘reason’ as the means for changing our outlook on reality.  This is a problem for us Western culture adherents because the inadequacy of ‘reason’ is the problem that we need to surmount, so as long as we are using ‘reason’ to try to surmount reason, this is like ‘trying to bite one’s own nose; i.e. it is impossible.  The impossibility is captured in Geodel’s theorem of the innate incompleteness of all finite systems of logical reasoning.

THIS IS A CRAZY-MAKER insofar as we persist in using reason to try to understand the complexity of the Tao we are included in, since it is beyond the reach of ‘reason’.  What happens is that we wander around within a matrix of reason-based arguments that we hope is going to lead us to a reason-based enlightenment, but ‘reason’ cannot ‘go the distance’ because what we Western culture adherents use as ‘reason’ is the EITHER/OR logic of the excluded medium, and what modern physics and the flow-based understanding of reality requires is QUANTUM LOGIC, which the BOTH/AND logic of the included medium where the ‘figure-and-ground’ are ONE and only appear as TWO.

One can think of this in wave-field terms of ‘duning’ which is a non-local, non-material, non-independent (ineffable) resonance (wave-field) phenomenon that the limitations in our Western culture language and grammar have us reduce to something local, material, independent and thus ‘effable’; i.e. the dune that ‘grows longer and higher and that shifts across the desert floor (is now portrayed as an ‘independent thing-in-itself with its own powers of sourcing actions and developments).  This IS THE DOUBLE ERROR BASED REDUCTION, the Western culture popular means of reducing the ineffable to effable for the purposes of sharing some suggestive semblance of the ineffable, BUT NOT FIT FOR STANDING IN PLACE AND SUBSTITUTING FOR THE INEFFABLE, as is what is happening within modern Western culture adherence.

The CRAZY-MAKING INFLUENCE of SUBSTITUTING the double error reduction of the INEFFABLE for the INEFFABLE rather than using it as a A TOOL OF INFERENCE, is what we are currently dealing with in the Western culture social dynamic.  I could try to summarize, once again, how this plays out, but it is not possible for the reader to ‘get it’ if she is coming from her ‘reasoning’ faculty because ‘reason’ is not big enough; i.e. we can’t understand the wave-field dynamic of ‘duning’ if we use reductionist reasoning in terms of ‘dunes’ and ‘what dunes do’.  It is, as mentioned, like ‘trying to bite one’s one nose’.  Reason is not a capable transport for taking one beyond ‘reason’ to a relational (intuitive) understanding of the Tao.  One may ‘get it’ when other use inference to share it, but when one tries to articulate it, reason based articulation is innately incapable of expressing it, and in a culture that is conditioned to understanding ‘truth’ and ‘reality’ in reason-based terms, accepting a silent or poetic understanding is not ‘in the cards’;

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

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

— Heraclitus

In other words, the Tao is ineffable, so we cannot expect to come up with a reason-based articulation of the ineffable.  We can nevertheless understand the ineffable through our sensorimotor rhythms (SMR in neurofeedback terminology).

The Western culture social dynamic is meanwhile bogged down by the ‘splitting’ of the social collective that is a hidden trap in using the abstraction of ‘reason’ in that ‘reason’ splits apart ‘figure and ground’ opening up the psychological splitting whereby almost half of Western culture adherents opt for making the ‘figure’ (the social individual) the ‘source’ of the action while almost half opt for making ‘ground’ (the social collective) the ‘source of the action’.  The third and much smaller split-out is the sensitive ‘miner’s canaries’ who don’t like to participate in polarization, so they, in effect, ‘swallow’ and ‘embody’ the polarizing that is the unnatural ‘normal’ of the Western culture social collective.

The ‘aberrant normality’ in the figure-ground splitting of Western culture leaves little refuge for those sensitive ‘miner’s canaries’ that eschew joining either one of the polarizations, and their ‘holding out’ against the polarizing gives them the status of the ‘identified patient’;

The ‘Identified Patient’:

The term emerged from the work of the Bateson Project on family homeostasis, as a way of identifying a largely unconscious pattern of behavior whereby an excess of painful feelings in a family lead to one member being identified as the cause of all the difficulties – a scapegoating of the IP. 

