Two Types of ‘Sorcery’ That Underlie Western ‘Invented Reality’

 

Western culture serves up Invented Realities of two types, both of which are ‘sorceror’-based ‘invented realities’ commonly termed ‘nature’ and ‘nature’, which are obscuring the relational reality of our actual experience.  While the ‘real’ reality of our relational experience is still the primary reality in the cultures of indigenous aboriginals, Taoists and Advaita Vedanta, … this ‘real reality’ is being ‘eclipsed’ by the intellectual ‘Invented Realities’ of Western culture [‘nature’ and ‘nurture’] which have become the two competing ‘operative realities’ of the globally dominant Western culture.

There is much psychosis and cognitive incoherency that stems from this misplaced popular ascendance to primacy, as ‘operative reality’, of the two ‘invented realities’ commonly referred to as (3) ‘nature’: —  (based on a notional ‘sorcery’ (locally incipient authoring power) that is inside-outward asserting as can be depicted by a ‘whorl’ that is ‘sourcing’ ‘flow’, and (2) ‘nurture’: — based on a notional ‘sorcery’ (authoring power) that is outside-inward inducing as can be depicted by a flow that induces a whorl.  [*N.B. In Erich Jantsch’s three levels of reality as defined in ‘Design for Evolution’, these levels of ‘cognitive precedence’ in perceiving reality are numbered from lowest (3, ‘nature’ and  2, ‘nurture’) to highest (1, relational ‘appearance’)]

The question of whether (the ‘invented’) reality derives from bright and distinct explicit ‘sources’ with inside-outward asserting powers of originating actions and developments (as in ‘nature’), or whether (the ‘invented’) reality derives from dark and obscure implicit ‘sources’ with outside-inward inductive powers of originating actions and developments (as in ‘nature’) has divided the reality conceptualizing babits of Western culture adherents.  This division that arises from such language based abstractions has been parodied by Jonathan Swift in ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ in multiple ways, including the story of a people who divide into opposing factions over disagreement on whether a boiled egg should by opened from the more rounded end or from the more pointed end.

This unnecessary ‘splitting’ of public belief into two types of ‘invented reality’, putting people into opposing camps on the basis of which of these two conflicting ‘abstractions’ is the most appropriate to serve in a foundational ‘operative reality’ role to inform and orchestrate our individual and collective social dynamics, manifests as the ‘nature’ – ‘nurture’ split .  This splitting into two ‘invented realities’ continues in the current ‘modern era’ to divide and polarize the psychological/cognitive understanding of their respective adherents.  The adherents of the invented reality termed ‘nature’ are know as political ‘conservatives’ and the adherents of the invented reality termed ‘nurture’ are known as political ‘liberals’.

This splitting that derives from the split in ‘invented realities’ that divides social collectives into opposing camps is also the source of ‘the divided individual self’ (bipolar disorder, schizophrena) within sensitive individuals .  The divided self (as contrasted with the divided socio-political collective) is alluded to by the example of ‘the sensitive miner’s canaries’ who have a lower threshold for aberrant cognitive functioning that derives from the ‘divided self’ experience.  As R.D. Laing observes, this ‘divided self’ psychosis derives from what Western culture deems ‘normality’.

“What we call ‘normal’ is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection and other forms of destructive action on experience.” – R. D. Laing, author of ‘The Divided Self’

While a majority of Western culture adherents, because they subscribe to Western ‘invented reality’,  find themselves ‘splitting’ into one or other of the two camps deriving from one’s understanding of ‘sourcing agency’ (‘sorcery’) as coming either from clear and explicit inside-outward asserting sourcing, … or, … as coming from obscure, diffuse and implicit outside-inward inductive sourcing.  Such ‘sorcery’, whether of the ‘nature’ or ‘nurture’ variety, is an abstract artifact of language and grammar and does not even show up on the ‘radar screen’ of relational understandings of ‘reality’ as in modern physics and as in cultures such as the indigenous aboriginal, Taoist and Advaita Vedanta cultures.

‘Experiential reality’ is ‘relational’, … NOT in the sense of relations among things, but ‘relational’ in the sense of ‘the surprise version of the game of Twenty Questions’ where there is no dependence at all on ‘things-in-themselves’, although notional ‘things-in-themselves’ are used to induce cognition of the webs of relations of the reality of our natural relational experience.  Once relational cognition is established, the ‘things-in-themselves’ connoted by ‘names’ are allowed to dissolve and depart from the cognitive scene, leaving only cognition in relational terms.  This need to capture an impression of relations that have no dependency on ‘things-in-themselves’ is described by Wittgenstein and by Nietzsche as follows;

 

Wittgenstein;

6.54 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.

7. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

Wittgenstein’s final two propositions in ‘Tractatus Logico Philosophicus’.

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Nietzsche;

From now on, my philosophical colleagues, let us be more wary of the dangerous old conceptual fairy-tale which has set up a ‘pure, will-less, painless, timeless, subject of knowledge’[cognition], let us be wary of the tentacles of such contradictory concepts as ‘pure reason’, ‘absolute spirituality’, ‘knowledge as such’: – here we are asked to think an eye which cannot be thought at all, an eye turned in no direction at all, an eye where the active and interpretative powers are to be suppressed, absent, but through which seeing still becomes a seeing-something, so it is an absurdity and non-concept of eye that is demanded. There is only a perspectival seeing, only a perspectival ‘knowing’; the more affects we are able to put into words about a thing, the more eyes, various eyes we are able to use for the same thing, the more complete will be our ‘concept’ of the thing, our ‘objectivity’. But to eliminate the will completely and turn off all the emotions without exception, assuming we could: well? would that not mean to castrate the intellect? . . .Nietzsche, ‘The Genealogy of Morality’.

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Rather than ‘inventing reality’ in language and grammar terms of ‘sourcery’ by notional ‘things-in-themselves’ and ‘what things-in-themselves-are-doing’, it is possible to understand the world of our experience in purely relational terms which never actually ‘bottom out’ in ‘sourcery’ coming from notional ‘things-in-themselves’ with impute powers of authoring [i.e. as Wittgenstein points out, our understanding is deeper when we ‘remain silent’]

To be sure, language and grammar have the power to trigger cognition of sourcery-based reality but this ‘invented reality’ in no way replicates the relational reality of our actual experience.  Meanwhile, the language-and-grammar based ‘invented reality’ is where the splitting apart of ‘self-and-other’ and then again ‘inhabitant’ and ‘habitat’ is introduced into the mind, setting up the social divisions arising from those who ‘invent reality’ in ‘nature’ over ‘nurture’ terms and those who see ‘invent reality’ in ‘nurture’ over ‘nature’ terms, and then spend so much time squabbling over which of these ‘invented realities’ is the ‘real reality’ that cognitive access to the ‘real real reality’ of our relational experience within the transforming relational continuum is blocked by the nature vs nurture ‘side-show’.

That is, so long as our cognitive resources are fully committed to the debate over whether ‘nature’ prevails over ‘nutture’ (reality level 3) or ‘nurture’ prevails over ‘nature’ (reality level 2), … the first and highest level reality (level 1 in Jantsch’s Design for Evolution) is ‘blocked from cognitive access as our cognitive powers are fully committed to resolving the ‘nature’-over-‘nurture’ vs ‘nurture’-over-‘nature’ ‘invented reality’ contention.

The relative precedence of ‘nature’ or ‘nurture’, while it divides the adherents of Western culture, is a ‘psychological red herring’ since both of these concepts are abstractions that have no place in the reality of our natural, relational experience.

