NAMING: The Psychosis-Brewing Sorcery of Western Culture

Synopsis:

What is evidently missing, for the ‘miner’s canary’ in Western society, is a social environment that is already onboard in supporting the natural primacy of relational experience with its ‘full heart of inspiration’ over a ‘normal’ Western social environment that puts swollen-head ego-based intellection into an unnatural primacy.  An environment permeated by the prevalence of ‘the full heart of inspiration’ tends to form in the psychiatric hospitalization phase in the empathic relational dynamic co-cultivated among ‘miner’s canaries’. 

However, this revitalizing environment is abruptly removed when the ‘canary’ is seen as having ‘recovered’ [i.e. Western medicine sees the source of psychosis as developing within the ‘miner’s canary’ (‘within the boil’/’inhabitant’) and not within the ‘flow’/’habitat’ as if ‘boil’/’inhabitant’ and ‘flow’ /’habitat’ were a duality).   The occluded ‘third’ option (Jantsch level 1 reality) gives an understanding of the problem of chronic psychosis in Western culture as arising from the Western culture ‘splitting’ apart of ‘boil’ and ‘flow’; i.e. suggesting two ambiguously reversible modes of ‘beings’ with the powers of ‘sourcing’ actions and developments, … commonly termed ‘nature’ (reality level 3) and ‘nurture’ (reality level 2).  While the individual is seen as the ‘sorceror’ in level 3 (nature), the collective is seen as the ‘sorceror’ in  level 2 (nurture).

This Western social polarization (conservative versus liberal) over the question of ‘which (level 3 reality or level 2 reality) is in a natural primacy over which?’ obscures the level 1 option wherein the ‘boil’ is not separate from the ”flow’ but is ‘appearance’ (i.e. there is no ‘sorcery’  in level 1 reality.).  Thus there is a psychological split between (a) ego-based belief where one sees oneself (named singular entities such as one’s nation, corporation or other name-anointed ‘thing-in-itself) as the ”boil’ that has the power of sourcing the flow of actions and developments, and (b) ego-based belief that sees one’s collective (family, nation, corporation) as having the power of inductively sourcing the actions and developments of one’s individual self. This schizophrenic division of ‘reality’ seen as either level 3 (nature) or level 2 (nurture) obscures (‘eclipses’) level 1 reality and this ‘eclipsing’ of level 1 reality is the source of Western culture psychopathology.

In other words, the ‘miner’s canary’ is on the right track in seeking to heal the split, but it can’t ‘heal the split’ within itself since ‘the self’ is not a ‘thing-in-itself’ that is split; i.e. the relational form in the flow is an ‘appearance’ and not a ‘thing-in-itself’ so the ‘healing’ must occur in the collective wherein the collective understands that there is no habitat-inhabitant split.  In other words, psychosis derives from the ego based belief in the ‘self’ as an ‘independent thing-in-itself’ with its own powers of sourcing actions and developments and the associated confusing of whether (a) the sourcing is by way of the inside-outward asserting of individuals to ‘source’ the dynamic of the collective, or whether it is by way of (b), outside-inward inductive sourcing from the collective that shapes the dynamic of the individual.  [This innately ‘un-resolvable, self-dividing’ (schizophrenia inducing) ambiguity derives from the abstract language-concocted abstraction of ‘sorcery’].

Healing of the ‘divided self’ is therefore NOT the healing of a ‘sick self’, as Western culture would have it, but the healing of the ego’s notion of the self as a ‘thing-in-itself’ hence ‘a divided self’.  ‘Healing’ is therefore to be found by way of ‘putting the divided self back together’, but by ‘letting go’ of the impression of the ‘divided self’, as in ‘mitakuye oyasin’ (all my relations) and as in ‘The surprise version of the game of Twenty Questions’ and as in ‘the indigenous aboriginal learning circle’ where the participants can come to understand themselves as inclusions in something greater than themselves that they can come to know and embrace by way of inspiration that fills the heart, … rather than by the ‘divided self’ way of  … ego that swells the head.