The identified patient – also called the “symptom-bearer” or “presenting problem” – may display unexplainable emotional or physical symptoms, and is often the first person to seek help, perhaps at the request of the family. However, while family members will typically express concern over the IP’s problems, they may instinctively react to any improvement on the identified patient’s part by attempting to reinstate the status quo

Western culture adhering social collectives thus ‘divide out’ into (1) conservatives that believe that the action of the figure (individual) is the source of the transformation of the ground (social collective); (2) liberals that believe that the action of the ground (social collective) is the source of the transformation of the figure (individual); and (3) the sensitive miner’s canary that eschews the polarizing of one social faction against and another social faction and thus ‘eats’ or ‘buffers’ within themselves, the polarizing contention.

This Western culture double error based aberrance is manifesting increasingly in Western society, as electronic communications and electronic visual monitoring continue to undermine our relational experience of inclusion in the Tao based understanding.  The visual CCTV images of Jean Valjean taking a loaf of bread is given greater priority in establishing reason-based truth than the round-about relational awareness of regions of relative food surplus and deficiency.  This is because such visual operations ‘spotlight’ and extract ‘localized samplings’ of the overall Tao and in this manner reduce the ineffable to the effable that is needed for ‘reason based’ analysis and understanding.  Crime Scene Investigation (CSI) is a ‘reason’ based approach to understanding that is binarily conclusive (EITHER IS OR IS NOT) in its determinations, thanks to its manner of reducing the ineffable to the effable

If there were formerly a significant population of Jean Valjeans and Robin Hoods in Western society, the combination of automated surveillance technologies and the promotion of ‘reason’ from its support role to relational intuition, to the leading role (where the relational indefinite is ‘hardened’ to the explicit and definite, this reduction cannot proceed in the reverse direction because of the loss of understanding that not only accompanies ‘reasoning’ but is its defining feature.)  The voyeur CCTV camera images support the reasoned conclusion that Jean Valjean stole the loaf of bread, a ‘transaction’ that is prohibited by law, and which pre-empts shaggy-dog Zen stories that suggest that good can arise out of bad and vice versa (as if the binaries of good and bad have an unstable ontology) .  Thus the CCTV images that capture small pieces of the unfolding Tao continuum can draw differing perspectival interpretations of the same phenomenon as context is increased or decreased (as in the Zen story of the lost and returning horses).

Meanwhile, Western culture adherents’ practice of chopping up the Tao into pieces to render the ineffable crudely effable is open to being taken to the extreme so that the impression of who a person ‘really is’ is being shaped in the public eye by small vignettes that for those that know that person, may represent small or non-representative glimpses into that person, which does not stop a mass reaction against, or in favour of that individual on the basis of the mass communicating of the vignette.  The exposures here have been cited in Ivan Illich’s ‘Silence is a Commons’ (there is no doubt that those who have ‘access to the microphone’ in our modern electronic communications infused world, can have huge influence

Western society, having migrated from keeping sensory-relations based intuition in the primacy to putting reason (chopped up visual/sound bites) in the primacy, is now becoming alarmed over the evident exposure to the mental manipulating power in the system (e.g. did the Russians influencing U.S. election).  This exposure has always been there, as it is inherent in the reductionist system.  The problem is that language is popularly used to reduce and reconstitute the sensory experience of inclusion in the Tao in voyeur visual image terms as in the ‘double error’ reduction and reconstruction of ‘doer-deed’ or ‘producer-product’ dynamics.    ‘Figure’ and ‘ground’ are ONE in our ineffable sensory experience of inclusion in the Tao, but split into TWO in our effable language and grammar rhetorical reduction to ‘reason’. As Nietzsche points out in ‘The Twilight of the Idols’, ‘reason’ (while as noted above is just one of the ways of reducing the ineffable to effable for sharing purposes) is imbued with deceptiveness, giving ‘reason’ an exposure that poetic inference and intuition do not have.

The following Nietzsche quote addresses the deceptiveness of ‘reason’ in philosophy — (Proposition 5 in Chapter 5 (Reason in Philosophy) of Twilight of the Idols.  (Götzen-Dämmerung).  In German the sense of Götzen is ‘false Gods’ or ‘Idols’.

