In the Gap Between Winter Solstice and Christmas: The Judas Kiss

Western society is a scape-goating societyΨ. Using the ‘bewitchment of language’, binary logic and intellectually idealized ‘absolute space and time reference frames’, it persuades the interdependent human forms of their absolute ‘independent being’ and self-authorship of development and behaviour, so that the ‘individual’ that makes a disturbance, is held fully and solely responsible for such disturbance. One person is held to be ‘guilty’ and all others ‘innocent’.

Instead of community balance and harmony being understood in terms of equilibrium in an interdependent relational matrix as is found in nature;

“[In nature]… “the individual parts reciprocally determine one another.” — Ernst Mach

… Western civilization has seen community harmony in the light of an absence of disturbance-makers. The ‘disturbance-maker’ concept is based on the assumption that humans are ‘independent beings’ with free will who are masters of their own acts, so that actions that clash with and disturb the dominant social dynamic, however dysfunctional that may be, are considered fully and solely responsible for the disruption.

Even the slave, forcibly kept in captivity for his entire life, as may have been the case with his parents and grandparents before him, will be held fully and solely responsible should he ‘make a disturbance’. Because of the binary logical thinking employed, all others in the master-slave society will be held to be ‘innocent’. This aberration is the outgrowth of religious and scientific assumptions that define humans as ‘independent beings’;

Religious ‘independent being’;

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

Scientific ‘independent being’;

“An organism is an independent whole composed of interdependent parts that maintain various vital processes”; and more generally; “an organism is any organized body or system conceived of as analogous to a living being: e.g. the governmental organism”. — Wikipedia

The notional ‘local whole system’ is the familiar model for the sovereign state, which is likewise endowed with ‘independent being’. There is a cross-referencing here wherein the secular definition of ‘independent being’ borrows from its theological predecessor [man as an independent being with free will who is master over his own acts].

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.”

 

 

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.

 

 

State sovereignty “is a ‘religion’ and a faith.” Lombardi, Mark Owen. “Third-World Problem-Solving and the ‘Religion’ of Sovereignty”
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Control and enslavement of the masses was made possible by imperialism/colonialism where lands were appropriated by Emperors and kings and their  unstoppable military forces and carefully doled back out to noblemen, sheiks and others who had sided with and contributed military support to the imperial adventure, creating a colonial power alliance that extorted labour and services from the people in exchange for limited access to the essentials for life that lay in the land.  This was the controlling/enslaving mechanism, and since this was not only authorized by the emperor, king or secular authority, but a core means of maintaining control over vast territories, it had the full backing of justice and law enforcement systems.

Prior to the arrival of the Imperial Authority, the people were one with the land; i.e. the situational possibility orchestrated and shaped the actualizable potentials of the people; i.e. epigenesis orchestrated genesis in a ‘coincidence of opposites’. This ‘physical reality’ did not change with the coming of secular authority, but the ‘political reality’ changed; i.e. the coincidence of opposites of epigenesis and genesis was reduced by decree to ‘all-genesis, no epigenesis’; i.e. each governed region was seen as a ‘whole’ composed of internal ‘part[icipant]s’; i.e. the people.

Here we see the division in understanding of how the world evolves; the Darwinist ‘dualist’ view of all-hitting, no-fielding [all genesis, no-epigenesis] and the Lamarckian ‘non-dualist’ view of the coincidence of opposites of fielding and hitting, epigenesis and genesis.

With the arrival of the Imperial authority, the orchestrating influence or ‘epigenetic influence’ that actualizes the ‘genetic action’ of the people is no longer the land (nature) but has been replaced by the top-down directives of Imperial/colonial authoritarian machinery. This has been hard on the spirit and the soul of the authority-oppressed man. Whoever resisted and caused a disturbance was seen as fully and solely responsible for the disturbance in accordance with the assumption of man as an independent being with his own internal jumpstart powers of development and behaviour. This Western society conception of man [self] is blind to [is in denial of] the relational nature of dynamics in the physical reality of our natural experience.