Meanwhile, we continue to navigate within a Western culture that promotes ‘sorcery’ based ‘psychosis’ as ‘normality’.

He who blames the sorcery of harmful actions on others and credits himself with the sorcery of helpful actions has a long way to go on his journey.

  He who blames the sorcery of harmful actions on both himself and others and credits both himself and others with sorcery of helpful actions is halfway there.

  He who blames or credits no-one with the sorcery of actions, harmful or helpful (i.e. he who sees through the ego-based illusion of sorcery) has arrived. —

NAMING: The Psychosis-Brewing Sorcery of Western Culture

Author’s Prologue: 

We live in a world that is strongly influenced by ‘Western culture’, and Western culture, as this essay suggests, is the brewer of psychosis through its unnatural promotion of belief that the individual relational form is a ‘being’, with notional ‘independent thing-in-itself’ existence, which ‘leads in’ to the construction of an intellectually ‘Invented Reality’ conjured up by ‘naming’  wherein ‘the being’ is deemed (by the intellect) to be the SOURCE of ‘its own’ actions and developments.

The impression that comes with this belief in ‘sorcery’ is ‘ego‘; i.e. – the (language and intellect supported) impression of ‘thing-in-itself being’ that is the full and sole source of ‘one’s own’ actions and accomplishments.  The ‘ego’ is this misguided (psychosis inducing) conceptualizing of oneself as a ‘sorcerer’.   Western culture cultivates this psychosis-en-masse by collectively honoring and rewarding the (notional) ‘sorcerers’ of ‘good acts and developments’ and by collectively defiling and punishing the (notional) ‘sorcerors’ of ‘bad acts and developments’.  The relational essence of ‘reality’ is eclipsed and ‘locked out’ by this Western culture induced mass psychosis.

‘Reality’ in the indigenous aboriginal cultural understanding is purely relational and the abstract concept of ‘sorcery’ does not arise (there is no need for ‘sorcery’ in a relational understanding of reality).  For example, we have the option to understand the transforming outer face of the earth in the purely relational terms of ‘seafloor spreading as contrasted with ‘continental drift’. While the former is the experience-based physical reality, the latter is part of an intellectualized ‘Invented Reality’ fabricated by ‘naming’ the ‘forms’ that we ‘see’ (imagine) in the flow, in the same manner as imagining forms in the flames of a camp fire.  If we filmed the flames and slowed them down the playback, we could ‘name’ each flame and describe their ‘birth’, ‘development/growth’, and subsequent ‘weakening’ and dissipating, in effect, ‘reifying’ ‘appearances’ or ‘apparitions’ and using language and grammar to impute to them their own persisting ‘thing-in-itself’ ‘being’ endowed with ‘powers of sourcing their own actions and developments.  So it is, as well, with the purely relational understanding of ‘seafloor spreading’ and the ‘rational alternative’ of ‘continental drift’, based on the abstractions of ‘being’ and ‘thing-in-itself’ based ‘sorcery’).

Everywhere in Western culture, there are questions arising as to the ‘relational’ versus ‘rational (discrete)’ dichotomy, including the question as to whether ‘reality’ is ‘relational’ as in our ‘relational experience’ and as in indigenous aboriginal reality (mitakuye oyasin), …  or whether reality is in the intellectual ‘Invented Reality‘ terms of ‘independent beings’ with their own powers of ‘sorcery’.  If we choose ‘sorcery’, then we think, for example, in terms of ‘illness’ as ‘defective sorcery’, while if we choose ‘all my relations’, we think of ‘wellness’ in terms of sustaining harmonies in the web of relations we are included in (or, more correctly and in keeping with modern physics, ‘the web of relations that we are’ as in the ‘non-being’ (purely relational and thus ‘implied’ or ‘non-explicit’) depictions (inferences) in ‘the surprise version of the game of Twenty Questions’).