And in India, as in Greece, the same mistake was made: “We must once have been at home in a higher world (instead of a very much lower one, which would have been the truth); we must have been divine, for we have REASON!” Indeed, nothing has yet possessed a more naive power of persuasion than the error concerning being, as it has been formulated by the Eleatics, for example. After all, every word and every sentence we say speak in its favor. Even the opponents of the Eleatics still succumbed to the seduction of their concept of being: Democritus, among others, when he invented his atom. “REASON” in language–oh, what an old deceptive female she is! I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.

Finally, while I would like to deliver these understandings in a more brief and more easily digested manner (it is never going to be easy because of the limitations of this Western language that I am using as the communications tool, a language that has built-into-it, abstract reductions to facilitate REASON based communications).  The avoidance of having the narrative hijacked by a language that tends to reduce everything to ‘reason’ (i.e. by way of the ‘double error’) is why Bohm wanted to develop a flow-based language (and why he embraced indigenous aboriginal languages on discovering that indigenous aboriginal languages had a design that avoided hi-jacking by reason, and preserved a capability for conveying inference of the ineffable Tao.

* * *

 

 

NOTES: The ramifications of the deceptiveness of REASON.

 -1- Reason supports the double error which supports sorcery which supports ego

 -2-  Reason is the basis of the ‘producer-product’ view of economics which is a cornerstone of both capitalism and socialism

 -3-  The schizophrenic split between capitalism and socialism is congruent with the schizophrenic split between conservatism and liberalism. That which is in common is that both are based on the producer-product abstraction (there are no producers of product in a transforming relational continuum (the Tao). The producer-product abstraction is a double error-based illusion (delusion if one buys into it as Western culture adherents generally have).

The schizophrenia inducing ambiguity in the producer-product dichotomy comes from assuming;

A: production comes from individuals and the many partake of it, and,

B: production comes from the many and individuals partake of it

In the former, individuals source a spread that the many can feed on.

in the latter, the many source a spread that individuals can feed on.

WHAT’S WRONG with this picture?

ANSWER: there’s no such thing as ‘sourcing’ (‘sourcing’ is the double error of language and grammar).  There is only relational transformation.  The concept of sourcing gives rise to schizophrenia due to the innate ambiguity as to whether the whorl sources the flow or whether the flow sources the whorl.  That is in the realm of visual appearances that we reduce to language and grammar.  In the reality of our sensory experience of inclusion in the Tao, the whorl is how flow appears and is not something separate from the flow;

“Big whorls have little whorls,
Which feed on their velocity;
And little whorls have lesser whorls,
And so on to viscosity.”
—L. F. Richardson

The concept of ‘the sourcing of actions and developments’ (‘sorcery’) is an ‘error of grammar’; i.e. it comes from language where we, for example, use grammar to reduce ‘duning’, which is the manifesting of relational transformation in a wave-field dynamic, to a notional act of ‘sorcery’ on the part of ‘a dune’; e.g. ‘the dune is growing taller and longer; … the dune is shifting to the East’.

WE USE GRAMMAR TO GIVE GOD-LIKE POWERS OF CREATION (SORCERY) TO NAME-INSTANTIATED (NOTIONAL) THINGS-IN-THEMSELVES, WHETHER DUNES, PERSONS, NATIONS, CORPORATIONS OR WHATEVER.  THUS, AS NIETZSCHE SAYS;

“I am afraid we are not rid of God because we continue to believe in grammar” — Nietzsche

Ich fürchte, wir werden Gott nicht los, weil wir noch an die Grammatik glauben…

 -4-  Ego, Corporate pride, Nationalism, all stem from the belief in grammar. Where the understanding is that we all share inclusion within a relational continuum; i.e. as where everything is mutually dependent, the two-leggeds, four-leggeds, winged and slithering ones (‘mitakuye oyasin’), ‘inspiration’ (which is sensory experience based) is the motivation rather than ego (which is intellectual calculation based)

—inspiration fills the heart, ego swells the head—

 -5-  There are no ‘binaries’ in the reality of our actual experience of inclusion in the Tao; i.e. the Western culture notions of ‘good-and-evil’, ‘life and death’ etc. are all based on the EITHER/OR logic of the excluded medium. In the understanding of modern physics and the Tao, there is only the BOTH/AND (quantum logic) of the included medium where the whorl and flow are ONE and the distinguishing is by ‘appearance’ rather than by ontic separateness.

