Originally sent to [list].

Here is a short (what is intended as) ‘elucidating’ on the ,,, problem of understanding the abstraction of ‘being’ as belonging to ‘physical reality’ rather than belonging to ‘abstraction’.

 

I would describe the endemic problem, in ‘Western culture’ of ‘belief in the reality of being’ [not recognizing ‘being’ as a linguistic poetic ‘cognition-bootstrapping tool’] as the core source of social dysfunction termed ‘incoherence’ by Bohm.

 

 

That is, in a world of flow, as modern physics investigations understands the world, as do indigenous aboriginals, Buddhists, Vedics etc., there is no ‘being’.   ‘things-that-be’ (‘things’ that ‘exist’ as ‘things-in-themselves’) are the stimulated in cognition by ‘names’ in ‘language’.  When we ‘name’ a relational form in the flow, we impute ‘persisting being’ to it.  That is why we must use language ‘poetically’ in order to use names to ‘bootstrap’ a shareable impression of an inherently relational form or feature.

 

‘Naming’ is the imputing of ‘being’ (notional persisting thing-in-itself existence) to a relational form in the transforming relational continuum.  This does not conflict with the ‘fluid’ reality of our actual experience provided that the ‘beings’ cognitively imputed by ‘naming’ are understood as poetic device that serves to construct purely relational cognition.

 

To understand ‘beings’ as ‘physically real’ in the sense that ‘beings’ are accessible (not just to our intellect but) to our natural physical relational experience is absurd.  This absurdity of imputing ‘reality’ to ‘being’, by way of using language and grammar ‘literally’ or ‘non-poetically’, has been hijacking our natural intelligence and elevating the abstract being-based worldview (which understands ‘names’ as identify ‘real things-in-themselves’ with persisting ‘existence’) into an unnatural primacy over the understanding coming directly from our relational experience wherein ‘everything is in flux’ and where ‘forms’ are relational forms in the transforming relational continuum.

 

This unnatural ‘reification’ or ‘objectification’ of that which is intrinsically relational has also ‘hijacked’ the ‘economy’ by imputing ‘being’ to the value associated with ‘money’.   In the aboriginal culture, giving and receiving was not based on value that was ‘being-based’.  ‘Naming’ a thing to convert a coloured piece of paper into a ‘banknote’ that purportedly has intrinsic thing-in-itself value, is the same sort of ‘black magic’ as transforming a pauper into a prince by ‘naming him’, … and perhaps embellishing the naming with a bit of magical ceremony such as tapping him on the shoulder with the magic sword of Excalibur, or having a Pope utter some Latin words and sprinkle him with ‘holy water’.

 

This ‘black magic’ of being-based literalism has become foundational in the cognitive habit of Western society.  Money, in the form of ‘notes’ comes in different ‘de-nom-inations’, such as ten dollar bills, hundred dollar bills etc.

 

Just as in the case of ‘humans’ who are, according to our natural experience, relational forms in a transforming relational continuum, language and grammar has allowed us to impute ‘being’ to humans so as to portray them as ‘things-in-themselves’ with their own internal sourcing of ‘animation’, as in the ‘nature’ aspect of the ‘nature’ – ‘nurture’ dichotomy/paradox.  Again, this ‘nature’-‘nurture’ paradox stands or falls on a belief in ‘being’ and does not arise in the understanding of a human as a relational form in a transforming relational continuum.

 

In the same mistaken way, it is possible to impute ‘being’ to ‘relational value’ as incarnated in a ‘banknote’.  In this manner, relational value that ‘flowed’ through relational dynamics is given ‘being’ by ‘naming’ the value (printing bills in different ‘de-nom-inations);  The value is nevertheless intrinsically ‘relational’  and it is a cultural habit to give ‘being’ to ‘relational value’ by ‘naming’ it as in ‘currency’ of different ‘de-nom-inations’.  Once again, the poetic understanding of value is overtaken by the ‘being-based’ understanding.  As Chief Maquinna of the Nootkas (who lived in what is now called ‘British Columbia’)  put it;

“Once I was in Victoria, and I saw a very large house; they told me it was a bank and that the white men place their money there to take care of, and that by-and-by they got it back, with interest. We are Indians and have no such bank; but when we have plenty of money or blankets, we give them away to other chiefs and people, and by-and-by they return them, with interest, and our hearts feel good. Our potlatch is our bank.”