The ‘sensitive relationists’ or ‘miner’s canaries’ who ‘balk’ as Western culture ‘social pressures’ seek to impose on them ‘ego’ based belief in ‘beings’ with the powers of ‘sorcery’, will, of course, be treated by the ‘normals’ as if ‘the balking’ is their ‘problem’, deriving from faults within their own interior since Western culture understands ‘reality’ in terms of an abstract ‘containing space’ populated by ‘human beings’ seen as ‘independent entities with their own ‘sourcing’ powers’, NOT as relational forms in the transforming relational continuum. 

In this Western culture ‘invented reality’ , the sensitive miner’s canaries whose experience-based intuition informs them of their relational essence, are pressured to shut down their relational intuitions, often with the help of ‘lobotomizing’ medications if not actual ‘lobotomies’ designed to remove the contra-Western culture (natural)  understanding of the primacy of relational experience over rational intellection. 

Meanwhile, ‘help’ for the miner’s canaries seems just around the corner, in modern physics, if not in many relational belief traditions; e.g;

What we observe as material bodies and forces are nothing but shapes and variations in the structure of space.  Particles (things-in-themselves) are just schaumkommen (‘apparances’ , ‘apparitions’). — Erwin Schroedinger.

I, you, he, she, we, … In the garden of mystic lovers these are not true distinctions. — Rumi

… Western culture ‘lock-in’ to belief in a ‘being’ and ‘sorcery’ based ‘Invented Reality’ is deeply entrenched in the psyche of the Western social mainstream.  That is, the Western culture – ‘this is the way we do things around here’ – rallying call incorporates ‘belief-in-sorcery’ based (ego-based) rewards and punishment systems, and ensures Western culture-as-it-is ‘lock-in’ with ‘high switching costs’.)

While miner’s canaries are simply those who orient firstly to relations and only secondly to rational (language and grammar based) intellectual protocols, the OVERT EXPRESSION of ‘miner’s canaries’ distress within Western culture’s imposing of ego-based ‘sorcery’ shows up with greater frequency in the female than in the male gender.

For example, Jill Astbury in ‘Crazy for You: The Making of Women’s Madness’, comments on the 1993 World Health Organization study that shows that women have twice the incidence of ‘affective disorders’ (depression, bipolar disorder etc.) as men. An investigation into ‘mental health’, rather than ‘mental illness’ would have revealed (in a statistical sense) the frequent pushiness and single-minded use of power by males that tends to render females (and more sensitive, less aggressive males) ‘invisible’, shutting them off from opportunity-to-participate and from opportunity for authentic self-expression. In communities where ‘normalcy’ is a normalcy wherein masculine control hierarchies dictate the manner of participation and self-expression, the statistics, which might otherwise have celebrated the sensitivity and caring of women (and sensitive males etc.), imply, in the patriarchal context, their ‘inferiority’ or ‘ineffectiveness’ (if not ‘defectiveness’) rather than their sensitivity and caring.

“My father was a famous engineer, my mother had no name”; –Claribel Alegria (Nicaraguan-Salvadoran poet)

Gender difference may distract from the deeper source of this dysfunction which is the Western culture belief in ‘being’ (imputed by ‘naming’) based ‘sorcery’ of actions and developments, and the complaint that ‘we should be looking at wellness (relational balance and harmony) rather than illness (the evil sorcery of pathogens), or seafloor spreading (purely relational transformation) rather than ‘continental drift’ (sorcery based on ‘naming’ relational forms to impute ‘thing-in-itself being’ to them, and then using language and grammar to impute ‘powers of sorcery of actions and developments) to the language-invented ‘beings’; i.e.  … an intellectual ‘Invented Reality’.