THE CORE ISSUE

 

“What we call ‘normal’ is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection and other forms of destructive action on experience.” – R. D. Laing, author of ‘The Divided Self’

 

THE RAMIFICATIONS OF THE CORE ISSUE

Our culture is driving a lot of us nuts.  But if we let the nuttiness get to us and start ‘flapping about’ as in ‘the ‘miner’s canary’ syndrome, we will be isolated and subjected to attempts to bring us back into conformance with the nuttiness which is the cultural imperative that defines ‘normal’; i.e; the social pressure to adhere to the Western cultural ‘normal’ can be likened to ‘playing a game’ such as ‘When in Rome, do as the Romans’.

“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

Western culture-infused nuttiness unfolds through belief in the ‘Invented Reality’ with its notional ‘beings’ with notional ‘action and development sourcing powers’.  The Western culture population is a collective of self-perceived ‘sourcerors’ of actions and accomplishments (positive and/or negative) and the collective social dynamic is ‘managed’ on the basis of required compliance with the understandings of this Western culture ‘invented reality’.

This Western culture that ‘runs on’ ‘Invented Reality’ carries along with it all those that are troubled by the psychological confusion it embodies.  Some are able to function smoothly in the superficialities of the ‘Invented Reality’ in spite of its being based in aberrant understanding, while a minority become overtly, visibly disturbed and tangibly disruptive, disturbing the masses who are moving compliantly in conformance with the ‘invented reality’.  This sets up a situation wherein the non-compliant are seen as ‘crazies’ even though it is the ‘Invented Reality’ serving as cultural normality wherein the aberrant behaviours derive.

The actions of those individuals (termed ‘psychotic’) that resist Western ‘aberrant normality’ invite ‘corrective actions’ from the ‘normals’ aimed at restoring the individual to Western ‘aberrant normality’.  In terms of the ‘miner’s canary’, those sensitive ones who perceive and react against incipient socially ambient abnormality, may find that their resistant, against-the-grain behaviours, are interpreted [within the nature or nurture paradigm] as being ‘internally sourced’ (something wrong with them) rather than their resistant behaviour being understood as aberrant-social-environment sourced.  Thus, the ‘miner’s canaries’ may succeed in ‘getting themselves admitted’ to a ‘treatment facility’ designed to repair their ‘internal faults’, administered by the majority in charge who regard themselves and their aberrant cultural dynamic as the baseline for what is deemed ‘normal’.

For example, as Franca Ongaro Basaglia [Psychiatria Democratica] observes;

“The problem of psychiatric illness and its institutions developed in our society primarily as a question of public order. It came into being as a socio-political problem, namely the defense of the healthy and working community from elements that would not conform to its modes of behaviour and rules of efficiency. Isolated care and treatment justified the segregation and internment of the ‘ill’ who were considered less for their illness than their potential as disruptive elements. This focus on abnormality and deviance, especially social disruption, meant that subjective suffering was not addressed – nor were the diverse variables giving rise to psychiatric problems. Despite decades of public concern and specific legislation opposing this approach, scientific theories, professional bodies and institutions have resisted abandoning the provision of a style of care that protects society to the detriment of those cared for.” (Franca Ongaro Basaglia, Int. J. Soc. Psychiat., 1992, 38, p36). see http://www.human-nature.com/hraj/trieste.html 

This ‘inverted view’ wherein the sensitive ones resist conforming to the aberrant behaviour of the social collective of ‘normals’, has been noted (as a possibility) from time to time by psychiatric researchers, but is typically ignored since the current ‘aberrant normality’ is ‘locked in’ by ‘high switching costs’.

Psychiatric researchers studying cases where Africans (with indigenous aboriginal culture based understandings of reality) coming into European culture [with its ‘aberrant ‘invented reality’ based normality’] have developed schizophrenia where there was none in their tribal environment, have suggested that the source of the schizophrenia is not within the individual but derives from the individual’s immersion in the Western culture.

However, such research is largely ignored since Western culture defines normality in terms of harmonious social-relational participation within the Western culture.  For example, if the research commences by investigating ‘what is wrong with this person’ rather than commencing from ‘what is wrong with this community such that it cultivates aberrant behaviours in so many people, … then even though the aberrant behaviour is induced by the ambient social dynamic, it can only be attributed to ‘something going wrong’ in the interior of the individual.  Psychiatric researcher Raymond Cochrane, in the wake of a study of individuals moving out of a tribal environment where the incidence of schizophrenia was negligible into a European environment where their incidence of schizophrenia was very high, made this following point;

From the outset it will be clear that most of the research in this field has followed the conventional epidemiological or medical paradigm by focusing on mental ill health as the dependent variable. It is, therefore, not surprising that there is a lack of empirically grounded research on mental well-being or the psychological resilience and survival of minority groups in this country” — R. Cochrane (University of Birmingham) and S. P. Sashidharan (North Birmingham Mental Health Trust) in ‘Mental Health and Ethnic Minorities’

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DISCUSSION:

There is a lot of material here in this relatively short write-up to ‘take in’ in the sense of bringing it into connective confluence, in one reading.  The additional challenge lies in the structure of the language we are using to convey understanding.  It is a language that ‘works’ by ‘INVENTING REALITY’.   That is to say, it is a language that conveys ideas and understanding by ways of notional ‘things-in-themselves’ with their own powers of sourcing actions and developments.  The shortfall in the capacity of language to capture purely relational cognition is where Lao Tzu’s observation comes from; ‘The Tao that can be told is not the true Tao’.  Reference to the same shortfall in language is found in Wittgenstein’s final proposition in Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, and again in modern physics where the linguistic delivery we use to convey the relational dynamics of our experience is compared to ‘The surprise version of the game of Twenty-Questions’.

A noun-and-verb language and grammar does not have the architecture capable of directly capturing intrinsically relational dynamics; i.e. as Wittgenstein puts it, we must first employ ‘things’ to induce the cognitive impression of ‘relations’ but then slip out the ‘things’ once we have developed a relational understanding.   Since ‘things’ are designated by ‘names’ that trigger the cognitive impression of persisting existence, our habit is to use names as the basis for cognitively imputing the power of ‘sourcery’ to the notional ‘things-in-themselves’ (‘beings’); e.g. while a hurricane is an ‘appearance’ in the flow, our Western approach is to name it so as to be able to impute not only persisting existence to it, but to notionally endow it with its own ‘sourcing powers’ as in ; ‘Katrina’ (the whorl in the flow) is growing larger and stronger’, … ‘Katrina is ravaging New Orleans’, … ‘Katrina is weakening and dissipating’.   These propositions are in themselves ‘senseless’ but they serve to give us an impression of the relational dynamics of nature which, meanwhile, do not ‘really’ arise from ‘things-in-themselves’ (beings) with ‘their own powers of sourcing actions and developments’.

6.54 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.

7. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

Wittgenstein’s final two propositions in ‘Tractatus Logico Philosophicus’.

The Western culture problem is to forget to ”throw away the ladder'” and to understand LITERALLY, statements that imply the existence of ‘beings’ with ‘sourcing powers’. Newtonian science (don’t forget that Newton was into the studies of the occult/sorcery) teaches us to believe LITERALLY in the ‘existence of material things-in-themselves’ with the power of sourcing actions and developments.  That is, Newtonian science is in the business of ‘INVENTING REALITY’, and Newtonian science has yet to be replaced (subsumed) by modern physics as the instructor of Western culture cognition.