The pattern here is clear.  In indigenous aboriginal culture ‘naming’ as in ‘Dances with Wolves’ is a ‘bootstrapping’ use of names where names are just expedients or ‘Wittgenstein ladders’ to assist the jump to purely relational cognition.   This is also the case with ‘wampum’ which symbolized relational value; i.e. the value was not in the wampum itself.

 

The concept of ‘naming’ is employed in two very different ways (poetic/relational and explicit/rational, the latter imputing ‘thing-in-itself being’ to relational forms) that has divided Western culture into ‘poets’ and ‘rationals’ and made the latter the cultural standard and governing class.  It has also divided the now dominant (non-poetic, rational)  Western culture from the indigenous aboriginal culture.  Among Western civilized people, there persists a longing, in some, for restoring poetic understanding to its natural primacy.  That is, our experience of inclusion in a transforming relational continuum argues for the poetic use of language.

 

‘Naming’ imputes ‘being’ to that which is purely relational (e.g. hurricane Katrina).  The same is true in the case of ‘value’.  ‘Value’ is intrinsically relational; e.g. the value of a pot derives from its emptiness (what is not there);

 

We shape clay into a pot,
but it is the emptiness inside
that holds whatever we want. We hammer wood for a house,
but it is the inner space
that makes it livable. We work with being,
but non-being is what we use.  — Lao Tzu

 

As the Nicaraguan-Salvadoran poet Claribel Allegra said, “My father was a famous engineer, my mother had no name”, point to the Western cultural reality wherein ‘naming’ established ‘being’ not simply as a ‘bootstrapping expedient’ to get to relational understanding but as a device that has come to be ‘taken literally’ in Western culture as in imputing the ‘existence’ of name-designated ‘things-in-themselves’.

 

In Western culture, there has been a shift in values away from relational value to being-based value.

 

The ‘human’, in Western culture, is NOT understood via relational experience as a relational form in the flow but as depicted in language and grammar as an ‘independently-existing being’ aka thing-in-itself, grammatically presented to cognition as the jumpstart author/producer of ‘goods’ and ‘services’.  Once we start using language and grammar in this being-based ‘producer-product’ manner, we can no longer ‘see’ (in our cognitive conceptualizing), ‘the flowing’ for ‘the forms in the flow’ [Nota bene: this is at the heart of our cultural self-deception].

 

Imputing ‘being’ by ‘naming’ is abstraction that we (Western culture) deploy not only to ourselves in such a manner as over-rides the poetic relational understanding of the human, … but to our inherently relational social dynamics termed the ‘economy’.  There is no ‘being’ as in ‘things-in-themselves’ that ‘exist in their own right’ in the relational world of our actual experience, and the usefulness of language in poetic mode that gives names to relational forms in the flow, ‘backfires’ when we impute a foundational role to ‘being’ in our language and grammar ‘constructions of reality’.

 

Poetic usage of names as associated with relational forms makes sense since such poetic naming employed in ‘bootstrapping’ provides the basis for inducing sharable cognition of the ‘Tao’ we are included in; i.e. an inherently ‘thingless’ relational world of relational forms in the flow;

 

“Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen” …  “that which we are unable to capture in language, we must pass over in silence.” — Ludwig Wittgenstein

 

That is, we can’t speak directly of relational flow forms since there is nothing (no things) that persist there, everything is in flux.

