FORWARD:  This commentary addresses that which is impossible to ‘admit to’ by the custodians of Western culture, because Western culture adherents are supporting an INVENTED REALITY that is so far from the reality of our actual sensual experience that it would be a huge ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’ exposure to overtly ‘burst the bubble’.

Western culture is in a situation akin to Pinocchio.  It’s nose has already grown so large that it has become an embarrassment to everyone one of us who daily pretends as if it is just a ‘normal’ nose’.

In terms of the figure-and-ground of Gestalt psychology, our psyche’s are ‘split’ by the dichotomous issue of whether ‘the moving figure’ is the source of the ‘movement of the ground’ (does the flapping flag source the wind) or whether the moving of the ground is the source of the movement of the figure (does the gusting wind source the flapping of the flag?).    The ‘double error’ of language and grammar is implicit here, and arises from combining the abstraction of name-instantiated things-in-themselves with the abstraction of powers of sourcing actions and development.  Experiential reality is instead, our sensory experience of inclusion in relational transformation (reality based on sorcery is the abstract double-error based artifact of language and grammar).

When we turn on the TV and/or access internet reviews of ‘where the world is at these days’, … we are tuning in to, or prepping ourselves for constructing an ‘INVENTED REALITY’ based on ‘the double error’ of language and grammar.  The popular ‘INVENTED REALITY’ that is publicized and regarded as our Western culture ‘operative reality’ is a crazy-making scam.  That is, the pictures of ‘The American Sniper’ can be ‘couched’ in language that cultivates the notion of a heroic feat, or alternatively, a mass murdering spree.  The INVENTED REALITY pivots from the abstract concept of ‘sorcery’ which is innately ambiguous in a figure/ground sense (does the man source the times or do the times source the man?, does ‘one rotten apple spoil the barrel’ or ‘does it take a whole community to raise a child?’).  Sorcery is a language and grammar based abstraction (the double error) that breeds schizophrenia.  As Nietzsche points out, we use the double error of language and grammar to impute to name-instantiated (abstract) things-in-themselves the powers of Creation;  “I am afraid we are not rid of God because we continue to believe in grammar” — Nietzsche

However, because we have built our global social dynamic on the ‘back’ of this double error based INVENTED REALITY, everything that is being pushed as ‘reality’ is a scam.  What is, ‘reality’ is the ineffable Tao.  This has not changed with the arrival of language.  What has changed is that the surrogate pseudo-reality that we have invented (the INVENTED REALITY) as a tool to ‘get by’ the ‘ineffability’ of the reality that we are ‘really’ included in, aka ‘the Tao’ that cannot be told’ (it is ineffable).  Using ‘double error’ based language and grammar as a tool that renders the ineffable Tao ‘effable’ (in a radically reduced form) allows us to construct an effable, double error based INVENTED REALITY.  This is the ‘tool’ that as Emerson has noted, has ‘run away with the workman, the human with the divine’.

We Western culture adherents have thus, thanks to the double error reduction, come up with an effable surrogate ‘pseudo-reality’.  It is today’s Western culture ‘operative reality’ or INVENTED REALITY, and it is certainly NOT the equivalent of the ineffable reality aka ‘the Tao’ (inclusion in the transforming relational continuum).   Our Pinocchio nose is grown so massive that it is unthinkable to draw attention to it.  The whole social superstructure of Western culture is built upon the façade of sorcery that gives rise to ego that serves to preserve and protect the crazy-making belief in double error based sorcery.