As with the ‘nature’ – ‘nurture’ dichotomy in Western culture, the social collective is ‘split’ into two opposing factions.  What ‘gets lost in the shuffle’ is that such ‘dividing’ derives from the intellectual abstractions of language and grammar and NOT from our natural relational experience.  The ‘whorl’ in the ‘flow’ (and/or the inhabitant in the habitat) are not TWO SEPARATE THINGS-IN-THEMSELVES.  The separateness is ‘appearance’ and to concretize, as ‘real’, the appearance of separateness within language and grammar as ‘real’ (i.e. to ‘buy in’ LITERALLY to the abstractions of language and grammar) is the recipe for psychosis that has become ‘mainstream’ in Western culture.

‘Naming’ is the intellectual abstraction that we impose on our own relational understanding that imputes ‘thing-in-itself’ being’ to flow-forms where there is none, cognitively establishing the imagined ‘thing-in-itself’, in the mind, as the ‘self-actualizing’ ‘sorcerer’ of actions and developments.

The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao
The name that can be named is not the eternal name
The nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth
The named is the mother of myriad things  — Lao Tzu

There is no need to get ‘hung up’ on ‘names’ by ‘taking them literally, as if ‘names’, rather than signifying relational forms in the flow, signified ‘independently-existing things-in-themselves as used to connote ‘being’ and ‘being-based powers of sorcery’.  In indigenous aboriginal culture as in modern physics (and as in the surprise version of the Game of Twenty Questions’), .. ‘names’ can be deployed so as to stimulate cognition in terms of a web of relations and thus cultivate understanding that is purely relational and thus ‘designed for evolution’  (Jantsch) as is needed for one’s understanding as a relational form included in a ‘transforming relational continuum’.

Evidently, in Western culture, language is used to invent ‘names’ that are used to ‘instantiate’ ‘being’, and ‘being’ is used in grammatical constructions to instantiate ‘sorcery’ (‘sourcing of actions and developments’), and ‘sorcery’ and ‘sorcerers’ and their notional ‘actions and developments’, are used to instantiate moral responsibility, rewarding and punishing, and forgiving, so that all of the foregoing form a mutually supportive intellectual ‘house of cards’; the ‘Invented Reality’ of Western culture that eclipses our relational experience based understanding.

‘Naming’ is like the ‘sample-and-hold’ technology in the digital capture of music and photographic images.  It opens the door to ‘Inventing Reality‘, as in the film industry and on the television news.  When Orson Welles broadcast a dramatization of H.G. Wells ‘War of the Worlds, it served as a convincing ‘Invented Reality’ for those listening in, and many of those listening in mistook it for ‘reality’ and panicked.

Could we prepare a graph of the respective ‘truth ratings’ of the ‘Invented reality’ as served up by media communications in various states; e.g. North Vietnam, Russia, the EEU and the United States? and then expect to be able to assess and grade each one as to how closely it came to ‘the ‘true’ reality’?

“Truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins. We still do not know where the urge for truth comes from; for as yet we have heard only of the obligation imposed by society that it should exist: to be truthful means using the customary metaphors – in moral terms, the obligation to lie according to fixed convention, to lie herd-like in a style obligatory for all…”  — Nietzsche,’On truth and lie in an extra-moral sense,’

Perhaps ‘reality’ is something that comes through relational experience and is ‘beyond intellectual capture’ such as our inclusion as relational forms in the transforming relational continuum; i.e. something that cannot be reduced to an intellectual language and picture based ‘show and tell’?

We can watch a film re-enactment of a child soldier raping a young girl and a film of the girl later forgiving him for his crime, but we can’t produce direct imagery of how the relational social dynamics they share inclusion in, inductively source these unfolding relational dynamics.  In the same sense, if we are watching infra-red film of a misty ‘boil’  n the solar-energy infused atmospheric flow, we can concoct an ‘Invented Reality’ wherein we ‘name’ the boil ‘Katrina’ and use language and grammar to ‘intellectually animate it’ as if it were the ‘sorcerer’ of its own actions and development; … ‘Katrina is growing larger and stronger’, … ‘Katrina is ravaging New Orleans’, … ‘Katrina is weakening and dissipating’, …  but we can’t capture direct imagery of the transforming relational continuum in which such ‘appearances’ or ‘apparitions’ develop (i.e. the ‘boil’ is an ‘appearance’ or ‘apparition’ in a purely relational (field) continuum wherein “alles fließt“.

