We can’t build a city in the same Wilderness twice for the Wilderness is not the same Wilderness and the city is not the same city.

(Shifting understanding from Euclidian space to Spherical space)

The proposition “We can’t build a city in the same Wilderness twice for the Wilderness is not the same Wilderness and the city is not the same city” flags a difference in how we understand reality associated with differing conceptualizations of space.  (Spherical space is not the same as Euclidian space; i.e. In the (spherical) space of our sensory experience, as the cultivated area grows, the Wilderness area reciprocally shrinks; i.e This is NEITHER GROWTH nor SHRINKAGE per se (i.e. GROWTH and SHRINKAGE are both flatspace concepts), it is TRANSFORMATION (‘TRANSFORMATION’ is a more ‘dimensionally-competent’ spherical space conceptualization).

BOTTOM LINE: Based on the testimony of our real-life sensory experience, there is no such thing as GROWTH, there is only TRANSFORMATION.

‘GROWTH’ depends on the abstract concept of LOCAL (i.e. a locally existing thing-in-itself as the ‘stub’ that is undergoing ‘GROWTH’.

‘GROWTH’ is simpler than TRANSFORMATION because it makes an abstract splitting between content and container or ‘inhabitant’ and ‘habitat’ which conjures up the abstract concept of LOCAL existence so that we can develop a simpler system of language and grammar to represent change LOCALLY as with the INHABITANT without having to deal, AT THE SAME TIME, with simultaneous changes in the HABITAT as is the case with TRANSFORMATION.

That is, because we can notionally SEPARATE AND ISOLATE the FIGURE from the GROUND as if they were TWO separate things (i.e. as if the INHABITANT and the HABITAT were TWO separate things), … we can reduce the INEFFABLE-because-NONLOCAL to the EFFABLE-because-LOCAL.

CAREFUL!   … because some wise-guy is going to pull a fast one and decide to convey change as if it were SOURCED by the HABITAT (GROUND) instead of being SOURCED by the INHABITANT (FIGURE) which leads to a language and grammar based unresolvable paradox known as the Wind-and-Flag paradox in Zen; i.e. does the flapping of the flag source the wind or does the wind source the flapping of the flag?

That is; Do the dynamics of the INHABITANT source changes in the HABITAT or do the dynamics of the HABITAT source changes in the INHABITANT?

All we wanted to do was to make things simpler for talking purposes by separating FIGURE-and-GROUND-as-ONE into FIGURE-and-GROUND-as TWO so that we could ‘hold the GROUND still’ while we explained what was going on in the GROUND (as ‘dependent variable’) as if sourced by the FIGURE (‘independent variable’).  Of course, someone else had to come along and spoil the game by ‘holding the FIGURE still’ (dependent variable) and explaining what is going as if sourced from the GROUND (independent variable).  Will the real SORCERER please stand up and identify itself; is it the FIGURE that is SOURCING changes in the GROUND or is the GROUND that is SOURCING changes in the FIGURE?

Do CONTINENTS DRIFT?  or DOES SEAFLOOR SPREAD?

Something tells me that we are bumping into the DOUBLE ERROR problem raised by Nietzsche as in the construct LIGHTNING FLASHES and FIRE BURNS  (Nishitani) where we ECLIPSE TRANSFORMATION by using language and grammar to reduce it to LOCAL SOURCING of actions and developments.  If the spherical form of the earth were understood in Wave-field/fluid terms then the CONTINENTS DRIFTING could be FLUID EXTRUSION and the SEAFLOOR SPREADING COULD BE FLUID SUBDUCTION.  That is, the whole thing would be fluid as it actually is, but our imposing of NAMES on some of the longer persisting flow-features facilitates our intellectual reduction of the NONLOCAL FIGURES-IN-GROUND-as-ONE TRANSFORMATION to LOCAL FIGURES in-GROUND-as-TWO separate ontologies.

So, the conceptualizing that blocks the fluid mode of understanding is the DOUBLE ERROR of NAMING and GRAMMAR since even though continents are included in the transforming fluid continuum, our need to EFFABLE-ize such NONLOCAL-and-thus-INEFFABLE fluid goings-on is strong enough that we seem willing to accept the DOUBLE ERROR imperfections (including ‘ambiguity’) that are the PRICE of this DOUBLE ERROR based EFFABLE-ization.