 

Not only does Western culture use language to ‘name relational forms in the flow’ to promote the abstraction of ‘being’, Western culture’s use of language and grammar reduces the relational dynamics in which humans are included relational forms, to the abstract notional terms of a collection of ‘human beings’ that are the purported ‘authors’ of ‘named products’ that are imputed to ‘exist-in-themselves’ (i.e. to ‘be’).  It is not possible to ‘hold on to’ our cognition of the ‘flow’ or ‘the Tao’ at the same time as shifting one’s cognitive focus on ‘things-that-be’ (have ‘persisting existence’).  For example, how can we retain our understanding of being included in a flow when everyone is warning us, … ‘look over there, … Katrina is moving towards us’.  That is a mental picture that ‘trumps our understanding of being included in a relational flow and divides our understanding into ‘self’ and ‘environment’;

 

A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.” – Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

 

To believe in ‘being’ that is cognitively induced by ‘naming’ [i.e. to FAIL TO UNDERSTAND names as expedients to bootstrap and share relational understanding] is the collective craziness of modern Western culture, and it comes from Western human ‘ego’ which is the source of belief in ‘being’; … who could say this more clearly than Nietzsche has already said it?

 

“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.” – Nietzsche, ‘Twilight of the Idols’.

 

The Western ‘capitalist’ (or ‘socialist’) economy is a psychological scam!  Humans are not ‘beings’ that jumpstart author and produce ‘products’ designated by ‘names’ that impute persisting being to relational forms in the flow.  The world of our experience is relational flow.  Language and grammar divide it up into abstract being-based ‘things-in-themselves’ which are useful in grammatical constructions for inducing cognition of purely relational flow by way of ‘bootstrapping’.

 

Again, psychologically adorning relational forms with ‘names’ so that we can use language to share our experience of inclusion as relational forms within a transforming relational continuum is a useful ‘communication’ or ‘experience-sharing’ tool, provided that the abstract concept of ‘being’ imputed by ‘naming’ is employed only as a ‘Wittgenstein ladder’ to facilitate purely relational cognition as in ‘bootstrapping’ aka ‘the surprise version of the game of Twenty Questions’.   The dysfunction (termed ‘incoherence by Bohm) that characterizes what we know as the modern Western culture social dynamic arises from the popular trend of accepting ‘being’ designated by linguistic ‘naming’ as ‘real’ rather than as abstraction that is useful in bootstrapping relational cognition;  … as Wittgenstein puts it;

 

“My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly” — Wittgenstein

Let’s face it, … ‘humans’, according to our actual experience, are relational forms in the transforming relational continuum; i.e. we are not ‘beings’ that have the powers to jumpstart produce ‘things-in-themselves-that-be’ also known as ‘goods’.  Such being-based cognition is abstraction that can be useful in a bootstrapping application (in a poetic, purely relational application).  However, in a bootstrapping application there is no assumption of ‘being’ in an absolute or literal sense since bootstrapping uses ‘being’ as a momentary expedient to trigger purely relational cognition.)

 

Relational forms in a relational flow cannot be the jumpstart authors of being-based ‘things-in-themselves’ aka human-being-authored ‘products’ or ‘things-in-themselves’.  Such a psychological impression is the product of language that imputes being through naming.

 

As relational forms in the transforming relational continuum rather than ‘beings’, we are not the jumpstart authors of anything, not even, what we refer to as ‘our own children’ (our children belong to the world; i.e. the transforming relational continuum aka ‘Tao’, that is all-including so that we are included together with ‘our’ children and they are influencing our development at the same time as we are influencing their development via the common fluid medium that includes us all).

 

All that I am suggesting here has been said before and far more eloquently than I am saying it.  That does not change anything (much) in the Western culture, since we are so heavily invested in ego-based belief and we brainwash our children with it in the Western educational system.  The reason we can’t, as a collective, break out of it is well said, in my opinion, by Henri Laborit; in his introduction to ‘La Nouvelle Grille’ (The New Framework)

 

‘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.