As R.D. Laing observes, in ‘Knots’, we are ‘locked in by high switching costs’; i.e. ‘blowing the whistle’ has the potential to bring a lot people in high places (elevated by the rewards and recognition that Western culture hands out for ‘sorcery’) crashing down, but such potential remains merely a potential so lang as the whistle-blowing remains at a low enough level to be ignored.  Naturally, individuals who blow the whistle exposure themselves to being ‘discredited’ by the stalwart supporters of the sorcery-based INVENTED REALITY;

They are playing a game.  They are playing at not playing a game.  If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they will punish me.  I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game.”  – R.D. Laing

Or, as Henri Laborit expresses this dilemma in his intro to ‘La Nouvelle Grille’; pioneers who try to bring in new understandings that undermine established reward and recognition standards. expose themselves to ‘getting arrows up the arse‘;

We’ who explore such topics, cannot easily share them because (a) they do not fit into the typical dinner conversation format of our present culture, since to express them takes a lot of relational connections that can’t fit into a rapid-fire repartee, and (b) because the humanism  implicit in trying to share them is not seen as “a humanism of real worth” since it undermines, besmirches or topples the esteemed icons, pillars of society, founding fathers, and celebrities of the culture-in-place.  – Henri Laborit, ‘La Nouvelle Grille’  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Laborit

 

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Modern physics employs ‘quantum logic’; the logic of the included medium wherein the distinction between ‘boil’ and ‘flow’ (figure and ground) is only by appearance and not by substance.

The deploying of language and grammar in such a manner (in the Western culture manner) of AMBIGUOUSLY SPLITTING into two separate entities, as in Newtonian physics; FIGURE and GROUND (e.g as also in gestalt psychology and/or inhabitant and habitat) is SCHIZOPHRENIC where we interpret this ‘two-in-one’ as ‘two separate entities’.  That is, we are splitting what is really ‘one’  in modern physics, into ‘two’.

Western culture ‘reality’ is based on ‘the double error’ (Nietzsche) which ‘over-rides’  and ignores (within the psyche if not in ‘reality’) the ineffable character of relationally transforming nature by using ‘naming’ (language)’ to (first error) impute ‘thing-in-itself being’ to ‘figure’ and conflating this (second error) with grammar by imputing the power of sourcing to the naming-instantiated (notional) thing-in-itself.  The ‘double error’  thus ‘liberates’ the ‘figure’ from the ‘ground’, opening the way to constructing an INVENTED REALITY that is ‘all-figure, no-ground’ , as in the ‘producer-product’ abstraction. 

This ‘double error’ is the basis of Western culture belief in ‘human beings’, name-instantiated notional ‘things-in-themselves’, notionally with ‘powers of sourcing actions and developments’; i.e. this is mental abstraction implanted by language and grammar, and it conflicts with the modern physics understanding of reality in the ineffable terms of inclusion in the transforming relational continuum.

The double error is the source of schizophrenia on a Western culture – wide scale.  As Nietzsche points out, this shows up as ‘ego’ which is the false (psychotic) impression of the power of sorcery that notionally resides in abstract name-instantiated things-in-themselves; e.g. ‘human beings’, ‘nations’, ‘corporations’, … all of which are imputed, thanks to language and grammar, to possess ‘their own powers of sourcing actions and development’. This provides the necessary abstract ingredients for an INVENTED REALITY in double error terms.   This gives rise to ‘ego’ (which Nietzsche also points out) in association with ‘naming’ of the individual or collective (nation, corporation etc. to impute ‘thing-in-itself being’ and then using grammar to equip ‘it’ with the power of sourcing actions and development..

All of these named things-in-themselves are abstractions which serve Western culture adherents as their (our) means of ‘effable-izing’ the ineffable Tao (the transforming relational continuum of modern physics.  This double error based INVENTED REALITY employed by Western cultural adherents as our ‘operative reality’, is the promulgator of schizophrenia.

Schizophrenia comes into play in the social collective where it can be termed ‘exo-schizophrenia’ to distinguish it from ‘endo-schizophrenia’ that divides the individual into opposing pseudo-selfs (two selfs-in-one-psyche).  This division derives from the belief in ‘sorcery’ that leads to delusions of egotistical grandeur alternating with paranoia/fear. I am terming this ‘endo-schizophrenia’ (to distinguish it from ‘exo-schizophrenia’ of a social collective polarized against itself by one group’s respected ‘hero’ being the other group’s hated ‘villain’).  The ‘endo’ prefix for schizophrenia is to distinguish the level of splitting (i.e. ‘endo’ in individual level schizophrenia and ‘exo’ in social collective level schizophrenia (e.g. conservative liberal sorcery based reality splitting).

