§ (the term flagged, ‘Choiceless Awareness’ is intended as used by Jiddu Krishnamurti)

 

As in the innocence of youth, which is to some extent retained through life, we have natural capacity for CHOICELESS AWARENESS .

As in the knowing of maturity, which grows with experience, we have the socially acquired capacity for DELIBERATE ASSERTION.

There is a clear suggestion of FEMALE-MALE gender relations here that invites exploration.

For example, INSPIRATION seems to associate with CHOICELESS AWARENESS while EGO seems to associate with DELIBERATE ASSERTION.

Poetic inference such as “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day” INVITES US TO OFFER OURSELVES UP TO CHOICELESS WARENESS of inclusion in a warm and comforting space.  This contrasts with DELIBERATE ASSERTION that ‘INFORMS’ us in a FORCE-FEEDING manner comparable to the force-feeding of geese used in the making of ‘Foie gras’

While CHOICELESS AWARENESS and DELIBERATE ASSERTION and aspects of life and psyche which seem to shift in emphasis from youth to maturity, they are also symbolic of sexual relations.  The CHOICELESS AWARENESS describes the sensual experience of the VAGINA as it opens up to be IN-FORMED by the ASSERTING PENIS in the process of CARNAL KNOWING.

When we take this TOPOLOGICAL ANALOGY further into our WESTERN CULTURE social dynamic, we may see how it can lend understanding to the SHIFT from youth to age whereby CHOICELESS AWARENESS is progressively TRADED OUT for DELIBERATE ASSERTION and we move towards spending more time ‘expositing on how things are’ than in opening up to ‘how things could be’.

This shift in the INDIVIDUAL from CHOICELESS AWARENESS (greater in youth) to DELIBERATE ASSERTION (greater in maturity) may also distinguish cultures as it appears that our WESTERN CULTURE has made a stronger shift in this direction the EASTERN CULTURE.  It seems as if we WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS have shifted away from understanding reality as TRANSFORMATION which is like INSPIRATION as associates with CHOICELESS AWARENESS.  Metaphorically, the PSYCHE, like the VAGINA, opens up to be IN-FORMED as part of the process of TRANSFORMATION by way of being INSPIRED by CARNAL KNOWLEDGE.  Psychological TRANSFORMATION seems to have this same ‘topology’.

WESTERN CULTURE ‘complainants’ are arguing that the MALE aspect of DELIBERATE ASSERTION has been ‘hijacking’ the overall process, starving out CHOICELESS AWARENESS and even adopting a mocking ‘know-it-all’ attitude that demeans FEMALE CHOICELESS AWARENESS.

My sense is that this DISCOMFORT about OURSELVES in our WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENT social collective is WELL-FOUNDED.  In my own philosophical researches, the findings of which resonate with those of Nietzsche, Bohm, Wittgenstein and Schroedinger, we WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS are shifting into a SUBSTITUTE REALITY which strips out the FEMALE aspect.  The SUBSTITUTE REALITY is based on trading out GROWTH for TRANSFORMATION such as where we say ‘The TOWN is GROWING in size, population and production’, in place of acknowledging the sensory experience REALITY of the TRANSFORMING LANDSCAPE.

How can we ‘lift out’ “THE TOWN” and pretend that “IT” is “GROWING”, out of the context of the CONTINUALLY TRANSFORMING LANDSCAPE IN WHICH IT IS INNATELY INCLUDED?

We can do this INTELLECTUALLY because the intellect is good at putting together abstract constructions by employing the DOUBLE ERROR of NAMING and GRAMMAR as pointed out by Nietzsche.  The FIRST ERROR is NAMING to impute the LOCAL EXISTENCE of a THING-IN-ITSELF (e.g. ‘the TOWN) conflated with the SECOND PART OF THE DOUBLE ERROR which is GRAMMAR where we impute to the NAMING-instantiated (notional) LOCAL THING-IN-ITSELF, its own power of SOURCING actions and developments.   This DOUBLE ERROR allows us to LOCALLY JUMPSTART thing-based actions and development where-and-as we choose.  This is how we construct SUBSTITUTE REALITIES as, for example, ‘the TOWN is GROWING larger and more populous and productive’.  This is like the Cuckoo’s egg that hatches out in some other bird’s nest and ‘hijacks’ the whole REALITY.

IN REALITY, there is no TOWN-THAT-IS-GROWING-LARGER-AND-MORE-POPULOUS-AND-PRODUCTIVE, there is instead, the TRANSFORMING LANDSCAPE aka the Wave-field’ aka the ‘Tao’ aka the ‘transforming relational continuum’.

AM I SUGGESTING THAT THE TOWN IS ‘NOT REAL’ BUT JUST A ‘FIGMENT OF OUR IMAGINATION”?