KEY POINTS DESCRIBING HOW WESTERN ‘NORMALITY’ SOWS THE SEEDS OF PSYCHOSIS

-1- There are no such things in the real world of our relational experience as ‘beings’ (thing-in-themselves with persisting existence’).  These are abstractions based on relational forms in the flow the give us the cognitive impression of ‘persisting existence’ when they are ‘named’, since the ‘name’ persists in our minds and we associate the name-that-persists with the continually transforming feature in the continually transforming flow.  Our observing eye and mind can ‘lock-on’ to a continually transforming relational form and make a cognitive association with a name, thus facilitating a cognitive substitution that replaces an ‘impression of a persisting form’ (i.e. a relational form in a transforming relational continuum) with a language and grammar based abstract ‘thing-in-itself’ with its own persisting thing-in-itself ‘being’.

-2- There are no such things as ‘beings’ with powers of ‘sourcing’.  Once we ‘name’ the whorl (a relational form or appearance/apparition in the flow), we not only establish in the mind the notion of a ‘thing-in-itself’ but we establish it, cognitively, as a local notional ‘sourcer’ of action and development.  There are no local sources of action and development in a transforming relational continuum (the ‘transforming relational continuum’ that is experienced by us as ‘nature’ or ‘reality’ as in modern physics).  That is, the abstract concept of ‘beings’ with the power of ‘sourcing’ (‘authoring’) actions, are a double error of cognition that comes from language and grammar.  Nietzsche captures this, as follows;

“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

-3- The ‘Invented Reality’ of Western culture builds from the above errors yet this ‘Invented Reality’ is the ‘operative reality of Western culture.

-4- The ‘Invented Reality’ is based on an ‘infinite source’ [i.e. the notion of absolute ‘thing-in-itself’ existence], however, there is ambiguity here which leads to the ‘nature’ or ‘nurture’ dichotomy.  That is, the ‘Invented Reality’ assumes infinite (as in a ‘thing-itself’) based ‘sourcery’ and the choices are that the sourcing as coming nonlocally from God and/or locally from man. In the ‘old age’ ‘Invented Reality’, the God source is an external infinity while in the ‘new age’ ‘Invented Reality’, the infinite God source is inside of us.

-5- In modern physics ‘reality’, as in indigenous aboriginal ‘reality’ and Taoist ‘reality’, there are no ‘sources’, only ‘relations’ and relations-based ‘appearances’ (‘apparitions’).  The concept of ‘sourcing’ or ‘sorcery’ is abstraction cognitively induced by language and grammar.

 

AUTHOR’S EXPLANATORY NARRATIVE

I have placed this ‘personal exploration and reflection into the roots of psychosis’, … ‘psychosis’ that is endemic in Western Culture,  … ‘online’, in the hope that it may be of some use to someone else, particularly if that person has, like myself, experienced suffering either directly or indirectly from what is called ‘schizophrenia‘ or ‘bipolar disorder’ and/or related so-called ‘psychological disorders’.

My findings are the results of many years of investigation into personally experienced issues, … investigation that is articulated mostly in a ‘complex systems’ or ‘modern physics’ mode of understanding. The key finding, which is certainly ‘not new’, is that what Western culture calls ‘normality’ breeds psychological dysfunction by way on employing the abstract notions of ‘being’ and ‘beings’ notionally equipped with action sourcing powers’ the credit for ‘Inventing Reality’, … an ‘Invented Reality’ that is meanwhile ‘conjured up’ with ‘language and grammar’.

I started my serious full time investigation when I got the strong sense that something was seriously amiss within the social dynamics of our Western society and that whatever it was, was breeding systemic psychological dysfunction.  Of course such ideas are commonly ‘out there’ as in the writings of R.D. Laing and others who I had read, and were also implied by the huge gap between Newtonian science and modern physics and the fact that ‘modern physics’ continues to be ‘held at bay’ and inhibited (by the culture in place) from subsuming Newtonian physics as the cognitive foundation for intellectualizing our experiencing of ‘reality’.  What persists as a result, is Western culture’s tradition on ‘Inventing Reality’.

What I am saying is that what Western culture and its media based information systems put out as if it were ‘reality’ is nothing other than ‘Invented Reality’ that is something abstract and very distant from the ‘reality of our actual relational experience.  Meanwhile, the ‘reality’ that is implicit in modern physics, in the cultural understanding of indigenous aboriginals, in Taoism and in Advaita Vedanta, reconciles with our actual relational experience of inclusion within a transforming relational continuum.   The gap is huge between the ‘operative reality’ of modern physics and indigenous aboriginal culture, on the one hand, and the operative reality of Western culture, on the other hand. Meanwhile, philosophical investigators such as David Bohm have found basic agreement between a modern physics based understanding of ‘reality’ and the indigenous aboriginal understanding of ‘reality’, and such understanding is far apart from the Western culture understanding of ‘reality’.  For example;

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’

Given that indigenous aboriginal ‘reality’ seems to come far closer to the reality of our actual relational experience as supported by modern physics than does the Western culture ‘Invented Reality’ (based on the abstractions of ‘beings’ with notional ‘action sourcing powers’), this gives us cause to be on the lookout for problematic understandings as may come to us from employing the Western culture ‘Invented Reality’ as our ‘operative reality’.

In exploring this, my own findings accord with those of R. D. Laing and others in regard to ‘psychosis’ being ‘brought on’ by the psychological misconceptions deriving from Western culture ‘Invented Reality’.   That is, what is promoted as ‘normality’ in Western culture breeds schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

Insofar as Western acculturated people live within this psychosis-breeding culture where the impact for the majority of people is constrained to the splitting of one’s impressions of ‘reality’ on a ‘nature’ or ‘nurture’ basis, the psychosis remains largely hidden since the two factions (‘conservatives/naturists’ and ‘liberals/nurturists’) can take turns making their ‘reality’ the operative reality for an entire group.  But for individuals for whom this battle is raging internally and is not vented in the guise of embracing either the one or the other in sequential fashion, the upshot may be a bout of psychosis induced within ‘the divided self’.

The individual who is herself ‘split apart’ into ‘self’ and ‘other’ by the schizophrenia innate in the Western culture (an exposure that is not present in the indigenous aboriginal and Taoist etc. cultures) will be encouraged to drink of the ‘healing elixir’ of either the ‘nature’ or ‘nurture’ adherents/factions in Western culture.

The ‘nature’ faction offers ‘medication’ that restores the ‘old age’ imagery of self as that of the whorl (i.e. a local, explicit being-based source) that sources the flow , or in other words, the ‘whorl’ as the self-asserting being that constitutes the ‘sourceror’ in the form of a ‘master of his acts’ as in Christian belief;

“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

The ‘nurture’ faction offers ‘medication’ (in a psychological ‘spirit balm’ sense) that restores the ‘new age’ imagery of self as that of the flow (i.e. nonlocal darkness/obscure non-being based influence) that sources the whorl.  The non-being based (spiritual) influence serves our cognitive understanding as non-being-based sourcery.  The ‘sourcery’ in the ‘nurture’ fork of the ‘nature’ – ‘nurture’ dichotomy is invoked in the notion that we are the ‘source’ of pain experienced by others but we must ‘forgive ourselves’ for sourcing such pain;

Dear God, Please teach me to forgive myself and others. Remove the walls that keep love out, behind which I am prisoner. Heal my guilt and remove my anger, that I might be reborn. Make gentle my heart and strong my spirit, and show me how to love. Amen  — Marianne Williamson

We become God-like in this ‘forgiveness’ understanding in the sense that ‘She that giveth pain, taketh pain away’.