 

p.s. the translation of laborit’s comment from Francais is mine (I could not at the time find an English version of ‘La Nouvelle Grille’.).

 

 

 

 

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Aboriginal Physics Update

 

 

NATURE-NURTURE PARADOX SOLVED! (the paradox derives from belief in ‘being’)

 

The innate ambiguity as to whether the developmental changes in a human being derive from inside-outward asserting (genetic) influences, … or whether they derive from outside-inward change-inducing environmental influences that the human being is uniquely, situationally included in, … is resolved by the following understanding;

 

There is no such thing in the reality of our actual experience as ‘being’.

 

‘being’ is an ‘intellectual invention’ CONJURED UP by ‘naming’ a relational form in the transforming relational continuum.

 

In other words, ‘being’ is the abstract cognitive product of language and grammar.  The following example demonstrates;

 

“Hurricane Katrina is growing larger and stronger”, … “Katrina is heading towards the Gulf Coast”, … “Katrina is devastating New Orleans”, … “Katrina is weakening and dissipating”

 

This is an example of how ‘naming’ and grammatical constructs can create the intellectual impression of a ‘being-based dynamic’ where there is none (i.e. where there is only relational transformation (within a relationally transforming continuum or ‘flow-field’).

 

‘Naming’ is the source of ‘being’ and ‘naming’ can ‘turn straw into gold’ (turn ‘a pauper into a prince’) as in the 4000 year old fable of Rumpelstiltskin.

 

(by the way, the reference to the ‘passage of time’, such as ‘4000 years ago’ is pure abstraction that derives from splitting apart ‘being’ and ‘becoming’.   Without ‘being’, there is no way to ‘measure change’ since ‘everything is in flux’ — Heraclitus).

 

There is no such thing in the reality of our relational experience as ‘being’ and therefore there is no innate ambiguity as to whether the source of change in a developing ‘human being’ derives from ‘nature’ (inside-outward genetic asserting from the interior of the ‘being’) or ‘nurture’ (outside-inward inductive  pulling-forth/shaping from environmental influence in which the ‘human being’ is situationally included) because THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A ‘BEING’.  ‘BEING’ is an abstract artefact of language-based ‘naming’ (as pointed out by Lao Tzu in the Tao Te Ching).

 

There is a good reason why Western society puzzles over such paradoxes as how the behaviour of certain ‘beings’ demonstrates such amazing ‘intelligence’ even though they do not have a ‘brain’.  David Suzuki’s documentary ‘Smarty Plants’ is full of such amazing scientifically unanswerable accounts, as is the Nova documentary ‘Slime Mold Smarts; eg;

 

The slime mold Physarum polycephalum is a single cell without a brain, yet it can make surprisingly complicated decisions. In this animated video short, watch as a slime mold navigates through a maze and solves a civil engineering problem.” — Nova, ‘Slime Mold Smarts’

 

Wait a minute, … on what basis do we impute the existence of an ‘intelligent being’ otherwise known as an ‘organism’ (to distinguish it from ‘inorganic nature’?.   Is it true that the ‘organism’ came into being in an otherwise lifeless inorganic mud pit thanks to an infusion of electrical energy from a ‘bolt of lightning’?  Oh yes, the answer to this great mystery of ‘the origin of life’ in a ‘dead universe’  is, according to scientific authorities, simply waiting for us to improve our investigative techniques so as to get our hands on the answer that can be likened to ‘money that is already in the bank’ and/or ‘the check is in the mail’.

 

The greater reality is that there is no answer to this riddle as to the location of the source of intelligence in that type of ‘being’ that we refer to as a ‘plant’ because there is no such thing as ‘being’.  ‘Being is an abstraction that derives from the language game of ‘naming’ where we ‘give names to’, … and thus impute ‘being’ to, …  relational forms  in the transforming relational continuum;

 

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao; The name that can be named is not the eternal name. The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth. The named is the mother of ten thousand things.