NO!  I am saying that “THERE IS TOWNING GOING ON IN THE TRANSFORMING LANDSCAPE” where “TOWNING” is a ‘verb’ and NOT a ‘noun’

What is screwing up our UNDERSTANDING is our WESTERN CULTURE practice of DOUBLE ERROR based (NAMING and GRAMMAR based) SUBSTITUTE REALITY construction.

While our SENSORY EXPERIENCE informs us of the continually transforming landscape, our NAMING and GRAMMAR language lets us CONJURE UP a SUBSTITUTE REALITY featuring LOCAL THINGS-IN-THEMSELVES notionally WITH THEIR OWN POWERS of ACTIONS and DEVELOPMENT.

Have you even actually seen “A TOWN GROWING”?  What happens to its relationship to the LANDSCAPE as it GROWS?  Does its GROWTH mean that it is ‘using up more LANDSCAPE’?  Or, is it included in the LANDSCAPE in which case we have to ‘let go’ of the abstraction of the TOWN-as-a-THING-IN-ITSELF with its own powers of GROWTH and DEVELOPMENT, and instead accept the reality of the TRANSFORMING LANDSCAPE in which there is TOWNING in the same relational sense as whorling in waterflow wherein FIGURE-and-GROUND-are-ONE.  That’s what TRANSFORMATION is all about, while GROWTH is UNREAL ABSTRACTION that pivots from using NAMING to impute LOCAL THING-IN-ITSELFNESS and conflating this with GRAMMAR to impute to the NAMING-instantiated (notional) LOCAL THING-IN-ITSELF, its own (notional) powers of SOURCING actions and development.

The TOWN cannot slot into the same LANDSCAPE twice for it is not the same TOWN nor is it the same LANDSCAPE.  TRANSFORMATION is like that.

This essay is entitles “The CHOICELESS AWARENESS and the DE-LIBERATE ASSERTION” to point to the fact that our psyche is capable of both modes of understanding and if I make the DE-LIBERATE ASSERTION that ‘the TOWN is GROWING’ while your sensory experience is serving up CHOICELESS AWARENESS of inclusion in TRANSFORMATION, you may be emotionally conflicted by the impossibility of reconciling these two very different understandings, the former being an awareness of inclusion in TRANSFORMATION and the latter being a SELF-ASSERTING as to WHAT IS GOING ON OUT THERE, such as purportedly includes THE TOWN THAT IS GROWING.

CONCLUSIONS:

Language allows us to CONSTRUCT SUBSTITUTE REALITIES featuring notional LOCAL THINGS-IN-THEMSELVES with GRAMMAR-GIVEN POWERS OF SOURCING ACTIONS AND DEVELOPMENT; e.g. ‘The TOWN that is GROWING larger and more populous and productive’.

This SUBSTITUTE REAITY is something we can articulate and it is also something we can PICTURE, … which resolves the problem of NOT BEING ABLE TO USE LANGUAGE to represent TRANSFORMATION which is INEFFABLE-because-NONLOCAL-and-IMPLICIT.

Thus, instead of the actual INEFFABLE REALITY of TRANSFORMATION, we SUBSTITUTE the language-capturable SUBSTITUTE REALITY based on the DOUBLE ERROR of NAMING and GRAMMAR, e.g. ‘the TOWN is GROWING larger and more populous and productive’.

This is a simple point but it has taken me A LOT OF WORDS because one has to DECONSTRUCT the SUBSTITUTE REALITY which is what we are using as our BASE-CASE LANGUAGE.  As Zen adherents suggest, we should be tacking an “ING” on the end of all our NOUNS to convert them back to VERBS so as to honour the fluidity of reality  (the transforming relational continuum).  In this case we would speak of TOWNING instead of ‘TOWN’ and TOWNING could be understood as a fluid feature within the TRANSFORMING which implies a FIGURE-and-GROUND-as-ONE topology as is consistent with the Modern physics Wave-field as well as with the understandings of reality of indigenous aboriginal cultures (mitakuye oyasin – everything is related), Taoism/Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta.

GIVEN THAT we WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS use language that conjures up a SUBSTITUTE REALITY as in the example of ‘THE TOWN’ that, so we say, ‘IS GROWING LARGER AND MORE POPULOUS AND PRODUCTIVE’, we should naturally be obliged, after using this SUBSTITUTE LANGUAGE that we have designed to SIDESTEP the fact that reality is INEFFABLE-because-NONLOCAL-and-IMPLICIT, to remind ourselves that having used language to trigger a mental leap beyond the literal words to an INTUITION of the INEFFABLE, we must NOT FORGET that this SUBSTITUTE REALITY that we have constructed in ONLY GOOD FOR INFERENCE of the INEFFABLE reality that lies beyond the reach of explicit language, THUS we cannot let the tool of language REDEFINE REALITY.  In other words, we cannot employ the SUBSTITUTE pseudo-REALITY such as ‘the TOWN IS GROWING’ ACTUALLY SUBSTITUTE for REALITY since it is only good for triggering in our psyche, the needed INTUITIVE LEAP to the fluid reality that lies BEYOND EXPLICIT CAPTURE BY LANGUAGE.