BUT WATCH OUT!  … because in making the artificial split-up of TRANSFORMATION wherein FIGURE-and-GROUND-are-ONE (which is what makes TRANSFORMATION NONLOCAL and IMPLICIT and thus ‘ineffable’), … by way of the DOUBLE ERROR (of NAMING and GRAMMAR), into FIGURE-and-GROUND-as-TWO (which establishes LOCAL EXPLICIT existence of the FIGURE and thus ‘effability’), we set up the (abstract) conditions of LOCAL SOURCING of actions and developments, but with an innate AMBIGUITY as pointed out above; i.e.

Do CONTINENTS DRIFT?  or DOES SEAFLOOR SPREAD?

This is the same DOUBLE ERROR based ambiguity that divides us, as WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS into a bipolar duality of ‘conservatives’ and ‘liberals’.  The CONSERVATIVE view of reality (the individual is the jumpstart source of assertive actions and developments) and the LIBERAL view or reality (the social collective sources the opening up of opportunity that induces the individual’s assertive actions) and antithetically opposing views of reality BOTH OF WHICH DERIVE FROM THE DOUBLE ERROR of language and grammar.

So, we have to invent NAMING and GRAMMAR to impute the power of SOURCING actions and developments to either/both the individual and/or the social collective.  As a matter of fact, we can use the DOUBLE ERROR to animate (within the abstraction constructing intellect) whatever we want, humans, animals, continents, birds, corporations, races, but in spite of all that sort of fragmenting talk, what is going on is TRANSFORMATION that we all share inclusion in.

In Nietzsche’s terms, this all comes about (ambiguity included) through our invoking of the DOUBLE ERROR.  The FIRST ERROR is NAMING that imputes LOCAL THING-IN-ITSELF BEING to whatever the NAMING is attached to, while the SECOND ERROR of GRAMMAR conflates the FIRST ERROR by imputing to ‘IT’ (the NAMING-instantiated thing-in-itself) the notional power of SOURCING actions and development.

For example ‘LIGHTNING FLASHES’.   This NAMING-and-GRAMMAR construction creates the impression of LOCAL SOURCING of actions and development as characterizes “GROWTH”.  E.g. ‘the city is GROWING’.

This positivist assertion makes no mention of the reciprocal SHRINKING of the Wilderness, which would be fine if the ‘GROWING’ was transpiring in a FLAT SPACE of infinite extents, however, if it is transpiring in the real world of our actual sensory experience where space is spherical in the sense that “GROWTH” of human developments is reciprocated by the “SHRINKAGE” of the undeveloped ‘Wilderness’ and not in a clean and neat explicitly definable zones of GROWTH and SHRINKAGE but in a kind of intermixing fluid manner as when muddy river waters encroach into aquamarine ocean waters.

Because the symbolic architecture of the language we are using employs NAMING and GRAMMAR within the DOUBLE ERROR to REPRESENT “CHANGE”, this system does not have the representational capability to articulate TRANSFORMATION which is multi-dimensional.  This recalls how Newton was stumped when he tried to express in mathematical language, three or more bodies moving under one another’s simultaneous mutual influence, while developing the mathematics of his ‘Newtonian physics’. He ‘gave up’ in exasperation, saying;

 “An exact solution for three bodies, exceeds, if I am not mistaken, the force of any human mind”

Since such 3+ body problems appear to be the ‘general case’, it is no wonder that we often have to struggle to REDUCE the real problem to terms wherein we can articulate a description in ambiguous ‘two-body’ terms such as ‘male’ and ‘female’ asserting and accommodating (i.e. ambiguity arises as to which of the DUO  is the SOURCE of how much of the dynamic), as also in the case of continents drifting and seafloor spreading.

Do CONTINENTS DRIFT?  or DOES SEAFLOOR SPREAD?

Can you see what is at the bottom on this ambiguity?  Yes, … that’s right, the architecture of language and grammar limits us in our constructing of representations of our sensory experience and we are thus forced to make reductions as we fashion our representations of reality so as TO FIT THE LIMITATIONS OF LANGUAGE AND GRAMMAR.

Newton’s inability to capture the three-body problem in his mathematical scheme of representation of reality is a case in point.  Benjamin Whorf points out that this limitation that Newton ran into, was something we (Western Culture Adherents) had already built into language, suggesting that we needed a more dimensionally-capable language, as also suggested by Bohm.  The following two citations by Whorf and Bohm are relevant here, in pointing out how the architecture of language (which varies across cultures) limits and DUMBS DOWN, by varying degrees, our expressing of our sensory experience (i.e. of inclusion in the transforming relational continuum).