Regardless of the oppressiveness of the prevailing social dynamic, the spirit that resists conformance and thus causes disturbance, is ‘scape-goated’. Whether the disturbance manifests as emotional distress, criminal actions or terrorist actions, the accused ‘independent-beings’ deemed ‘authors of the disturbance’ are held fully and solely accountable, thanks to the defining of humans as ‘independent beings that reside, operate and interact in a common space or habitat that is notionally ‘independent’ of the inhabitants that reside, operate and interact within it.

The act of accusing is, at the same time, a declaration of one own ‘innocence’ and even more than that, a declaration of self-righteousness [standing up to evil and condemning and eradicating it].

But ‘mental illness’ seen as something arising in the individual rather than something that manifests through individuals in a stressful relational social dynamic, is a special case because instead of the relational stress being channelled back in criminal and/or terrorist ‘push-back’ that invites public anger, the stress is absorbed as a ‘breakdown of the individual self. Thus, rather than eliciting public animosity it elicits pity, sympathy, compassion.

There is great irony in a kiss given to another; an act of affection, that serves as a signal that casts them into hands of those who would differentiate and demean them as ‘defectives’ unlike the healthy normals who, as in the case of criminal and terrorist behaviours, have no hand in the authorship of such disturbing behaviours.

It is the same sort of irony in Judas kiss that identified Christ as the rebel that challenged the secular authority and who claimed that God’s authority, coming through him, prevailed over secular authority.

The kiss was at the same time ‘affection’ and a casting off of that person into the midst of world of enforcers and purifiers who stewarded the sustaining of what was currently ordained as healthy and normal.

It was the meeting of ‘non-dualism’ as in;

“I, you, she, we. In the garden of mystic lovers these are not true distinctions”. —Jelaluddin Rumi

… and ‘dualism’ as in

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

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Imagine for a moment, Erwin Schroedinger showing up in this era, claiming to be Brahman at the same time as Atman.

“From the early great Upanishads the recognition ATMAN = BRAHMAN (the personal self equals the omnipresent, all-comprehending eternal self) was in Indian thought considered, far from being blasphemous, to represent the quintessence of deepest insight into the happenings of the world.” – Erwin Schroedinger, ‘What is Life’

Schroedinger is, in effect, claiming to be ‘the son of God’.

But in this case, the God is Nature, the transforming relational continuum in which everyone is included; … the Great Mystery of the indigenous aboriginal belief tradition, the ‘flow’ of Heraclitus, the ‘new world conception’ that was threatening to make it’s re-entry into Europe at the ‘fin de siecle’ with the rediscovery of relativity [lost or mislaid in the Western culture in the era of Plato and Socrates];

“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

 

 

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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

Schroedinger, in claiming to be the son of God averred that we are all children of God, … in the manner of storm-cells in the flow, agents of transformation of the transforming relational continuum, the ‘All’.

No more ‘independent beings’ in this understanding, … an understanding in which ‘relations are all there is’. This is the view of Mach’s principle wherein the inhabitants are included in the habitat; i.e. where the inhabitants are relational forms that are features within a transforming relational continuum. This is not picturable in a three-dimensional space, although it can be alluded to by a ‘strange loop’; e.g. in the following diagram wherein the flow is the source of its own transformation as in the coincidence of opposites of influx and outflux.

Three dimensional picturing of a storm-cell in the spherical space on the surface of the earth is not picturable on the flat plane because relations go out and come back from all directions. As with a map of the surface of a sphere, this can only be ‘projected’ onto a euclidian plane and instead of the interdependencies being circularly requited, in euclidian flatspace, as in the mercator projection, the interdependencies reach out north and south (away from each other) and west and east (away from each other).