Note that in the ‘indigenous aboriginal understanding’ as in modern physics, there is no local sourcing so there is nothing for an individual to forgive herself for.  As relational forms within a transforming relational continuum, there is no ‘individual-based local sourcing of actions and consequences’.  Those concepts are the cognitive artifacts of language and grammar constructs.  In the relational understanding of indigenous aboriginal cultures, reality is unfolding in the continuing now, … it is not a being-authored-time-based construction.

The causal inference embodied in Williamson’s ‘new-age’ portrayal of ‘reality’ wherein forgiveness resolves the damage arising from a person or group that is seen as sourcing actions that are hurtful to others, is a far cry from the aboriginal relational understanding of reality as a transforming relational continuum wherein there is no such dynamic as ‘sourcing’ and therefore no sourcing of cruel acts to forgive (nor is there any ‘sourcing’ of loving acts to celebrate).  That is, there is no ‘sourcing’ in a transforming relational continuum (the world of our actual relational experience), and no ‘beings’ to serve, cognitively, as ‘sourcerors’.  As relational forms in the flow, our influence can serve to cultivate relational resonance/dissonance.  The driver that slows within a relational configuration so as to form an open corridor for another car to move, may be opening the way for an injured man in another car to secure the timely medical aid he needs to survive an injury he has just suffered. In our relational experience where our movements are not ‘absolute’ [as we intellectually conceive of them when we cognitively frame them in a Cartesian reference grid], our movements can only be understood in terms of relational transformation.  It is language and grammar that allows us to cognitively ‘Invent Reality’ that is in terms of ‘beings’ with ‘their own action sourcing powers’.      .

In the transforming relational continuum; as we know from our real life relational experience, there is only the cultivating of relational harmonies/dissonances. There are no ‘sorcerors’ of good or evil actions and consequences and therefore there are no ‘sorcerors’ to forgive [Forgiveness is not a meaningful concept in a relational world.

That is, ‘forgiveness’ is a concept that takes on meaning only in an ‘Invented Reality’.  ‘Forgiveness’ ‘turns into a pumpkin in the absence of an ‘Invented Reality’ ‘cover’.

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EPILOGUE:

The Invented Reality, … in other words, the world that we in the Western culture cognitively construct using the tools of language and grammar is NOT the world of our relational experience of inclusion within a transforming relational continuum, the latter world including far more that we can be explicitly consciously aware of.

We use language and grammar to invent realities that are sparsely populated and thus simply and conveniently shared; i.e. we populate these ‘Invented Realities’ with the things that ‘come to mind’ in our cognitive dynamics, … our ‘Invented Reality’ is as simple and sparse as we choose to make it by using words (names) and grammar to invent/construct (imagery that triggers cognition of our self-tailored ‘invented reality’ versio) .This ‘invented reality’, that is sparsely and selectively composed gives us the opportunity to INVENT our own personally preferred (subjectively biased) ‘reality representation’, that includes what we personally choose to include and fails to include that which is not known or is uncomfortable to us.

In this sense, our language-and-grammar based ‘invented realities’ are ‘not wrong’ per se, but necessarily ‘incomplete’.  But if they are ‘incomplete’ then they are therefore ‘not correct’.  Is it possible for an ‘invented reality’ to be incomplete-yet-not-incorrect, or would we have to conclude that the ‘incomplete rendering of reality’ was ‘not correct’ because it was incomplete?  (the aphorism ‘damned with faint praise’ comes to mind, as in summing up a singer’s performance by complimenting her on her beautiful dress and who could find error in this ‘portrait of reality’?).

Does ‘correct as far as it goes’ avoid falling into the category of ‘incorrect’? Surely, ‘correct as far as it goes’ can be crafted in such a manner as to include one’s personally preferred realities while excluding the realities that one would prefer that they ‘just go away’. [The sharing circles of indigenous aboriginal tradition and/or ‘sharing circles’ in general, tend to cultivate cognition of an ‘omni-perspectival ‘invented reality’ PROVIDED THAT THE CULTURAL UNDERSTANDING IS _NOT_ THAT THE ‘INVENTED REALITY’ IS BASED ON ‘BEINGS-WITH-SOURCING-POWERS’.  That is, there is an innate ‘incompleteness’ of conceptualizations that are in terms of ‘things-in-themselves’, notionally with their own powers of sourcing actions and developments.

The language-based constructing (inventing) of reaity in ‘Western Culture’ terms of notional things-in-themselves with action and development SOURCING POWERS …  differs radically from ‘INVENTING REALITY’ in the manner suggested by Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Bohm, Schroedinger, Chew/Wheeler wherein the ‘INVENTED REALITY’ emerges in the relational confluence of a multiplicity of various and diverse ‘REALITY PERSPECTIVES’, rather than from a ‘MAJORITY VOTE’  on ‘which of multiple ‘INVENTED REALITY PERSPECTIVES’  is ‘THE BEST’…. the latter being a ‘reductionist’ approach that draws forth a mocking/sarcastic criticism of ‘reason’ from La Fontaine; i.e. ‘La raison du plus fort est toujours la meilleure’.

(Imagine a mixture of indigenous aboriginals and Europeans sitting in the same ‘sharing circle’ and listening to the sharing of the diverse experiences and observations of the participants in a common eco-dynamic (which might be thought of as including not just the two-leggeds, but the four-leggeds, finned and winged and slithering ones , as if they [or some articulate ‘stand-in’ for them] could rhetorically share their experiences).  The European cognitive tradition is to ‘reduce’ what goes on to ‘the truth, the full truth and nothing but the truth so help me God’.  The implied ‘sense-making’ in this ‘Western’ approach to ‘Inventing Reality’ is what Nietzsche and others have exposed to be an invitation for subjective hijacking of the ‘invented reality’, yet this reality-hijacking remains the Western culture ‘standard’ approach; i.e. it is a ‘psychosis cultivating standard’.  In the Western culture, there is widespread belief in the ‘reality’ of the ‘incubus’ and ‘succubus’, spirit-demons that sexually force themselves upon sleeping Western humans, and whose ‘relational topology’ corresponds to the abstractions of ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’.’

With respect to the ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’ split, in the ‘nature’ approach to inventing reality, the rhetoric we use in our description is very precise and exact (thanks to naming and imputing thing-in-itself existence to relational forms in the flow and thanks to understanding their behaviour as being ‘sourced’ from out of their interior).  However, in the ‘nurture’ approach to inventing reality, we speak of the ‘darkness’ of the dispersed relational flow from whence relational forms emerge indistinctly and non-explicitly; e.g. where the child-soldier’s behavioural lifestyle is understood as being drawn inductively from the relational dynamics he is situationally included in [rather than jumpstarting from within his interior].