 

What one experiences in a ‘left-brain’ ‘stroke of insight’ is the ‘disappearance’ of name-based being.  By this, I am not intending ‘the disappearance of names’.  Names are still accessible to the stroke experient and continue to ‘have meaning’ but only in a relational sense such as ‘dances with wolves’ or more generally, as in ‘the surprise version of the game of Twenty Questions’ (a phrase coined by modern physics researchers Geoffrey Chew and John Wheeler).  An example of a name-defined being that is ‘absolute’ and ‘not relational’ is ‘Rumpelstiltskin’ and/or John Dunbar (the ‘being’-identifying name of relational forms that can alternatively be expressed by relational phrases such as ‘Dances with Wolves’).

 

If we are roaming the prairies and pass by ‘dances with wolves’, we will recognize him, but if we should pass by ‘rumpelstiltskin’ there are no clues in his actions and appearance that can trigger cognition of his ‘being’ based identity signally by; ‘rumpelstiltskin’ or ‘John Dunbar’  In grammar, such names are termed ‘proper nouns’

 

“Proper nouns, usually capitalized in English, are arbitrary, in that a name can be given to someone or something without regard to any descriptive meaning the word or phrase may otherwise have.” –dictionary.com

 

The ‘being’-identifying name does not have the same cognitive influence as the bootstrapping names since the former implies abstract ‘thing-in-itself existence’ while the latter contributes meaning through relational ‘Wittgenstein ladders’; i.e. where we weave a web of relations as the basis for informing the listener by calling up experiential remembrance in terms of relational experience.

 

The point of the 4000 year old fable Rumpelstiltskin is that ‘naming’ can ‘spin straw into gold’ or ‘turn a pauper into a prince’ akin to a tap on the shoulder with the magic sword Excalibur in the legend of King Arthur that can turn an ordinary man as a relational form into a ‘Sir Galahad’ (knight);

 

Excalibur is the legendary sword of King Arthur, sometimes also attributed with magical powers or associated with the rightful sovereignty of Britain.

 

‘Being’ is ‘the rightful sovereignty of the self’ aka ‘ego’.

 

The ‘ego’ is the imaginary substance that supports the abstract concept of ‘being’; i.e. ‘ego’ gives rise to the abstract concept of ‘being’;

 

“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.” – Nietzsche, ‘Twilight of the Idols’.

 

Summary:

 

The nature-nurture paradox; e.g. does Omar Khadr’s behaviour derive from his internal essence or genetics, as is connoted by ‘nature’, … or is his behaviour inductively pulled into form and shape by the dynamics of the environment he is situationally included in?

 

The Western populace ‘splits’ on the answer to this question’; i.e. the answer distinguishes between the politically conservative (which often includes devoted adherents of Christianity, Islam and Judaism) who would understand the individual as an ‘independently-existing-thing-in-himself) and hold the individual fully and solely responsible for his own behaviour [i.e. make the assumption that nature prevails over nurture] and the politically liberal who would take into account environmental influences that may have inductively shaped the individual’s behaviour [nurture over nature].

 

What goes unstated in this binary split in the assumed sourcing of behaviour is the role of the cognitive assumption of ‘being’.

 

Only if we first assume ‘being’ does the choice arise as to whether the being is animated by inside-outward asserting agency or by outside-inward inductive agency.  ‘Being’ is an illusion that is cognitively reified by language; i.e. by the act of ‘naming’ that abstractly endows a relational form in the flow with (the cognitive abstract notion of) persisting thing-in-itself existence.

 

There are no ‘beings’ in the real world of our relational experience.  ‘Names’ signifying ‘beings’ are useful abstractions if we hold back any tendency to understand them ‘literally’ as ‘things-in-themselves’.  That is, we can instead understand ‘names’ or ‘nouns’ as ‘Wittgenstein ladders’ that we can use poetically (purely relationally) within language to stimulate/induce cognition of relational forms in a purely relational world dynamic.