It is the ‘miner’s canaries’ that intuitively smell a rat in the exo-schizophrenic polarization, that holds them back from participating in the exo-schizophrenic grouping (the 90% or so of those Western culture adherents that DO participate in this ‘sorcery’ based polarization are sufficiently committed to their prespective ‘pole’ of sorcery and so busy defending it that they fail to tune in to the reality that ‘sorcery’ is pure intellectual abstraction).

The miner’s canaries are the sensitive ones who reject joining in the group-based polarizing (exo-schizophrenia), however, they are not ‘out of the woods’ because they remain in a web of relations with Western culture adherents who either believe, or at least operate as if they believe in ‘the powers of sorcery’ of individuals and other name-instantiated things-in-themselves (named persons, nations, corporations, societies etc).  Those ‘miner’s canaries who ‘opt out’ of such polarizing organization become the ‘identified patients’ who serve as a ‘buffer’ for the polarization in the dysfunctional (exo-schizophrenic) Western culture they/we are included in;

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

These ‘miner’s canaries’ not only lose the support that others gain from ‘accepting one or other polarization’, they are caught in the middle of the strife without a safety net.  Since the vast majority of Western culture adherents ‘believe in sorcery’ (ego, the ‘double error’), The miner’s canaries that resist such ‘exo-schizophrenia’ are exposed to the trials and tribulations of ‘endo-schizophrenia’, the victims of throwing themselves into a sort of ‘balancing game’, but there are only about two percent of the population that throw their ‘miner’s canary’ bodies ‘into the gap’ between the polar opposites of the exo-schizophrenic Western culture adherency.

Recall that both exo-schizophrenia in the collective and endo-schizophrenia in the individual derive from the ‘double error’ of language and grammar.  So long as the social collective that one participates in sustains the double error based belief in sorcery, the exo-schizophrenia persists.  While indigenous aboriginal cultures, Taoism/Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta do not adhere to the ‘double error’ based belief in ‘sorcery’ and thus their community support does not depend on adhering to such crazy-making beliefs, Western culture adherents with beloved family and friends who remain fully supportive of ‘double error’ based INVENTED REALITY, are faced with a difficult challenge with respect to sustaining and regaining their balacnce.  In fact, psychotherapy for these miner’s canaries aims to restore their ‘ego’, an ‘ego’ that comes from ‘double error’ based belief, that they eschew, which is why they are ‘in trouble’ in the first place.  This is a Catch 22 situation that the miner’s canaries can only overcome by building a matrix of support that is non-double-error-based, an extremely challenging but not impossible task.

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 REFLECTIONS:

 

‘Mass murder’ is ‘on the rise’ in Western culture adhering society, and is seen in the typical binary logic of Western culture adherence as a ‘bad thing’ that is promulgated by an ‘evil villain’ even though ‘mass murder’ can also be understood as a good thing, and the perpetrator as a ‘virtuous hero’.

e.g.  American Sniper.  Chris Kyle 255 kills as a U.S. Navy Seals.

Chris Kyle is a hero for helping to exterminate evil villains and thus purify the social collective.

While it may be that the rising number of ‘mass murderers’ in Western culture are also believing in their own heroics of lashing out against a system corrupted by evil, the Western culture adhering majority are classifying them as ‘evil villains’.

This is clear case of exo-schizophrenia which manifests also in the division between ‘conservatives’ and ‘liberals’ and not only with groups such as Muslim extremists that ‘get crosswise’ with the prevailing/dominating ‘establishment’

The craziness of exo-schizophrenia, as in the conservative-liberal split and also in  the establishment-anti-establishment split, constitutes a failure to acknowledge ‘mitakuye oyasin’, that ‘everything is related’, and that the ‘inhabitant-habitat’ (‘figure-ground’) split is ‘appearance rather than ‘real’, and that it is only the psychological impression of its pseudo-reality given by the double error of language and grammar that has us Western culture adherents ‘believing’ that such splits are ‘real’.