[One might say that the ‘old age’ sense of ‘invented reality’ as in ‘nature’ corresponds to the Western culture’s ‘incubus’ while the ‘new age’ sense of ‘invented reality’ as in ‘nurture’ corresponds to the ‘succubus’, … ‘demonic forces’ that ‘continue to haunt’ Western cultures and have a solid long-term presence in Western culture folklore.  Note that ‘being sexually taken’ by an incubus’ or ‘succubus’ can be a very pleasurable (and/or scary) experience.  I include a comment on this because we find widespread experience of this spirit/body ‘splitting’ in Western culture although it is usually not brought up in ‘serious discussions’ since it is obviously not the sort of thing that is openly shared or reported on in (mostly science-rooted) news media. ]

One might say that the Western culture’s initial ‘splitting’ of ‘self’ and ‘other’ induces compensatory psychological reunification.  ‘Sourcery’ as is the basis of both ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’ ‘Invented Reality’ animators comes into Western culture in two forms; ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’ which correspond to the medieval notions of the invisible but powerful ‘evil spirits’ termed ‘incubus’ and ‘succubus’.  It is our Western culture way to ‘reject out of hand’ such ‘supernatural’ concepts yet Western culture continues to be hung up on ‘belief’ in the ‘reality’ of ‘nature’ as a ‘sourcing force’ and ‘nurture’ as a ‘sourcing force’ even though such ‘sorcery’ is not supported in modern physics.

Tied up in all of this is this question of whether it is possible to be ‘correct’ even while one’s cognitive reach is ‘incomplete’ due to the sparsely populated ‘invented realities’ we assemble from scratch (as if on a blank background) with language and grammar.  This question of how ‘incompleteness’ related to ‘correctness’ seems like an important question to resolve since our vision can never be ‘complete’ raising questions as to whether we should accept as ‘true’ any statement on its own since this absence of completeness sets us up for the cognitive dysfunction cited by La Fontaine; ‘La raison du plus fort est toujours la meilleure’.

In fact, this question of the completeness of an understanding expressed via language and grammar has been much pondered by philosophers, and their ponderings, taken together, inform us on the nature of the ‘shortfalls’ in sparsely populated ‘Invented Realities’ (this ‘incompleteness’ being compounded by the selection of particular, preferred ‘invented realities’ rather than opening up our understanding of reality to the coherencies in the confluence of multiple perspectives, as in the ‘sharing circle’) .  As Nietzsche points out, when we observe something, it is merely our perspective of something far more complex (the transforming relational continuum in which we are situationally included);

Our perspective is very limited and we capture it in simplistic ‘doer-deed’ language which replicates the ego based view of our notional powers of jumpstart sourcery’;

 “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’.

Because our individual perspectives are so fundamentally limited in scope, the notion of a ‘learning circle’ (as in indigenous aboriginal culture) arises wherein many different perspectives are brought into connective/interferential confluence as in ‘holography’ to cultivate the equivalent of ‘holographic cognition’.  Nietzsche describes this departure from the Western habit of selecting single perspectives from a multiple offering of single perspectives, as if to say that the best perspective captures ‘reality’, an approach that opens the way for “La raison du plus fort est toujours la meilleure” as the ‘selection mechanism’.   Why not accept a multiplicity of different perspectives, and extract from them a coherency-based connective confluence (the ‘holographic view’), as is what Nietzsche is essentially saying here;

From now on, my philosophical colleagues, let us be more wary of the dangerous old conceptual fairy-tale which has set up a ‘pure, will-less, painless, timeless, subject of knowledge’[cognition], let us be wary of the tentacles of such contradictory concepts as ‘pure reason’, ‘absolute spirituality’, ‘knowledge as such’: – here we are asked to think an eye which cannot be thought at all, an eye turned in no direction at all, an eye where the active and interpretative powers are to be suppressed, absent, but through which seeing still becomes a seeing-something, so it is an absurdity and non-concept of eye that is demanded. There is only a perspectival seeing, only a perspectival ‘knowing’; the more affects we are able to put into words about a thing, the more eyes, various eyes we are able to use for the same thing, the more complete will be our ‘concept’ of the thing, our ‘objectivity’. But to eliminate the will completely and turn off all the emotions without exception, assuming we could: well? would that not mean to castrate the intellect? . . .

Considering multiple different perspectives of “all my relations”, including wolf, eagle etc. as of equal importance leads us away from the abstract notion of the individual being able to single handedly (with a singular perspective) capture ‘reality’.  It makes more sense to understand the individual, with his language game play, as ‘inventing reality’ and inventing a very ‘bare-bones’ reality at that, … just to keep it clear and precise, the way a lot of Western folks like it (no one consults with ‘wolf’ to find out how well a human perspective based ‘invented reality’ captures the reality of the common ground of wolf and man.  But this is a question that has been explored in indigenous aboriginal philosophy that has led to the ‘sharing circle’ process of bringing into relational confluence a multiplicity of perspectives, rather than searching for ‘the best single perspective’ as in the European tradition, which degenerates into selecting the single perspective of ‘the most powerful’.

This same problem of ‘inventing reality’ through a ‘being-based construction’ that employs a limited number of ‘the best and most trusted perspectives’ is exposed, in modern physics, as fundamentally inadequate.  As Carlo Rovelli expresses this in ‘Quantum Reality’;

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’

‘Animals on animals’ includes humans and within this relational dynamic wherein everything is relationally dependent on everything (‘mitakuye oyasin’, … ‘all my relations’), there is no way that one can ‘back off out of it’ to get a perspective of ‘what is going on in the world’.

This impossibility of a comprehensive ‘perspective’ of ‘what is going on in the world’ as if from the perspective of a viewer outside of the world, leads one to think in the sort of terms of Wittgenstein and modern physics researchers, wherein one brings into confluence many different perspectives to harvest the relations across them, saving the purely relational cognition as the ‘reality’ and tossing out individual perspectives that were used co-cultivate the purely relational understanding of reality.

Modern physics researchers Geoffrey Chew and John Wheeler suggest the ‘surprise version of the game of Twenty Questions’ as a means of transcending the simple-minded game of selecting the ‘best of multiple perspectives’.  This approach, that develops a purely relational matrix based understanding without dependence on ‘things-in-themselves’ is described as ‘bootstrapping’;  As Chew observes;

[Geoffrey Chew]: “when you formulate a question, you have to have some basic concepts that you are accepting in order to formulate the question. But in the bootstrap approach, where the whole system represents a network of relationships without any firm foundation, the description of our subject can be begun at a great variety of different places. There isn’t any clear starting point. And the way our theory has developed in the last few years, we quite typically don’t know what questions to ask. We use consistency as the guide, and each increase in the consistency suggests something that is incomplete, but it rarely takes the form of a wel-l­defined question. We are going beyond the whole question­and­answer framework.”

Given that the real world of our relational experience is ‘relational’ and given that the ‘reality’ constructed with language and grammar is in terms of notional ‘things-in-themselves’ (beings imputed by ‘naming’ relational flow-forms) with the notional powers of ‘sourcing their own actions and accomplishments’ (“sorcery”) delivers an abstract ‘Invented Reality’ that is far from the ‘reality’ of our sensual relational experience, … why put it in precedence over our sensual relational reality?

That question has been explored earlier and explained via the Western public distraction over whether ‘nature’ or ‘nurture’ is the best way of viewing ‘reality’.  This is about as off-course as one can be, but by occupying everyone on a wild-goose chase of one type or the other, leaving no-one left to explore and ratify the purely relational understanding wherein the abstractions of ‘beings’ and ‘sourcing powers’ are not even invoked.  This ingrained Western culture ‘split’ on the question of whether reality is ‘nature’ or ‘nurture’ driven is deserving of Jonathan Swift’s critique in Gulliver’s travels wherein the people of Liliput and Blefescu split into two opposing camps on the issue of whether a boiled egg should be opened from the roundy end or the pointy end.