The ‘Western culture Invented Reality’ is an ‘intellectual language and picture based ‘show-and-tell perspective’, … a psychologically fabricated abstract pseudo-reality’ that interposes itself between ourselves and our experience in the manner of the intrusive hatching of a Cuckoo’s egg, upstaging the natural relational order of things.  Once the psychologically invasive concept of ‘picturable beings’ (e.g. ‘continents-that-move’ in place of the ‘boils’ of seafloor spreading) with the notional powers of ‘sorcery’ of their own actions and developments have established psychological ‘lock-in’, the ‘switching costs’ can become formidable.

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.”  — Wittgenstein

‘Psychosis’ is induced by the mental conflict that comes with living in a Western culture that rewards its members seen as ‘sorcerors’, for their ‘positive sorcery’ and punishes them for their ‘negative sorcery’, when one’s natural relational experience is all the while invalidating the very concept of ‘sorcery’, and thus rejecting Western culture ‘Invented Reality’ .  Meanwhile, the sensitive and distraught, wing-flapping ‘miner’s canaries’ rejection of the psychosis-inducing Western culture ‘normality’ is seen within Western culture NOT as a natural response but instead as a ‘mental illness’ that needs ‘correction’ .  This puts the sensitive ‘miner’s canaries’ in a ‘double bind’ wherein their resistance to the psychosis-inducing belief in ‘sorcery’, mobilizes the Western culture ‘normals’ around them who embrace ‘belief in sorcery’ to help them restore their belief in themselves as ‘sorcerers’  (i.e. to ‘rebuild their ailing ego’, the Western psychological self-other disconnecting foundational belief in ‘sorcery’).

 * * * End of Author’s Prologue:  * * *

NAMING: The Psychosis-Brewing Sorcery of Western Culture

(formerly entitled; The Anatomy of Western Culture Invented Reality)

‘Reality’ understood ‘relationally’, as within Indigenous aboriginal culture reconciles with our natural experience and with modern physics whereas the Western culture’s abstract ‘beings-with-sourcing-powers’ “reality” is the brewer of collective psychosis.

‘Naming’ is thus the root source of collective psychosis.  ‘Naming’ is a ‘dark art’ also known, when coupled with grammar, as ‘sorcery’.  While ‘naming’ plays a foundational role in Western culture understanding, naming, in the indigenous aboriginal culture, is used merely as a ‘throw away expedient’ to ‘induce or trigger understanding that is purely ‘relational’.  ‘The surprise version of the game of Twenty Questions’ is how modern physics philosophical investigators Geoffrey Chew and John Wheeler describe this process of using ‘’naming’ as a throw-away expedient to stimulate cognition in a purely relational manner.

Wittgenstein, in his concluding two propositions in ‘Tractatus Logico Philosophicus’ makes the same point of using ‘name-imputed things-in-themselves-with-persisting-being’ … as a throw away expedient to stimulate understanding in purely relational terms;

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.

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

‘Naming’ is abstraction that re-casts relational forms as notional ‘things-in-themselves’ with persisting ‘being’ which ‘grammar’ then mobilizes in the abstract role of the ‘source’ or ‘sorcerer’ of actions and developments.

‘Naming’ is the basis of ‘sorcery’ and ‘sorcery’ becomes psychosis inducing where ‘naming’ is NOT used purely and solely as an expedient to get to understanding that is innately ‘relational’.

Consider, for example, continental drift versus seafloor spreading.  In the former mode of using language to stimulate understanding, … naming imputes persisting being to relational forms (e.g. ‘continents’), reducing them to ‘things-in-themselves’ that are then alluded to (in language and grammar) as the source(ro)rs of actions and developments,…. eclipsing (covering over and burying) understanding in terms of relational transformation.