In language, also, noun-and-verb language is inadequate for representing relational (curved) space, thus relational forms are force-fit into nouns and subjects even though, in the physical reality of our natural experience where ‘relations are all there is’, all forms are coincidence of opposites of influx and outflux while subject-verb-predicate representations are intellectual idealization.

We could say; ‘the terrain is slumping’ to remain in the realm of ‘relations are all there is’, but our penchant is to use noun-verb-predicate structures such as; ‘the mountains are eroding. Landslides are carrying pieces of the mountainside down into the valleys and filling up the valleys. In acknowledging matter-energy-equivalence, we can intuit that;

“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
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“Space is not empty. It is full, a plenum as opposed to a vacuum, and is the ground for the existence of everything, including ourselves.” — David Bohm
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“Fields of force are the primary reality, and ‘matter’ a secondary or derived phenomenon” —Michael Faraday

Relational languages stop short of turning relational forms such as humans, into noun-subjects that inflect verbs and generate predicates.

“The problem with English is that when it tries to grapple with abstractions and categories it tends to trap the mind into believing that such categories have an equal status with tangible objects. Algonquin languages, being for the ear, deal in vibrations [waves] in which each word is related directly, not only to process of thought, but also to the animating energies of the universe.

… [in modern physics] It is impossible to separate a phenomenon from the context in which it is observed. Categories no longer exist in the absence of contexts.

 

 

Within Indigenous science, context is always important. Nothing is abstract since all things happen within a landscape and by virtue of a web of interrelationships. The tendency to collect things into categories does not exist within the thought and language of, for example, Algonquin speakers.

 

 

This leads to a profoundly different way of approaching and thinking about the world. For, in the absence of categories, each thing is mentally experienced on its own merits, and for what it actually is. Rather than indulging in comparison or judgment, Indigenous speakers attempt to enter into relationship with them.

 

 

What is needed, Bohm argued in his book Wholeness and the Implicate Order, is a new sort of language, one based on processes and activity, transformation and change, rather than on the interactions of stable objects. Bohm called this hypothetical language the “rheomode.” It is based primarily on verbs and on grammatical structures deriving from verbs. Such a language, Bohm argued, is perfectly adapted to a reality of enfolding and unfolding matter and thought.

 

 

David Bohm had not known when he wrote of that concept that such a language is not just a physicist’s hypothesis. It actually exists. The language of the Algonquin peoples was developed by the ancestors specifically to deal with subtle matters of reality, society, thought, and spirituality.

 

 

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’

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Why Can’t We Shake This Impression of Being Master of our Acts?

Or, in other words; ‘How Science Corrects our Experience’

Or, in other words; ‘What Happened to ‘epigenesis’ [‘fielding’] in the Coincidence of Opposites of ‘epigenesis and genesis’ [‘fielding and hitting’] and why does our scientific thinking go instead with ‘the sound of one hand clapping [all-hitting, no-fielding, all genesis, no-epigenesis]?

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The world is given only once, as schroedinger says, and the forms we see and touch are not ‘independent’ of the space we all share inclusion in; i.e. the physical reality of our natural experience is that we are relational forms in a transforming relational continuum, and NOT ‘independent beings’ with internal process driven and directed behaviour.

I am not saying anything that departs from what an indigenous aboriginal child would be growing up understanding, which their verb based language would have no problem conveying.

A child raised in a culture with a noun-and-verb language-and-grammar is trained to understand his own movement as ‘independent’ in the manner of a powerboater.

But a sailboater realizes that he derives his power and steerage from the relational dynamics he is included in, and that is intuitively available to us, as well.

Western talk always relegates authorship of motion to the thing that is moving, as if it moves relative to a fixed frame, disregarding our natural experience.

Even though we can see the wake behind our sailboat and know that we are moving swiftly through the water, the GPS in our hand that says 0.0 is said to be our ‘true speed’, and when we sail with the wind so that our actual experience is no wind, we say that the ‘true wind speed is 8 knots.