 -6-  The social consequences of Western culture adherents’ belief in sorcery (belief in the double error of language and grammar) are many, the seeds of which are the false sense of ‘ego’ (the belief in name-instantiated being with power of sourcing actions and developments) and the false sense of local jumpstart authorship of actions that are conceived of EITHER ‘good’ OR ‘bad’, giving rise to ‘the guilty’ and ‘the innocent’ and ‘the hero’ and ‘the villain’. In quantum logic (BOTH/AND logic of the included medium), there is only harmony and dissonance, no locally instantiated actions and developments (only relational transformation). Quantum logic gives rise to the indigenous aboriginal, Taoist/Buddhist and Advaita Vedanta relational sense of desirable and undesirable action that is in terms of harmony and dissonance.

 -7-  The notion of the great achievements of Western culture that suggests the superiority of Western culture, which are in terms of the construction of cities, skyscrapers, highways, railways, seaways, airline systems etc. DO NOT REALLY EXIST AS THINGS-IN-THEMSELVES OUTSIDE OF LANGUAGE AND GRAMMAR, which is intellectual abstraction that employs the double error of language and grammar to instantiate such things. The well-tunneled mound of earth that serves as ant-hotel is not topologically different from the human constructed skyscraper; i.e. we are talking about transformation of the relational space we share inclusion in. It only becomes (in the intellectualizing mind) a ‘thing-in-itself’ when we work the ‘double error’ where we use ‘naming’ to impute local thing-in-itself ‘being’ to it, and conflate this with grammar, as with ‘the dune’ to say that ‘the skyscraper rises from the desert floor. The only ‘sensory experience validated ‘reality’ here’, is relational transformation (the Tao).  In other words, the exalting of Western man for constructing amazing cities, road and rail and waterway systems is misplaced because the reality is relational transformation in which humans are included in the manner of tornado-ing or duning  in the Tao which is not to say that they are separate things-in-themselves sourcing their own own works (that thought is just the double error abstraction).  We Western culture adherents are impressed by our own architectural works that sit there like pretty figures on the ground, but in the reality of the Tao, the figure and ground separateness is merely ‘appearance’

 -8-  BUT THE BULLSHIT DOUBLE ERROR whereby we pluck features out of the Tao so as to set them up (in language based intellectual abstraction) ‘on their own’ is not all bad, as it was invented to render the ineffable Tao crudely effable to facilitate sharing of (a crude reductive replica of our) ineffable experience. The exposure is (that Emerson points out is a trap that we Western culture adherents typically fall into) that ‘the tool (of double error language and grammar reduction) “runs away with the workman, the human with the divine.”

-9- Transcending the bipolar extremes of FEAR and EXALTATION of EITHER/OR logic with BOTH/AND Quantum Logic;

THE BINARY OF FEAR: The ego-shrinking deer-in-the-headlights feeling of being at the mercy of superior forces is a debilitating emotional condition where one is frozen into the null point between ‘fight’ or ‘flight’.

THE BINARY OF EXALTATION: The ego-inflating all-powerful SUPREME BEING feeling; “

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.” — Marianne Williamson

BEYOND THE BINARY IN THE SENSORIMOTOR RHYTHM RESONANCE OF INCLUSION IN THE TAO

You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting — over and over announcing your place in the family of things. — Mary Oliver “Wild Geese”

 

(Footnote: “BIPOLAR DISORDER” is a lock-in to searching for understanding in the innately limited terms of ‘reason’ constructed from binary logic.  Searches using the bright light of binary logic can be endless and futile because binary logic (the EITHER/OR  logic of the excluded medium) lacks the ‘dimensionality’ to convey continual forming within a flow-continuum.  This innate inadequacy of an analytical reduction based articulation that attempts to capture all-including flow (the Tao) ‘cripples’ the understanding in the articulation it delivers, a ‘crippled understanding’ that is nevertheless delivered in spite of its basic inadequacy.  This situation recalls the logic of the drunk looking under the streetlight for the valuable he has lost on a distant, darkened section of the street “because the search conditions are superior here under the streetlight”.