There is only ‘relational transformation’, regardless of Chris Kyle’s ‘heroic’ work in eliminating 255 evil Muslims and thus helping to purify the world so that us good Christian people can live in peace, … provided that we maintain our purification efforts in policing and incarcerating evil ones so that we (the good people) can walk about freely (within our security system protected areas) and enjoy  liberty, equality and fraternity.

BOTTOM LINE: Western culture adherence sucks us into ‘double error’ based schizophrenia where we can believe that our heroic eliminating of 255 evil people is ‘improving’ the world (purifying its continuing genesis), an abstract conceptualization that is matched by a binary opposite wherein the friends of those killed see the same phenomenon in terms of Chris Kyle as the vile/evil mass murderer that is the source of ‘degeneration’ of the global social collective.  Which reality is the ‘true reality’?  Whichever ‘version of sorcery’ we Western culture adhering exo-schizophrenics choose.  [THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS ‘SORCERY’. BELIEF IN SORCERY BREEDS SCHIZOPHRENIA]

This exo-schizophrenia is where, in seeing ourselves as individuals within a social collective, we leap from an island of good in a sea of bad to an island of bad in a sea of good.  As in Gestalt psychology, there is intrinsic ambiguity in this ‘figure-and-ground’ dichotomy.  In fact this is the enigmatic issue of ‘Mephistopheles  et l’Androgyne’ (‘the two-and-the-one’) that anthropologist Mircea Eliade explores in his book by that title.  It invokes the ancient image of the ‘coincidentia oppositorum’ or ouroborus.   In Newtonian physics (which derives from binary based language and grammar), there are always and only these two possible polar opposite states and we must choose EITHER one OR the other; i.e. is Chris Kyle a heroic eliminator of evil, … or is Chris Kyle a vile mass murderer?  While I am inclined to the latter, I stop myself from ‘going there’ because it implies a belief in ‘sorcery’ and that is a psychological crazy-maker.  In fact, it is the source of endemic Western culture exo-schizophrenia (social-polar-faction -splitting).

WE ARE TALKING ABOUT OUR INTELLECTUAL CONSTRUCTING OF REALITY HERE, SO IS IT NOT INTERESTING THAT NEWTONIAN PHYSICS GIVES US ONLY THESE TWO CHOICES OF EITHER ‘IS’ OR ‘IS NOT’ (TERMED THE LOGIC OF THE EXCLUDED MEDIUM), WHILE MODERN PHYSICS ALLOWS US ‘BOTH’ ‘IS’ AND ‘IS NOT’, AS IN THE BOIL IN THE FLOW AS ‘APPEARANCE’ [LOGIC OF THE INCLUDED MEDIUM] RATHER THAN, AS IN NEWTONIAN PHYSICS, ‘TWO SEPARATE, SPLIT-APART THINGS-IN-THEMSELVES, AS ‘NAMING’ (LANGUAGE AND GRAMMAR) IMPARTS TO OUR PSYCHE’.

The figure-and-ground dichotomy, in our binary logic (EITHER ‘is’ OR ‘is not’) interpretation, setting our psyche up for our ‘double error’ based belief in sorcery in which ‘ego’ comes to the fore, … is at the same time occluding and wallpapering over our quantum logical (BOTH ‘is’ AND ‘is not’) understanding, wherein our distinguishing of the boil in the flow (self-and-other) is ‘appearance’ based rather than physical split-apart based. 

The binary self-other split (aka figure-and-ground, inhabitant and habitat splitting) as invoked in the double error of language and grammar is a ‘crazy-making’ binary abstraction that is not supported by modern physics, the latter supporting instead the ineffable Tao (reality as the transforming relational continuum, aka ‘wave-field’ which is all-including.

It bears repeating that the ongoing flow or ‘Tao’ is ‘ineffable’ in its natural condition as all-including ‘transforming relational continuum’. 

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