What is true is thus in regard to the destination [what we are achieving, or not achieving] rather than the experiencing of the voyage.

The currents that the indigenous aboriginal has to struggle through, in a sea of white settlers, to reach the fish in the fishing holes and the game in the game-rich forests and plains, does not register in a measure of his ‘true performance’. The truth is not about experience, it is about results. Galileo decided on this for the simplifying convenience it furnished in the formulating of general laws of motion. One can formulate universal laws if one assumes that space is a vacuum. The feather has a much harder time fighting its way through air currents on its way from the top of a tower from which it is dropped, on its way to the ground, than does a cannon ball.

So why not correct such experience and calculate the ‘true velocity’ like the boss of the shipping company does as he watches the radioed in GPS positions of his ships. The tug towing logs that shows up as motionless [or even moving backwards], may be coming through the Skookumchuck, fighting a heavy tide, rocking and rolling and doing 6 knots relative to the water, although its ‘true speed’ is zero.

For the boss, and for business, in general, what counts is your ‘true motion’ which is not ‘the physically real motion of your actual experience’. You may have been working your hardest just to ‘hold position’ in the ripping tide where your ‘true motion’ was null.

You can’t ignore the ‘situational possibility that accommodates [receptively or resistively] the actualizing of your actualizable potentials. It is only the conventions of noun-and-verb Indo-European/scientific language-and-grammar that simplifies and removes the ‘epigenetic influence’ from the coincidence of opposites of ‘epigenesis and genesis’ or ‘fielding and hitting’. This is the psychological effect of subject-verb-predicate structures that puts intellectual idealization into an unnatural precedence over the physical reality of our actual, natural experience.

So, what are the currents like for a black man in a sea of whites relative to the white man in a sea of whites? Is it like the feather and the cannon ball where ‘the truth is’ that they should move at the same velocity, all other things being equal?

For destination-oriented cultures, it is progress towards the destination that is measured and experience is not even looked at. But if experience were actually looked at, … it might show that whites move through a sea of whites more like the cannonball [the sea of whites is more receptive and accommodating to whites] while blacks and indigenous aboriginals move through a sea of whites more like the feather; i.e. with great difficulty.

As Poincaré notes, once science has formulated a law or theory, the theoretical measure is used to ‘correct our experience’ as in the ‘true motion’ being the one on the GPS [referenced to an absolute reference frame].

Since Western science and Western religion both hold that humans are ‘independent beings’ who are fully and solely responsible for their own ‘hitting results’,

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

Since “This freedom characterizes properly human acts. It is the basis of praise or blame, merit or reproach.”

The superior performers are generally those who have been given and/or have acquired a lot of land since this puts them in a position to use access to this land to extort labours from those without land and to use this to acquire still more land, and still more extorting power. This leads to another type of ‘Judas kiss’ where the wealthy give to the poor. The irony is in the fact that while the wealthy have been using their wealth to extort labours from the poor, their charitable compassion sourced gift signals their differentiation via their superior – inferior status, as if they were ‘independent beings’, each fully and solely responsible for the results of their own actions.
It is once again the meeting of ‘non-dualism’ as in;

“I, you, she, we. In the garden of mystic lovers these are not true distinctions”. —Jelaluddin Rumi

… and ‘dualism’ as in

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

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Summary:

In a transforming relational continuum, forms such as the human form are a coincidence of opposites where epigenesis and genesis are in conjugate relation. Humans are not a noun but a verb, as in indigenous aboriginal languages and as described by linguists such as Alan Watts and Benjamin Whorf, and by Nietzsche. Humans are NOT ‘beings’, not according to the physical reality of our actual, natural experience.

Western people are ‘dualist in our day jobs’ and ‘non-dualist in our informal empathic engagings’. Dualist Imperialism/colonialism continues to prevail as the institutionalized structure of globally dominant Western civilization.

The irony in the Judas kiss is that it comes from non-dualist context but sends a dualist signal.