In Western culture, we have the ‘old age beliefs’ (‘nature’) versus the ‘new age beliefs’ (‘nurture’) and the understanding that neither are needed (both presume ‘beings’ with the power of ‘sourcing’ actions and developments, which distracts nearly the total Western culture populace from exploring the highest level ‘relational option’ wherein there is no assumption of either ‘being’ or ‘local sourcing’.

The ‘beingless’, ‘source-less’ reality, while it cannot be explicitly expressed in the manner of an ‘Invented Reality’, is expressible ‘indirectly’ (relationally) by way of poetic metaphor.   What metaphor can ‘avoid’ is the contructing of a cognitive impression that reduces relational forms within the transforming relational continuum, to local thing-in-themselves objects, as described in the following comment by Robert Denham;

We’ll let William Blake have the final word.  At the end of A Vision of the Last Judgment, Blake writes: “What it will be Questioned When the Sun rises do you not see a round Disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea.  O no no I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty.”  Blake is really talking about imaginative power here.  He is calling attention to the difference between those who see the sun only in terms of the simile, likening its fiery disk to a guinea (a gold coin), and those who see it metaphorically as a hallelujah chorus of the heavenly host.  Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a metaphor?  Our grasp can certainly take in the simile: we recognize the similarity between the bright, shiny sun and the shiny gold coin: it takes very little imaginative effort to see the guinea‑sun.  Seeing the hallelujah chorus, however, requires a greater imaginative reach, a reach beyond what we can grasp.  Would that we will continue to challenge those who might want to limit our imagination’s stopping at what we can grasp.

 — From: Robert D. Denham, ‘What’s a Meta For?’ Reynolds Lecture, Emory & Henry College, 28 March 2012

 

END OF EPILOGUE.

 

PERSONAL REFLECTIONS

 

What I have been exploring here in the above essay includes what I find to be a basic dysfunction in Western culture that cultivates collective psychosis that manifests most vigorously through sensitive individuals (the ‘miner’s canaries’) and for which the Western culture’s ‘solution’ is to drug (chemically lobotomize) the troubled ‘miner’s canaries so that they will acquiesce to ‘thinking like the Western culture majority’.   One might say that this is in spite of Giordano Bruno’s complaint (as he was taken off to be burned at the stake in Rome’s Campo dei Fiori for heresy in 1600) that ‘the majority has no monopoly on the truth’.

My point is that in Western culture, the sensitive minority (the ‘miner’s canaries’) whose disturbed state is deriving from the ambience of psychosis in the Western culture, are the ones that the culture deems ‘need fixing’.  Among these is a child of mine, myself, and several friends.  So, my experience is that there is a general culture-instigated psychosis that manifests most dramatically through the troubled minds of the sensitive ones, the so-called ‘miner’s canaries’, but it has never followed, in my personal reflections, that ‘the troubled miner’s canaries’ are the problem that needs resolving (how about the conditions in the mine?).

Nevertheless, the response of the Western culture collective that I know from living as a card carrying member therein, is to regard the ‘source’ of the problem of ‘schizophrenia’ and ‘bipolar disorder’ as originating in the interior of the individuals through which these psychotic behaviours manifest (the ‘miner’s canaries’) rather that understanding the ‘aberrant normality’ of the Western culture collective as the origin of psychotic behaviour that manifests through the ‘miner’s canaries’.

My thoughts go back to the anecdote of the drunk who has lost his wristwatch in the darkness and obscurity of a remote and unlit section of the street, who seeks out the well illuminated region beneath the streetlight to search for it because the searching conditions are much more favourable there.  This to me, reflects the behaviour of our Western social collective in response to the psychopathology that manifests through the most sensitive ones among us; i.e. instead of reflecting on our collective selves as the incubator of miner’s canary pathologies, which would have us investigate the dark and obscure social relational dynamics that the ‘miner’s canaries’ are situationally included in, we prefer to put the ‘canary’ under our analytical microscopes and search for an ‘internal source‘ of their aberrant (non-conforming) behaviour.

My point is that I don’t believe in ‘sourcery’.  There is no ‘sourcery’ in the transforming relational continuum; i.e. the world as understood in modern physics and there is no ‘sourcery’ in the indigenous aboriginal and Taoist view of ‘reality’.  ‘Sourcery’ is an abstract artefact of language and grammar which comes from first inventing ‘beings’ by ‘naming’ and then granting (the-now-existing-because-we-named-them) ‘beings’ the powers of ‘sourcing’ (authoring) actions and developments with ‘grammar’.  So, there is little point in exploring the interior of a ‘miner’s canary’ in search of the ‘source’ of its psychosis, just as there is little point in exploring the interior of a hurricane in search of the source of the destructive authoring/sourcing power of the hurricane.  In other words, searching for the source of psychosis in the interior of the ‘miner’s canary’ is a distraction, … a ‘wild goose chase’.  Yet, this ‘distraction’ seems to be firmly entrenched within the Western cultural psyche so that the social collective spontaneously applies ‘psychoanalysis’ to the ‘miner’s canary’ rather than to its collective self.

Since the Western culture distinguishes itself by putting ‘left brain analytical intellection into an unnatural primacy over relational intuition (erroneously termed ‘right brain’ cognition), those ‘miner’s canaries that become ‘psychotic’ in this ambience of culture-mandated madness, are treated by the majority (who are themselves disturbed and frightened by aberrant behaviours arising in loved ones) in such a manner as to restore the ‘miners canaries’ to the (psychotic) ‘normality’ enjoyed by the ‘normals’ that surround them.  This attitude derives from the assumption that the psychotic behaviour of the ‘miner’s canaries’ is ‘sourced’ from within their own interiors (the social collective in which they are situationally included is not seen as having anything to do with it, consistent with the abstract model of the ‘human’ as an ‘independently-existing thing-in-itself’).

Restoring the aberrantly-behaving ‘miners’ canaries’ to Western culture ‘psychotic-normality’ may require a lobotomy (chemical or physical) to ensure the (unnatural but Western culture normalcy of) dominance of the analytical ‘left brain’ cognition in directing the individual’s behaviour, rather than allowing the individual’s behaviour to be inductively shaped by the relational dynamic she is situationally included in (e.g. relational dynamics that are in a natural primacy in the understanding of ‘reality’ of modern physics, indigenous aboriginal culture, Taoism and Advaita Vedanta).

This unnatural inversion of cognitive ‘levels of reality’ which puts ‘beings-with-sourcing powers’ aka  ‘rationality’, at the top, has been identified as deriving from ‘logical error’ termed ‘petitio principii’.   While this ‘aberrant thinking’ has become the Western cultural ‘norm’, it induces rejection and resistance from a minority termed ‘the miner’s canaries’.  This ‘logical error’ (petitio principii) phenomenon has been identified by those who study, at the philosophical level, the logic that informs social behaviurs; e.g. the following statements by systems scientists Martine Dodds Taljaard and György Jaros, and by ‘Psychiatria Democratica’s’ Franca Ongaro Basaglia

The Name of the Devil is Suboptimization’

“The above aphorism, attributed to Kenneth Boulding, points to the inherent weakness characterizing the mindset and socio‐economic, political, educational and managerial practices of Western Industrial society as it developed over the past 300 years. It has its basis in the analytic‐reductionistic scientific paradigm, which, despite the remarkable technological applications it spawned, is inappropriate, conflict‐generating and dysfunctional in a world characterized by global interconnectedness and mutual interdependence …” — György Jaros and Martine Dodds-Taljaard

Similarly, as Franca Ongaro Basaglia [Psychiatria Democratica] observes;