This trade-out imparts a notional ‘power of sourcing of action and development’ to the ‘named entity’, in this example, to the ‘continent’ which is a relational form in a transforming relational continuum and NOT a ‘thing-in-itself’.  That is, ‘things-in-themselves’ are abstractions of the intellect that are ‘sourced’ by ‘naming’, hence the relational transformation that manifests as the evolving surface features (boils ?) on the earth’s surface is reduced to the ‘birth’ and ‘death’ of ‘continents’.  Once ‘naming’ is used to instantiate ‘being’, pivoting from relational forms in the flow, … grammar is used to ‘animate’ (in the psyche) the naming-instantiated-thing-in-itself (being).  This is an intellectual process for ‘Inventing Reality’ that is based on ‘’naming-instantiated things-in-themselves’, notionally invested with their own innate powers of ‘sorcery’; i.e. innate powers of sourcing actions and developments.

This use of ‘naming’ to conjure up an ‘Invented Reality’ based on notional ‘things-in-themselves’ with their own powers of ‘sorcery’ of actions and developments is a psychosis-inducing ‘dark art’ that is foundational in Western culture.

Note that ‘naming’ can also be used as a throw-away expedient as in “the surprise version of the game of Twenty Questions” to stimulate ‘relational understanding’ wherein the ‘named beings’ are used as temporary expedients to stimulate understanding that is purely relational, as in modern physics (where the relational dynamics of ‘field’ are primary and where material entities are ‘appearances’), as acknowledged in indigenous aboriginal cultures (mitakuye oyasin, ‘all my relations’ or ‘all is relational’).

The Western culture ‘trading out’ of ‘being-based-sorcery’ for relational transformation is the source of psychosis; i.e. Western culture is a breeding ground for psychosis. It happens as follows; … when we investigate aberrant behaviour in, for example, the ‘miner’s canary’, we pre-empt the understanding that behaviour is relational as with relational forms in a transforming relational continuum, and instead assume that ‘behaviour’ is ‘sourced’ within the ‘interior’ of the ‘thing-in-itself’.

But the ‘thing-in-itself’ is an abstraction that owes its ‘being’ to ‘naming’ and does not exist in the reality of our actual relational experience.  So why do we investigate anomalous behaviour that manifests in the relational form using the premise that it must be ‘sourced’ from the ‘interior’ of the relational form?  In reality, relational forms do hot have an ‘interior’ [there is no abstract binary split between exterior and interior until ‘thing-in-itself being’ is imputed by ‘naming’] such an abstract concept derives from [is abstracted from] relational forms RE-PRESENTED as ‘things-in-themselves’ by way of ‘naming’ (further embellished by grammar based animation).

In the following study, the investigating psychiatrists question why we do not study ‘wellness’ rather than ‘sickness’ in the case of mental health.  This points to the same psychological ambiguity as in the continental-drift, seafloor-spreading ambiguity; i.e. once we name a relational form in the flow, we not only impute ‘thing-in-itself being’ to it, we employ ‘grammar’ to establish it as the ‘source’ of its own action and development.  In this case the researchers question why we are not investigating ‘well-being’ alludes to the alternative ‘relational’ origins of well-being’.

[Nota Bene: ‘well-being’ is a relational concept which refers to healthy relations.  That is, in the relational understanding of the world (modern physics), healthy relations (sustained relational resonance) is the basis of persisting relational forms in the flow.  There are no abstract ‘things-in-themselves’ in the real world of our relational experience as relational forms in the transforming relational continuum) ]

“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’

Here once again, we have TWO OPTIONAL WAYS OF UNDERSTANDING  what is going on; i.e. (a) in ‘relational’ terms, wherein relational forms such as ‘humans’ are relational resonances in the flow whose ‘health’ lies is the sustaining of resonant relations, or (b) in ‘thing-in-itself based terms, where the abstracting powers of language and grammar equip us to impute ‘thing-in-itself being’ by way of ‘naming’ to relational forms, and then to follow this up by using grammar to ‘animate’ the abstract name-instantiated thing-in-itself, imputing to it ‘its own’ powers of sourcing actions and developments.