This is particularly so with the scape-goating of the so-called ‘mentally ill’ because these are the people who have let their body and soul buffer relational social stress rather than ‘pushing back’. The ambiguous ‘Judas kiss’ celebrates the one-ness of all life, at the same time as leaving a ‘defective/inferior’ stamp for others in our dualist culture to see, where the kiss was planted.

As in the spirit of restorative justice, there is no suggestion, in the essay, of who is innocent and who guilty, but there is the suggestion that hypocrisy and denial abound.

The acknowledging of non-dualism as the physical reality of our natural experience will restore it to its natural precedence, erasing the hypocrisy of dualist institutionalized rule and subsuming scape-goating with the non-dualist ethic of restorative justice as applies to ‘mental health’ as well as to violent and aggressive ‘push back’ behaviour. In place of the binaries of ‘guilty and innocent’, ‘offender and victim’, will be a relaxing of the identity of the individual and the group, so that sustaining of harmony and balance can inductively orchestrate the needed relational transformation.

Ψ:” Scape-goating society” intends that “It takes a whole community to raise a child-soldier, or a benefactor so that, as indigenous aboriginal ‘restorative justice’ implies, there is no way to solve explicitly for the authoring source of an eruption of violence or an eruption of good fortune.  We can see and touch those through whom unfolding developments ‘channel’ but these people are not the jumpstart source.  As in Pasteur’s deathbed concession to Antoine Béchamp; ‘le microbe n’est rien, le terrain est tout’ [The alleged causal agent is not the jumpstart authoring source, the relational terrain ‘is everything’ as in the case of the relational flow of the atmosphere vis a vis the storm-cell].  ‘Causal agency’ in a transforming relational continuum is ‘indefinitely deferred’ as in Derrida’s ‘différance’ .

The ‘scape-goat’ is the ‘sacrificial lamb’ used by the collective to [notionally] purify the collective; i.e. the identification of one ‘guilty offender’ renders all ‘others’ innocent victims.   At some level, we are aware of this, our forked tongue subterfuge; i.e. we say;

Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi,

Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world,

miserere nobis.

have mercy upon us.

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Footnote: Categories and ‘Sacred Meaning’

On the one hand, the world is only given once, as a transforming relational continuum;

“[In nature]… “the individual parts reciprocally determine one another.” … “The properties of one mass always include relations to other masses,” … “Every single body of the Universe stands in some definite relations with every other body in the Universe.” Therefore, no object can “be regarded as wholly isolated.” And even in the simplest case, “the neglecting of the rest of the world is impossible.” – Ernst Mach

In this case, not only are we ‘all related’, we are both God and children of God [Brahman = Atmen].

One might imagine Christ as someone who understood self and the world thus, … an understanding not unlike that of a misplaced indigenous aboriginal non-dualist in a sea of Imperialism conditioned dualists. The only solution visible to the dualists to this disruptor would be ‘cultural genocide’, the extermination of the incompatible non-dualist worldview.

On the other hand, the ‘categories’ used to divide the world up into independently-existing parts are based on an error in logic. As Poincaré has pointed out, it is circular logic to first presume the existence of a category, and then gather multiple exemplars of the category in order to flesh it out in terms of ‘common properties’.

In a relational space, the gathering of a new relational form, at the same time, transforms all other forms.

“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” – Heraclitus

Understanding forms by way of categories is understanding based construction synthetic logical objects based on appearances and substituting logic for the unique relational features in the transforming relational continuum [Children of the ‘All’ aka ‘Children of God’]

Once the ‘categories’ are divided out of the transforming relational continuum are depicted as separate entities, the notion of ‘Children of the All’ vanishes and the stage of reason is set up for racism and relative value-based rankings of the different categories.

“We … should beware lest the intellectual machinery, employed in the representation of the world on the stage of thought, be regarded as the basis of the real world.” – Ernst Mach

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