 

”Do not forget that a poem, although it is composed in the language of information, is not used in the language-game of giving information. “ … “Philosophy ought really to be written only as a form of poetry.”  — “Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language”– Wittgenstein

 

Poetry does not deliver information on man as a ‘being’ as science does, and the scientific portrayal of man as a  human ‘being’ is deservedly mocked by Charles Dickens in ‘Hard Times’ in the sequence where ‘Sissy Jupe’s relational understanding of a horse is ‘put down’ by her teacher Thomas Gradgrind who insists on grounding all understanding in ‘being’-based ‘facts’ as is the way of mainstream ‘science’;

 

“Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!”

‘Bitzer,’ said Thomas Gradgrind. ‘Your definition of a horse.’

 ‘Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth, and twelve incisive. Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy countries, sheds hoofs, too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with iron. Age known by marks in mouth.’ Thus (and much more) Bitzer. — Charles Dickens, ‘Hard Times’

 

Conclusions:

 

‘Being’ is cognitive abstraction that implies ‘persisting thing-in-itself existence’ that is achieved through language and grammar by ‘naming’ and synthetically animating ‘named beings’.  To ‘back up’ this ‘initial lie (abstraction)’, language and grammar further come up with the abstract concept of ‘the environment’ as notional ‘operating space’ that is separate from the ‘being’ but which ‘gives domicile’ to the ‘being’ in the form of a symbiotic give and take relationship.  E.g. the ‘hurricane-as-being’ (rather than as a relational form in the flow) is said to ‘draw its energy’ from the environment and to ‘transform the environment’ through its actions.  This is an ‘error of grammar’ as noted by Nietzsche;

 

“I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar,” – Nietzsche

Nietzsche’s point is that in a transforming relational continuum, there is no need to come up with the notion of ‘being’ as a platform from which to cognitively launch action and change; … as Nietzsche points out, ‘change’ does not need an ‘author’; i.e. ‘hurricane Katrina’ is not a ‘being’ that sources change, but is itself the changing so that we do not need language and grammar to give the false impression of being-sourced causal authorship where there is none;

 

“Our judgement has us conclude that every change must have an author”;–but this conclusion is already mythology: it separates that which effects from the effecting. If I say “lightning flashes,” I have posited the flash once as an activity and a second time as a subject, and thus added to the event a being that is not one with the event but is rather fixed, “is” and does not “become.”–To regard an event as an “effecting,” and this as being, that is the double error, or interpretation, of which we are guilty.” – Nietzsche, ‘Will to Power’, 531

 

The nature-nurture paradox (our inability to separate the relative contribution of inside-outward asserting genetic influence and outside-inward inductive environmental influences on observable ‘change’) is a phantom paradox that we cognitively foist on ourselves when we introduce into our cognition, the abstract concept of ‘being’ by way of ‘naming’.  Whether we are (using language for) talking about a ‘human being’, a ‘nation-being’ or a ‘corporation being’, … the ‘nature-nurture’ paradox arises purely and solely from our cognitive acceptance of the ‘existence of things-that-be’.  Without the abstraction of ‘beings’, we would have no need to discuss the relative determinative influence of internal genetic push and/or external inductive pull on the development of the ‘being’.  This holds true for ‘human-beings’, ‘nation-beings’, ‘corporation-beings’ and in general; i.e. if we retract ‘belief in’ (cognitive acceptance of) the abstract concept of ‘being’ as imputed by ‘naming’, there is no longer any ‘nature’ – ‘nurture’ paradox since it derives from an ‘error of grammar’ that attributes authorship to named and thus ‘reified’ (linguistically objectified) relational flow-forms.