Reality based on ‘sorcery’ has been the choice of Western culture and it is a breeder of psychosis and ego (or do I repeat myself).

A ‘name’ delivers to our cognition a picture of a ‘thing-in-itself’ with persisting thing-in-itself existence.   Since ‘naming’ generates in our intellectual cognition a persisting PICTURE of a ‘thing-in-itself’, we become mesmerized by the picture, like that of ‘hurricane Katrina’ that is bearing down on us (or are we simply included in the relational transformation that is ongoing?).  The picture of a hurricane is a sinister and threatening sight that we can talk about among ourselves by giving that ‘picture in our mind’ a ‘name’ (‘Katrina’) and using language to ‘Invent Reality’ wherein we use grammar to impute the powers of ‘sourcery’ of action and development to the abstract ‘being’ we have created with ‘naming’; i.e. ‘Katrina is growing larger and stronger’, … ‘Katrina is ravaging New Orleans’, … ‘Katrina is weakening and dissipating’.

As you read this, you can likely ‘picture’ ‘Katrina’ in your mind, but you may have difficulty in picturing the greater reality of our relational experience of inclusion in a transforming relational continuum, since our relational experience of inclusion in a world where ‘everything is in flux’ (Heraclitus) is not reducible to picture form, but our rational minds are filled with ‘pictures’ because language allows us to communicate ideas in the form of ‘pictures’ formed from ‘name-instantiated (notional) ‘things-in-themselves’.

“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.”  — Wittgenstein

Can you ‘picture’ hurricane Katrina?

Can you ‘picture’ the transforming relational continuum in which Katrina is a relational form or ‘appearance’ (‘apparition’)?

Yes, for the former question because the perspectival view of the nipple in the whorling is possible even while we are included in the whorling, but no for the latter question, because we are situationally included in the transforming relational continuum, and one would need an omni-perspectival view such as a holographic view to understand ‘reality’ in a manner that accords with our experience of inclusion within it.

Meanwhile, we are each uniquely situated within the transforming relational continuum and our particular situation within it allows us only our own unique ‘perspectival’ view.  We would have to bring many such ‘perspectival views’ into coherent connective confluence to ‘flesh out’ reality as understood as a transforming relational continuum within which we ourselves are relational forms included in this transformation;

‘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’.– Nietzsche

This recalls the ‘sharing circles of the indigenous aboriginal culture as well as the basic premises of modern physics, and our own natural desire to see us ‘in relational context’ as captured by Robert Burns;

O wad some Power the giftie gie us To see oursels as ithers see us! It wad frae monie a blunder free us, An’ foolish notion: What airs in dress an’ gait wad lea’e us, An’ ev’n devotion!  — excerpt from “To A Louse—On seeing one on a lady’s bonnet at church” By Robert Burns (1759—1796)

Western ‘Invented Reality’ is a thing-in-itself-based intellect constructed pseudo-reality that is a radical departure from our experience-based ‘relational understanding of reality’.  In our Western culture ‘Invented Reality’, we use language and grammar to ‘notionally infuse beings with sourcing powers’ to serve as the animators of the dynamics of an Invented Reality’.  As Nietzsche points out, we invent ‘sorcery’ (author-created pseudo-reality) as the explanation for ‘change’ which, in our relational experience (prior to reducing it to language and grammar constructions), is purely relational.

“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

Once we remove ‘relational transformation’ as the basis of ‘reality’ from our understanding, and substitute ‘sorcery’ wherein ‘authoring’ is at the bottom of a dynamic ‘reality’; i.e. ‘authoring’ by the notional ‘authoring powers’ or ‘sourcing powers’ of notional ‘things-in-themselves’ (relational forms that we have named so as to reduce them, cognitively, to ‘things-in-themselves’ to which we attribute the ‘sourcing’ of actions and developments).