As Whorf notes;

From the form-plus-substance dichotomy the philosophical views most traditionally characteristic of the “Western world” have derived huge support. Here belong materialism, psychophysical parallelism, physics–at least in its traditional Newtonian form–and dualistic views of the universe in general. Indeed here belongs almost everything that is “hard, practical common sense.” Monistic, holistic, and relativistic views of reality appeal to philosophers and some scientists, but they are badly handicapped in appealing to the “common sense” of the Western average man–not because nature herself refutes them (if she did, philosophers could have discovered this much), but because they must be talked about in what amounts to a new language. “Common sense,” as its name shows, and “practicality” as its name does not show, are largely matters of talking so that one is readily understood. It is sometimes stated that Newtonian space, time, and matter are sensed by everyone intuitively, whereupon relativity is cited as showing how mathematical analysis can prove intuition wrong. This, besides being unfair to intuition, is an attempt to answer offhand question (1) put at the outset of this paper, to answer which this research was undertaken. Presentation of the findings now nears its end, and I think the answer is clear. The offhand answer, laying the blame upon intuition for our slowness in discovering mysteries of the Cosmos, such as relativity, is the wrong one. The right answer is: Newtonian space, time, and matter are no intuitions. They are recepts from culture and language. That is where Newton got them.” — Benjamin Whorf

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In other words, because our language and grammar have been built for ease of sharing our complex experience, we end up not sharing our full-blown complex experience but a reductive reconceptualizing of it which simplifies it so as to render it more easily share-able.   The challenge thus arises for us WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS, who inform ourselves with KEEP-IT-SIMPLE-STUPID reductions that we have built into the architecture of our language, …. to develop a NEW LANGUAGE ARCHITECTURE that backs off on the DUMBING DOWN which has become a CRAZY-MAKER.

David Peat describes, in Blackfoot Physics, how David Bohm set out to architect a language to overcome the DUMBING DOWN built into European languages;

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

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

 A few months before his death, Bohm met with a number of Algonkian speakers and was struck by the perfect bridge between their language and worldview and his own exploratory philosophy. What to Bohm had been major breakthroughs in human thought — quantum theory, relativity, his implicate order and rheomode – were part of the everyday life and speech of the Blackfoot, Mic Maq, Cree and Ojibwaj.” – F. David Peat, ‘Blackfoot Physics’

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With this point about the incompleteness of languages in hand, in regard to our need for a more comprehensive language architecture, we can revisit the findings of our earlier discussion which point to where the weaknesses in our current languages lie, and the manner in which they limit and distort our language and grammar based conceptualizing of the sensory reality of our actual experience;

BOTTOM LINE: Based on the testimony of our real-life sensory experience, there is no such thing as GROWTH, there is only TRANSFORMATION. 

‘GROWTH’ depends on the abstract concept of LOCAL (i.e. a locally existing thing-in-itself as the ‘stub’ that is undergoing ‘GROWTH’.

‘GROWTH’ is simpler than TRANSFORMATION because it makes an abstract splitting between content and container or ‘inhabitant’ and ‘habitat’ which conjures up the abstract concept of LOCAL existence so that we can develop a simpler system of language and grammar to represent change LOCALLY as with the INHABITANT without having to deal, AT THE SAME TIME, with simultaneous changes in the HABITAT as is the case with TRANSFORMATION.

This is the point where, in the earlier discussion, the WARNING FLAG goes up because while we can use the DOUBLE ERROR to notionally SEPARATE AND ISOLATE the FIGURE from the GROUND as if they were TWO separate things (i.e. as if the INHABITANT and the HABITAT were TWO separate things), … we are, in effect, reducing the INEFFABLE-because-NONLOCAL to the EFFABLE-because-LOCAL.

We need to remember, as the EAST and modern physics does, that ‘The Tao that can be told is not the true Tao’.  In other words, the effable reduction is not ‘reality’, the ineffable is the ‘reality’.  We can’t articulate it or capture it in voyeur visualizable representations, but it is the reality of our sensual experiencing of inclusion in the Wave-field aka the Tao.

The drawings of M.C. Escher struggle with the project of garnering a view of ourselves as included in something greater than ourselves. While visualization can’t ‘go the distance’, this is the basic ‘delivery’ of our sensory experience of inclusion in the transforming relational continuum aka the Wave-field aka the Tao.

This gives us pause to reflect on why we WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS seem to have fallen into the habit of putting more trust in our DOUBLE ERROR based intellectual-visual language constructions such as CONTINENTS DRIFT and SEAFLOORS SPREAD (ambiguous NAME-and-GRAMMAR based LOCAL SOURCING abstractions) than in our sensory experience based INTUITION of inclusion in NONLOCAL TRANSFORMATION, the latter as affirmed in modern physics.

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