“The problem of psychiatric illness and its institutions developed in our society primarily as a question of public order. It came into being as a socio-political problem, namely the defense of the healthy and working community from elements that would not conform to its modes of behaviour and rules of efficiency. Isolated care and treatment justified the segregation and internment of the ‘ill’ who were considered less for their illness than their potential as disruptive elements. This focus on abnormality and deviance, especially social disruption, meant that subjective suffering was not addressed – nor were the diverse variables giving rise to psychiatric problems. Despite decades of public concern and specific legislation opposing this approach, scientific theories, professional bodies and institutions have resisted abandoning the provision of a style of care that protects society to the detriment of those cared for.” (Franca Ongaro Basaglia, Int. J. Soc. Psychiat., 1992, 38, p36). see http://www.human-nature.com/hraj/trieste.html 

In both cases, these authors are complaining about the knee-jerk assumption, in the case of the aberrant behaviour of the individual within the collective, that the source of the aberrant behaviour must lie within the individual rather than within the collective.  Understandably, it is easier to ‘fix an individual’ than to ‘fix a collective’, however, the signs and symptoms suggest that the problem of ‘psychiatric illness’, while it may manifest most obviously through the aberrant behaviour of the sensitive ‘miner’s canaries’, is not ‘sourced’ from within the interior of the ‘miner’s canaries’ as is the common Western culture assumption; an assumption that is contested in the above arguments of Martine Dodds Taljaard and György Jaros, … and also, by the arguments of Franca Ongaro Basaglia

ψ

In the common ‘science’ [pre-modern physics Newtonian science as commonly understood and employed] that is foundational to Western culture cognitive normalcy, the concept of ‘sourcery’ as the instigator of actions and developments is ‘taken for granted’; e.g. the ‘whorl’ or ‘whirlpool’ is assumed to source the ‘stirring up’ of the flow, … or is it instead that ‘the flow’ is assumed to source the ‘stirring up’ of the ‘whorl’?   This is the topological ambiguity in the ‘nature’ or ‘nurture’ debates.  The answer to it, given by modern physics, as in the indigenous aboriginal culture understanding of ‘reality’, is that NEITHER ‘nature’ NOR ‘nurture’ is the correct answer for the simple reason that there is no such thing as ‘sourcing’  (‘sorcery’). Therefore, both of the two, mutually opposing explanations (the whorl sources the flow, and, the flow sources the whorl) which are implicit in the ‘nature’ or ‘nurture’ dichotomy, are without validity or merit in the relational reality of our actual experience.

The whorl in the flow is ‘appearance’ (‘apparition’), as Schroedinger, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche have pointed out, and does not signify ‘two separate entities’ endowed with ‘sourcing powers’ as is the common impression coming from the ‘language’ based archetypal, topological dichotomy of ‘inhabitant’ and ‘habitat’.

As modern physics (relativity) is informing us, there are NOT ‘two things’ in this case, as cognitively implied by language.  Language employs the abstraction of ‘naming’ and when we ‘name’ a relational feature in the flow, we impute ‘persisting thing-in-itself being’ to the named form.  The whorl in the flow is ‘appearances’ and there is no ‘inhabitant’ -‘habitat’ split verifiable by our relational experience; i.e. such a split arises only cognitively, when we use language and grammar to psychologically impute being and sourcing powers, in which case, the splitting of the named entities of ‘inhabitant’ and ‘habitat’ comes to us as a cognitive abstraction; i.e. a ‘re-presentation’, in abstract terms of beings with sourcing powers, of a purely relational phenomenon.   There is no such abstract dichotomy, as far as our actual relational experience is concerned, which suggests, in turn, that relational understanding is ‘beyond direct and explicit expression in words’. (Wittgenstein’s final proposition in Tractatus Logico Philosophicus’ is 7. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.)

The notional ‘splitting apart’ of ‘inhabitant’ and ‘habitat’ or ‘self’ and ‘other’ is nothing other than language-based intellectual abstraction, which, while it plays a foundational role in Western culture ‘Invented Reality’ constructions, is unsupported by our relational experience of inclusion within a transforming relational continuum, as remains the primary understanding in modern physics, indigenous aboriginal ‘reality’, Taoism and Advaita Vedanta.

What this artificial ‘inhabitant-habitat’ splitting is pointing us to is the ‘double error’ or ‘petitio principii built into the foundations of Western culture cognition that Nietzsche is complaining about, and also systems scientist Martine Dodds-Taljaard and psychiatrist Franca Ongaro Basaglia.  In other words, the aberrant thinking does not originate within the person manifesting aberrant behaviour (the miner’s canary), and while it would be convenient to say that it originated within the ambient consciousness of the cultural collective the individual manifesting aberrant behaviour is included in, … that would (erroneously) suggest a mental splitting apart into two pieces, the individual and the collective.

The individual in the collective, … and/or the whorl in the flow, are not TWO SEPARATE THINGS.   There is only the flow, and the whorl in the flow is ‘appearances’.  It is in the misconception of TWO SEPARATE THINGS that the ambiguous dichotomy of ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’ arises; i.e. In the real world of our relational experience, there is no split into ‘inhabitant’ and ‘habitat’, … that notional ‘splitting’ is the product of our intellect that employs language and grammar to reify relational flow-forms so that they are conceived of as ‘forms in the flow’ where ‘forms’ and ‘flow’ (TWO SEPARATE THINGS).  Language and grammar have the power of cognitively imputing persisting existence by naming, in this case, by naming that imputes the persisting existence of two things (whorl and flow) where there is only one thing; i.e. the transforming relational continuum aka ‘the Tao’.

Western culture promotes erroneous thinking in elevating the abstract split-apart pseudo-reality of the ‘inhabitant-habitat’ dichotomy into an unnatural primacy over the relational form in the flow ‘appearance’ where there is no such split (the split comes from naming; i.e. from assigning two different names which imply two different ‘persisting beings’ to whorl and to flow where there are not two things but only one transforming relational continuum.

The first error (of Western culture’s ‘double error’ identified by Nietzsche) is to allow language and grammar to impress on our ‘cognitive understanding’ the notional existence of two separate entities (whorl and flow, inhabitant and habitat) where there is only one entity; i.e. ‘the Tao’ or the flow-continuum of modern physics.  The second error is for the Western believers in this split, to split into opposing factions based on whether ‘the whorl stirs up (sources) the flow’ [the ‘nature’-in-primacy advocates aka ‘conservatives’] or whether ‘the flow stirs up (sources) the whorl’ [the ‘nurture’-in-primacy advocates aka ‘liberals’ or ‘new-agers’].

It is one thing for the social collective to split into two factions based on a notional division into two separate and opposing ‘pseudo’- ‘Invented Realities’ that exist only in the abstract cognitive constructions stimulated by language and grammar, but quite another for the (sensitive) individual to split the self into a self-and-other combo to provide the necessary basis for ‘re-unification’; i.e. for a ‘union with oneself’.  This need for a ‘union with oneself’ derives from the Western culture promotion, through language and grammar based intellection, of the ‘split self’ as in the popular Western culture abstract dichotomy of ‘inhabitant’ and ‘habitat’.