While the QUANTUM BOTH/AND logic of the included medium lacks the crisp “is/is not” decisiveness of binary logic, it does not, as the standard binary logic based ‘reason’ does, constrain one’s search for meaning to ‘WHAT IS’ or ‘IS NOT the case.  The QUANTUM BOTH/AND logic of the included medium accepts the fluid nature of the Tao wherein the movement of the figure in the ground (the movement of the dune across the desert floor is ‘an error of grammar’ rather than a reality, the reality being the transforming relational continuum aka ‘the Tao’).

The value of neurofeedback in ‘sorting this out’ lies in the manner that it allows us to understand phenomena in wave-field terms wherein the ‘same’ phenomenon perceived in the Sensorimotor rhythm wave band delivers understanding that differs from that ‘same’ phenomenon perceived in the Alpha wave band.  That is, whereas, in the Alpha wave band, ‘source-and-receiver (‘figure and ground’) are ‘resolved’ as two separate ontologies, this is not the case in the SMR wave band, where figure and ground are dual aspects of one wave-field phenomenon and the figure-ground ‘separateness’ is only ‘appearance’ while ‘the two’ are sensed as dual aspects of one phenomenon (no separate ontologies), consistent with the wave-field understanding of modern physics.   One might describe this in the terms that alpha wave band perception ontologically splits apart the dune and the ‘desert floor’ (‘figure’ and ‘ground’ in Gestalt terms) wile the SMR wave band perception gives an understanding in terms of just one relational dynamic with ground and figure aspects, as in a hologram.

In this sense, the neurofeedback ‘overcomes’ the abstract ontological splitting that is burned into our psyche by visual-and-linguist figure-and-ground splitting.   Understanding of reality in terms of wave-field forms avoids the psychological trap of the figure-ground ontological split.

In Newtonian and special relativistic physics, if we take away the dynamical entities – particles and fields – what remains is space and time. In general relativistic physics, if we take away the dynamical entities, nothing remains. The space and time of Newton and Minkowski are reinterpreted as a configuration of one of the fields, the gravitational field. This implies that physical entities – particles and fields – are not all immersed in space, and moving in time. They do not live on spacetime. They live, so to say, on one another. It is as if we had observed in the ocean many animals living on an island: animals ‘on’ the island. Then we discover that the island itself is in fact a great whale. Not anymore animals on the island, just animals on animals. Similarly, the universe is not made by fields on spacetime; it is made by fields on fields.”   — Carlo Rovelli, in ‘Quantum Gravity’

What is, in effect, being described here is ‘holographic’ perception wherein figure and ground are no longer ‘two’ but ‘one’.  Access to this holographic view is opened up through this type of neurofeedback.

If we return to considering the wave-field impression of the ‘duning sand-sea’, and/or the skyscrapering hills, from the perspective of standing silently and experiencing not just visual but full sensory inclusion in such development, we may sense the reality of OUR inclusion within the transforming relational continuum (the Tao), or our inclusion in the ‘holographic universe’ (the wave-field aka the Tao).

Learning how to ‘re-tune’ to SMR (sensorimotor rhythms) is like recovering our forgotten art of holosensory perception.  We know the wave-fields are there and we know that we are sensitive to the resonances (wave field dynamics) we are included in, and the modern physics understanding is open to the ‘holographic universe’ concept.  WHY ARE WE ALWAYS REDUCING OUR EXPERIENCE OF INCLUSION IN THE TAO TO FLAT-SCREEN VOYEUR PICTURE-SHOWS?  Why not accept what modern physics is coming up with; i.e. our inclusion in a holographic universe?  That is, why not more SMR and less Alpha?