 

SUMMARIZING SCHOLIUM

 

The understanding shared here does not depart from the understanding that has been shared many times and in many publications by many authors before, all of which (including this one) lack significant ‘traction’ contributory to overthrowing of the long-dominating ‘scientific’ being-based [ego-rooted] beliefs of Western society.  Of course, such non-being-based understanding has been ‘mainstream’ in indigenous aboriginal cultures for millennia.  One might say that indigenous aboriginal societies never ‘got infected’ with the ‘virus’ of literal belief in ‘being’ as cultivated through noun-and-verb language and grammar.

 

“A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.” – Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

 

The ‘picture’ that ‘lies in our language’ and that ‘holds us captive, is the picture of ‘name’-defined ‘beings’ that are the purported ‘authors’ of actions and consequences.

 

The ‘nature-nurture’ paradox is secondary to this and seeks to discover ‘what makes these beings tick’ (‘beings’ as implied by names), … is it something inside of them that authors their inside-outward asserting, … or is it something outside of them that inductively sources (pulls forth)  and shapes their asserting?  If we suspend the imputing of ‘being’ to relational forms in the transforming relational continuum, the mature-nurture paradox evaporates and there is no point in debating whether Omar Khadr should be held responsible for killing a US soldier since ‘relational dissonance’ is the source of such destructive conflict; … it is NOT ‘human beings’ gone awry that is the source of the destructive conflict since ‘being’ is linguistic abstraction that does not exist in the real relational world of our actual experience (of inclusion in the transforming relational continuum).

 

Meanwhile, Western civilization is ostensibly comprised of educational, justice and commercial systems, all of which accept the cognitive notion of the ‘reality’ of ‘being’ as anointed by ‘naming’ and backed by ‘ego’.

 

To critique ‘being’ is to critique ‘naming’ and the giving of ‘titles’ that may inflate the ego or undermine it.   A system held in place by ‘ego’ such as Western society, is thus indemnified against change that would undermine the foundational role of ego in society.  That is, ‘pride’ and ‘ego’ are tied together as in ‘national pride’ which Einstein has termed ‘an infantile disease’, ‘the measles of mankind’.

 

But to criticize the foundational values of the society one is living in puts one into a ‘double bind’ situation of the Mohavit/Atmavit type as described in Advaita Vedanta, which is not an easy road to travel, as T.S. Eliot shared;

 

“T.S. Eliot studied Eastern religions in detail at Harvard, learning some Sanskrit and some Pali, and soon concluded that “their subtleties make most of the great European philosophers look like schoolboys.” For a young man disillusioned with his banal surroundings and desperate to break away from his family, there was something wonderfully aloof, impersonal and invulnerable about the Buddhist notion of the spirit, free of all attachments and desires. And by the time he was composing The Wasteland, which ends, of course, with the chant “Shantih shantih shantih,” he was genuinely considering a conversion to Buddhism. But the truth was, he wrote, “my only hope of really penetrating to the heart of that mystery would lie in forgetting how to think and feel as an American or European: which for practical as well as sentimental reasons, I did not wish to do.”

Schrodinger seems to have had the same problem. …” — Ned Beauman, ‘Great Mahavits’ January 4, 2010,

 

The ‘bouble bind’ that one finds oneself in, in ‘blowing the whistle’ on the synthetic ‘being’ based underpinnings of ‘Western popular reality’ serves to perpetuate the ‘error of being’ by discrediting those who succeed (against great odds) in stirring things up.  While T.S. Eliot ‘backed off’, others like Henri Laborit, whose views began to gather a public following, have been ‘discredited’ by the ‘scientific authorities’ who are there to protect scientific thinking in its current ‘being-based’ incarnation.  Laborit, pioneer of anaesthetics in medicine and author of ‘La Nouvelle Grille’ (The New Framework) whose research supported foundational revisions in scientific thinking, commented on what it felt like (the ‘double bind’) when one’s research fell outside of the scientific orthodoxy;

 

‘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.

 

In other words, it may be ‘a while yet’ before the collective we ‘gets honest’ about the artificiality of ‘being’-based cognition that has been made foundational in Western culture.

 

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