Once one (intellectually though clearly not experientially) splits apart ‘inhabitant’ and ‘habitat’ or ‘whorl’ and ‘flow’, one has to choose whether the flow is sourcing the whorl or whether the whorl is sourcing the flow (the ‘nature’ or ‘nurture’ dichotomy).  The ‘nature’ option puts the ‘sourcery’ clearly out front on centre stage so that the ‘inhabitant’ is the shaper of the ‘habitat’.  The ‘nurture’ option disperses the ‘sourcery’ in the shadowy and indistinct ‘hinterland’ of habitat and construes this darkness/obscurity as the shaper of the ‘inhabitant’. This combination of the radiant central light of the Christian God and the seductive obscurity of the Prince of Darkness come to mind as the dichotomous ‘sourcerors’ in this arrangement.

In modern physics as in the indigenous aboriginal cultural understanding of ‘reality’, there is no ‘sourcery’ and thus there is no confusion as to whether the ‘sourcing’ of actions and developments is inside-outward asserting (‘nature’) or outside-inward inducing (‘nurture’).

The Western culture associates ‘normality’ with ‘belief in sourcery’ (either ‘nature’ or ‘nurture’ cans serve as ‘sourcerors’); i.e. either the conservative or the liberal view will serve the Western psychological need for making ‘sourcery’ the underpinning of the ‘Invented Reality’ ). The belief in sourcery instructs the believer to identify a local source of ‘good emergent developments’ and/or the local source of ‘bad emergent developments’.  Hence the structure of the Western ‘justice’ rewards-and-punishments systems.  Meanwhile, in modern physics and in the indigenous aboriginal culture outlook, there is no ‘sourcery’ and the origin of unfolding phenomena (relational phenomena may manifest as resonance and dissonance) is relational (‘mitakuye oyasin’), therefore there is no one person to ‘blame’ or to ‘credit’ for particular manifest unfoldings.  The misplaced credits for emergent developments subjectively deemed ‘good’ or ‘bad’ derive from the first mistaken assumption of ‘sourcery’.  This assumption of there being a ‘local source’ of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ developments (rather than relational consonance or dissonance) underlies the ‘aberrant normality’ that manifests in Western culture, that stems from Western culture instilled belief in ‘sourcery’.

The aberrant behaviour of the ‘miner’s canary’ can be understood in terms of Giordano Bruno’s comment; ‘The majority has no monopoly on the truth (in regard to what constitutes reality); i.e. the sensitive/intuitive individual may become resistant to what she is feeling is aberrant that the collective is defining as ‘normal’.  This ‘sounds like a reasonable theory’ but what about if we consider the indigenous aboriginal that holds on to the indigenous aboriginal culture while living in the midst of a Western society.  The mental stress of the ‘miner’s canary’ is not present because the indigenous aboriginal that is still in harmony with the indigenous aboriginal cultural beliefs is not subject to the psychological conflict that the miner’s canary is; i.e. it is the friends and family of the Western culture ‘miner’s canary-in-distress’ that seek to restore her to ‘Western culture normality’ by giving her a chemical lobotomy (administering psychotropic medications), if necessary (actually, it is the common Western-culture therapeutic approach) to restore left brain rationality to its culturally ‘normal’ (but ‘unnatural’) primacy over relational experience.  see, for example, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/out-the-darkness/201603/chemical-lobotomy

Of course, the alternative to the chemical lobotomy that returns the individual to the Western cultural aberrant normality and thus re-establishes ‘normal relations with Western culture-conformant relatives and friends) is for the psychologically troubled individual to absent themselves from the Western culture with its well-wishing ‘lobotomizing you for your own good’ relatives and friends, and to re-ensconce themselves  in a Taoist or indigenous aboriginal culture wherein one’s friends do not forcibly demand one’s return to one’s compliance with the aberrant thinking of the Western culture.  This is hypothetically possible without breaking off one’s familial ties and friendships within the Western culture.  That is, who knows what ‘weird realities’ [or what more natural understandings unlike our weird cultural normal ‘invented realities’] others around us may be ‘understanding’, so long as they maintain a harmonious physical-relational interfacing with the collective in which they/we are included.

The ‘chemical lobotomy’ … ‘to restore one to Western (aberrant) normality) … is therefore not necessary as a long term treatment.  In fact, it is a treatment designed firstly and fore-mostly (as Ongaro Basaglia observes) to resolve the anxieties of Western culture family and friends in situations of psychological distress that manifests not so much in the observed behaviour of a ‘miner’s canary’ loved one but moreso in the pscychological distress of the loving relatives and friends of the ‘miner’s canary’.   That is, the distress is felt less in the individual undergoing a ‘psychotic episode’ who may even be enjoying her liberation from Western culture imposed ‘psychological lobotomization’ than in the psyche’s of friends and relatives of the individual ‘miner’s canary’ experiencing the ‘psychotic episode’.  It is the pain in the psyches of the ‘normals’ (the loving family members and friends) whose culturally conformant behaviours are a firmly fixed ‘stake-in-the-ground’ that has them pursue the restoration of culturally conformant behaviours in their aberrant miners canary family member, by way of chemical lobotomization, as a means of relieving their (the family’s) anxiety.

“The problem of psychiatric illness and its institutions developed in our society primarily as a question of public order. It came into being as a socio-political problem, namely the defense of the healthy and working community from elements that would not conform to its modes of behaviour and rules of efficiency. Isolated care and treatment justified the segregation and internment of the ‘ill’ who were considered less for their illness than their potential as disruptive elements.” —  Franca Ongaro Basaglia

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WARNING !!!: This essay is NOT recommending that those on ‘lobotomizing medications’ should simply cast them off, … not without developing and installing a competent psychological foundation to serve in place of the Western self-dividing psychological foundation that is the source of the rampant [‘divided self’] psychopathology in Western society.  This is a non-trivial task while one lives and works within a culture that is continually cultivating such psychosis; i.e. one cannot just flip a switch and start understanding ‘reality’ in a new way wherein there is no place for ‘sourcery’, a psychological concept/belief that happens to be the basis of Western human ego that figures largely in the psychosis inducing Western ‘Invented Reality’.

In other words, the Western-acculturated individual who wishes to come off ‘lobotomizing psychiatric mediations’ needs to undertake a ‘psychological reprogramming’ that dissolves/removes the Western culture conditioned ‘sorcery-based values’ as used to credit individuals, nations, organizations [notional named-into-existence things-in-themselves] with the powers of ‘sourcing’ of ‘good’ actions and developments and/or the sourcing of ‘bad’ actions and developments.  Such problematic (dysfunction inducing) knee-jerk ‘good’ or ‘bad’ judgements of notional (naming-instantiated) ‘independently-existing-beings’ on the basis of their ‘sourcing’ of actions and developments must give way to relational understanding wherein ‘sourcing’ does not even come into play.

This ‘cultural reprogramming’ may not come easily for many long-time Western culture adherents, since one’s culturally ingrained valuing of one’s ‘divided self’ on the (egotist) basis of one’s powers of sourcing actions and developments that the social collective may judge to be ‘good’ or ‘bad’ (and reward/punish accordingly) is not so easily ‘shaken off’.  There must first be a shift in values from good or bad sorcery to the cultivating of resonance/dissonance (purely relational concepts that are the flip sides of a single coinage).  For example, in the flow of congested freeway traffic, the individual driver may cultivate harmony by simply ‘backing off’ and swerving or changing lanes relative to others (a relations-transforming dynamic) or likewise by ‘accelerating’ for this same purpose’, both of which actions may be induced by opportunity to transform the relational dynamic one is situationally included in, in such as manner as to transform impending/unfolding relational dissonance into relational harmony (reminiscent of the ‘Bodhisattva ethic’ of Buddhism).

 

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