“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’.

In other words, Western culture uses language and grammar to ‘invent things-in-themselves’ by ‘naming’ and thus uses invented ‘things-in-themselves’ as the notional ‘sources’ of action and development giving rise to a Western culture ‘Invented Reality’.  This reduces the reality of our actual relational experience to an ‘Invented Reality’ that we have created with language and grammar; i.e. ‘grammar’ takes over as the ‘creator’ or ‘sorcerer’ of reality

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

* * *

This concludes this short  commentary entitled NAMING: The Psychosis-Brewing Sorcery of Western Culture.

I think you may be able to see (my view as to) how ‘psychosis’ is being brewed by Western culture’s embracing of ‘sorcery’ as the animator of ‘reality’; i.e. there is no ‘sorcery’ in a transforming relational continuum, and neither are there ‘things-in-themselves’.  The ‘miner’s canaries’ whose behaviours Western culture conceives of as being internally instantiated within the canaries as ‘things-in-themselves’ are understood intuitively as sentient relational forms in the transforming relational continuum as alluded to Cochrane and Sashidharan;

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”

That is, ‘mental well-being’ has ‘relational implications’, rather than being ‘fully and solely determined’ by the internal workings of an abstract notional (thanks to naming) ‘thing-in-itself’; e.g; the following anecdote pointing to a relational understanding of psychosis;

I recall a conversation with a psychiatric ward patient who was recovering from her sixth suicide attempt which this time, put her into a two week long coma. She said; “every time, after a few weeks in here, they say I am cured. Sure I am cured, for living in a highly empathic society such as the psychiatric ward tends to be, but I am not cured for going back into society which is a rat race made even tougher by my being marked as a defect and a loser. See, this bus pass is marked ‘handicapped’. I tried to get off handicapped and go on ordinary welfare even though it was $300. less but they wouldn’t let me.” She also expressed the view that society was moving in the opposite direction of ‘more empathy’.

Patty’s observations support the view that ‘mental illness’ is an epigenetic syndrome that science is misconstruing as a biological illness. In fact, the term ‘biological illness’ is a reflection of how ‘out of touch with reality’ that the science of biology continues to be by modeling the ‘organism’ as an ‘independently-existing material ‘system-in-itself’ that resides, operates and interacts with other such ‘independent systems’ within an abstract absolute space and absolute time measuring/reference frame that is regarded as an ‘operating theatre’.  ‘Reality’ in the science of biology is radically at odds with the relational reality of modern physics.

Re-entering the reality wherein relations were primary was Patty’s cure, however, medical science did not see the return to health in terms of the healthy reintegration within the relational dynamic, but instead saw it in terms of the ‘recovery of the individual as an independently functioning ‘thing-in-itself’.

Of course, the ‘lock-in’ to Western culture psychosis-inducing ‘normality’ due to ‘high switching costs’ are enormous; i.e. they derive from ‘ego’ which is based on belief in the notion of ‘independent beings with their own powers of sorcery’, an abstract concept that has been deeply entrenched in the Western culture collective psyche.

‘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.

  – Henri Laborit, ‘La Nouvelle Grille’

This whole screwed up Western culture way of ‘understanding’ by way of things-in-themselves-that-source-actions-and-developments based ‘Invented Reality’ comes back to ‘naming’, Not, as in Indigenous Aboriginal culture where ‘naming’ is an expedient to induce relational understanding (wherein ‘named things’ are throw-away abstractions used to induce understanding of thing-independent relational transformation) , … but ‘naming’  that is intended to invoke in the intellectualizing mind, the picture of a figure-in-itself the persists and moves independent of the ‘environmental dynamics’ it is situated within (the binary inhabitant-habitat split).

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