“In the book ‘Causality and Chance in Modern Physics’ Bohm argued that the way science viewed causality was also much too limited. Most effects were thought of as having only one or several causes. However, 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.”  –The Holographic Universe: The Revolutionary Theory of Reality: Michael Talbot:

Think about it, … are you REALLY seeing ‘construction’ of ‘skyscrapers’ ON the rolling hills of the prairie landscape as in the figure and ground ontological split?  Or is that just the ‘producer-product’ ‘double error’ of language and grammar doing photo-markups in your brain?  Maybe there is no ontological figure-and-ground split, … maybe the split is just language and intellect based.  Is it EVER possible to construct something without disturbing (transforming) the landscape we are constructing it ‘on’ (or should that ‘on’ be ‘in’?).  But if the construction was ‘inside the landscape’, we too would have to ‘go inside’ the landscape to work on it and visit it.

We use our usual (double error salted) producer-product concept to say that say we ‘construct’ the skyscraper as if that ‘makes sense’.  Meanwhile there are stumps of trees where we took wood, pits where took gravel for concrete, quarries where we took limestone for exterior walls, and much much more alteration of the landscape … so much alteration that one is tempted to refer to what is going on in this case as relational transformation.   In fact, a producer product concept has a hyper-literal ring to it like the ‘pound of flesh’ contract in the Merchant of Venice; i.e. how to achieve it without taking an iota more or less.  In other words, the producer-product dynamic is unreal (ego-instantiated) abstraction in a world where the basic reality is of inclusion in a transforming relational continuum.

The Western culture promotion of ‘reasoning’ that is more precise that the realities of our sensory experience also gives rise to the ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’ craziness, wherein we psychologically ‘dress ourselves up’ as powerful figures with the gift of local, jumpstart ‘sorcery’ as when we confuse the ‘double error’ of language and grammar for ‘reality’.  We are NOT the source of anything; i.e. we are inclusions in the ineffable transforming relational continuum (the Tao) and the ‘double error’ is an expedient TOOL OF INFERENCE  allows us, with language and grammar, to construct voyeur visual representations of ‘a notional ‘world-out-there’ that we can use to INFER our inclusion in the Tao; i.e. our inclusion in a transforming relational continuum that is beyond the capability of ‘out-there’ visual representations.  The ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’ psychosis is our Western culture adherent habit wherein we ‘push’ our double error representation of ourselves (as things-in-ourselves with powers of sourcing actions and developments), beyond its expedient-tool-of-inference role, to serve in a ‘producer of products’ context within a surrogate ‘pseudo-reality’ that eclipses the relational reality of our sensory experiencing of inclusion in the Tao.

This reductive abstraction of a producer product dynamic was developed as an INTELLECTUAL TOOL to reduce the ineffable Tao to something ‘effable’ and thus language-and-grammar-shareable.  The sharing of (even of a reduced facsimile of) our unique and ineffable experience of inclusion in the Tao means that we can learn from one another’s experiences without having to repeat the often painful and lengthy experimental pathways leading to valuable understanding.  This language and grammar enabled knowledge transfer can only happen through a reduced-to-effable version of the ineffable.  The reduced-to-effable version of reality (thanks to the double error) is just a ‘tool’ of inference or ‘go-by’; it is not to be confused for ‘reality’.

However, Emerson’s point is that we Western culture adherents ARE confusing the tool of language and grammar double-error reduction … FOR REALITY.   This elevating of the tool that delivers an effable (local, materially-explicitized) reduction of the ineffable, … while at the same time abandoning and ‘burying’  our direct sensory experiencing of the ineffable Tao  (inclusion in the wave-field) , … is a case of “the tool running away with the workman, the human with the divine”.  The point is that the tool (of double error reduction) is only good for the ‘inferring’ of that which lies innately beyond direct, explicit expression (the Tao), … the double error tool of inference is not fit for serving as a ‘substitute’ for the Tao, but that is how we Western culture adherents are deploying it.

There are no ‘skyscrapers on a landscape and no ‘dunes on a desert floor’, …no ‘figure-ground’ ontological splits.

Not anymore animals on the island, just animals on animals. Similarly, the universe is not made by fields on spacetime; it is made by fields on fields.”   — Carlo Rovelli, in ‘Quantum Gravity’

 

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