Defining ‘Maya’: Realism or Pragmatic Idealism?

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May 28, 2012
by in APN

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Atlantic Hurricanes: 2008 Season

* * * Take the Reality Quiz either before or after reading this essay  * * *

 

Hurricanes are emergent forms in a continually transforming ‘relational space’.  They are like ‘sailboaters’ that derive their form, power and steerage from the dynamic habitat they are situationally included in.  At the same time, they seem also like ‘powerboaters’ whose animative sourcing seems to originate locally, from out of their internal processes.

Ernst Mach, Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Poincaré and others [the ‘relational theorists’] contend that this ambiguous non-duality [aka the relativity of habitat and inhabitant] pervades nature, that it applies to man just as it applies to hurricanes.  We can ‘feel’ some truth in this.  From our own experience, we seem to be born into a relational space, a web of relations that is always calling to us to ‘rise to the occasion’ [e.g. as our parents age and/or pass on] and to let our development and behaviour be orchestrated by the ‘opening’ that presents to us in the dynamic habitat that we are each uniquely situationally included in. 

 Yes, its also true that we can think of ourselves as rational-purpose-driven powerboaters that start planning, in their own right, ‘who they are going to be when they grow up’.  But, unless we are robots programmed with the celebrity profiles of media personalities, our assertive actions take on ‘real meaning’, like the hurricanes, from the unfolding situational [spatial-relational] dynamics we find ourselves included in [the hurricane emerges, develops and acts in the service of restoring balance in the ‘dynamics of the habitat’ (thermal energy flow-field) it is situationally included in].

In this case, our animative sourcing does NOT simply come from our interior, from our craving for ‘power’ to make things happen according to our individual preference, but, as Nietzsche suggests, the animative sourcing of our development and behaviour comes from our ‘Will to Power’, from our sailboater’s innate need to ‘rise to the occasion’ of the dynamic situations we find ourselves in.  To be coming purely from our notionally ‘internal’ powerboater ‘make-things-happen-the-way-we-want’ power would blind us to, and deny us our natural opportunity to answer, nature’s call to us; ‘to take our place in the natural scheme of things’.

Is the ‘powerboater’ view of ourselves, then, nothing other than … ‘Maya’, … ‘Fiktion’, … ‘schaumkommen’, …. mere ‘appearances’? (more…)

AWAKE! The End is Nigh; – The End of History

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May 21, 2012
by in APN

 

Awakening into reality

 

This is the end of human history, the end of the growth of humanity.

These words sound ‘kind of like’ Biblical prophecy, why is that?  It is presumably because they seem to speak to the absolutes of ‘existence’.

There IS something BIG going on that the above words literally address, if we examine them carefully. (more…)

The Duplicity of the Colonizer Culture

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April 23, 2012
by in APN

 

duplicity breeds in the gap between absolutism and relationism

 

 

The Source of the Duplicity in the Globally Dominant Colonizer Culture

 

Peter D’Errico has written a clear and credible, if disturbing, account of the duplicity of the colonizer culture, that permeates U.S. ‘Federal Indian Law’ and its administration, entitled ‘American Indian Sovereignty: Now You See It, Now You Don’t’.

 

This following essay describes the source of this ‘duplicity’ which permeates the globally dominant Western ‘colonizer culture’, while tying it to a schism in the foundations of scientific understanding (more…)

Accepting Responsibility For Our Own Actions… Is the Problem!

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March 17, 2012
by in APN

In nature, transforming space trumps time-based cause-effect constructivism

We are a culture [we of the globally dominating Western culture] that believes in ‘guilt’ and ‘innocence’ and ‘blame’ and ‘forgiveness’.  That is, we are a culture that assumes that human development and behaviour derives fully and solely from the interior of each human understood as a ‘thing-in-itself’, an ‘absurdity’ yet the cornerstone of our cultural belief system.

We believe that science and rationality, rather than being tools of convenience, are addressing ‘reality’, the real world of our experience, which is a major error, as philosophers such as Mach, Nietzsche and Poincaré have elaborated on, not that they have ever had the attention of the ‘social mainstream’.   We are stuck in a mental box that we seem unable to escape from, and Mach has put a name to it; it is called ‘three dimensional space’. (more…)

What is ‘Science’? What is ‘Language’?

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February 23, 2012
by in APN

Reality is something other than a language game called 'Science'

 

Science is an internally consistent system that does a good job of explaining ‘appearances’; i.e. ‘what things do’.  What it does not do a good job of, is in giving us an understanding of how the world we live is transforming, and how our ‘what things do’ oriented science relates to the transforming of our living space.

At the end of the nineteenth century there was a wave of scientific applications that we loosed on ourselves.  We knew a lot about how to ‘construct them’ but we didn’t know how their use would transform our landscape and our lives.  That’s because science deals in ‘what things do’ as if these things are ‘things-in-themselves’. (more…)

Resurrecting Reality

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January 30, 2012
by in APN

tranquil image of a continually transforming space; fixed operating theatre for human dynamics?

All my philosophical investigations have led me back to ‘the mathematics of belief’; to the type of ‘reason’ and ‘logic’ we use to ‘make sense’ of our experiencing of the world, and in the case of Western civilization, to ‘bury reality’ beneath it. (more…)

‘Transformation’ – Where ‘production’ and ‘destruction’ are ‘conjugates’

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January 23, 2012
by in APN

 

'Production' is a concept that ignores its own conjugate, 'destruction'

Would you want to know the source of major dysfunction in the world? … even if it challenged the foundational assumptions/beliefs of your culture? (more…)

Reality-Check: A Quiz for the Metaphysically Inquisitive

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January 14, 2012
by in APN

 

Human population growth over the past twelve millennia

 

Answering the following questions may give some insights on how solid is your grasp of reality. (more…)

Civilization: The Hijacking of Sentience by Reason

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January 7, 2012
by in APN

 

Where the periphery-to-centre orchestrating influence predominates over centre-to-periphery asserting drive

 

As Ralph Waldo Emerson says in ‘The Method of Nature’, “The tool [of reason] has run away with the workman.”

And as Friedrich Nietzsche says in ‘Twilight of the Idols’;

“Reason” is the cause of our falsification of the testimony of the senses. Insofar as the senses show becoming, passing away, and change, they do not lie. But Heraclitus will remain eternally right with his assertion that being is an empty fiction. The “apparent” world is the only one: the “true” world is merely added by a lie.” (more…)

A Christmas Shadow

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December 25, 2011
by in APN

transformation over 'time' as distinct from 'space'

 

Is there not a ‘dark side’ to the ‘cleansing of Ebenezer Scrooge’ in Charles Dickens ‘A Christmas Carol’?  Scrooge, the ‘bad boss’ transforms into Scrooge the ‘good boss’, persuading us that ‘goodness’ and ‘badness’ are absolutes that fountain forth from the interior of individuals understood as ‘sovereign powers’ or ‘things-in-themselves’.  Surely the ‘good action’ of the individual is, as Nietzsche says, a ‘mediocre truth’ that conceals a ‘shadow’ aspect. (more…)

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