It we use the words ‘the TOWN is GROWING’, we will have to understand, intuitively, THE LANDSCAPE IS TRANSFORMING in the same sense we would speak in terms of ‘the DUNE is growing larger and longer and is SHIFTING towards the coast’, while understanding the larger context of resonance-based transformation.  Since RESONANCE based TRANSFORMATION is NONLOCAL and IMPLICIT (purely relational) it is INEFFABLE and while we can intuitively understand this, we cannot articulate it without making a SUBSTITUTION to some form of REPRESENTATION that is EFFABLE, hence, ‘the DUNE is growing larger and longer and is shifting to towards the coast’.

When we teach our children how to employ language to construct EFFABLE SUBSTITUTE REALITIES, we might remind them to remember that the SUBSTITUTE REALITY uses the DOUBLE ERROR of NAMING and GRAMMAR to conjure up notional LOCAL THINGS-IN-THEMSELVES, notionally with their own powers of LOCALLY SOURCING actions and developments, … AND THEREFORE that we have to be on guard NOT to forget that we are constructing SUBSTITUTE REALITIES and instead fall into the trap of actually SUBSTITUTING the SUBSTITUTE REALITY for the real reality of our INEFFABLE sensory experience of inclusion in the NONLOCAL transforming relational continuum.

We need to be sure to say something to our children like;

“CHILDREN, remember that language is only good for constructing SUBSTITUTE REALITIES which are very valuable for triggering an INTUITION of the INEFFABLE reality of our sensory experience of inclusion in the transforming relational continuum.   So, remember not to fall into the trap of confusing the SUBSTITUTE REALITY CONSTRUCTIONS for the real but INEFFABLE reality of our sensory experience of inclusion in the transforming relational continuum.  As Lao Tzu reminds us, the reality that can be told is not the true reality of our sensory experience since that is ineffable’.  So, when you hear someone say something like; the TOWN IS GROWING, remember that this makes us into a VOYEUR and distracts us from our sensory experience of inclusion in the TRANSFORMATION.  This language based SUBJECT and OBJECT SPLITTING is just abstraction that enables the construction of a SUBSTITUTE REALITY that is effable so that we can enable language based sharing, something that we can’t do in the case of the REAL REALITY of our SENSORY EXPERIENCE of inclusion in the TRANSFORMATION which is INEFFABLE-because-NONLOCAL-and-IMPLICIT.  SO, DON’T forget to NOT LET YOURSELVES get carried away by your own SUBSTITUTE REALITY CONSTRUCTIONS, its just a TOOL and it comes with the exposure that the TOOL can run away with the workman so that the REAL YOU starts mistaking the ‘YOU’ in your SUBSTITUTE REALITY CONSTRUCTIONS’ for itself.  WE are included in the TRANSFORMATION and NOT “REALLY”, as in our SUBSTITUTE REALITY CONSTRUCTIONS, separate, LOCAL THINGS-IN-OURSELVES with notional (GRAMMAR-GIVEN) powers of SOURCING actions and development.

Sometimes, we tend to start THINKING TOO MUCH and our THOUGHT is always in the mode of DE-LIBERATE ASSERTION . That is, if we are thinking about things, we can’t at the same time be open to CHOICELESS AWARENESS.   As mentioned earlier INSPIRATION seems to associate with CHOICELESS AWARENESS while EGO seems to associate with DELIBERATE ASSERTION.

There is an NATURAL PRIMACY of INSPIRATION by CHOICELESS AWARENESS over DELIBERATE ASSERTION since if the priority is inverted, it is impossible to be in the state of CHOICELESS AWARENESS.   In our WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENT mode of operation, we are intensively engaged in the cultivating of the land, industrial construction and activities in which we are INTENTIONALLY and EXPLICITLY ASSERTING.  This DOMESTICATION proceeds in conjugate reciprocal relation with the LOSS of WILDERNESS, these two together implying overall TRANSFORMATION.

We might say that, ideally, ASSERTING MAY BE …  INFORMED BY… INSPIRATION as would appear to be the NATURAL scheme of things, whereas, by contrast, GROWTH is DRIVEN by the DELIBERATE INTENTIONS of EGO.

We notice also that, while ‘INSPIRATION fills the heart, EGO swells the head.

What seems evident is that, among WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS, the SUBSTITUTE REALITY is employed as the OPERATIVE REALITY rather than as a TRIGGER for an INTUITIVE LEAP to understanding the NONLOCAL-and-INEFFABLE.  For example, we WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS regard GROWTH as something REAL and we INVEST our energies to the cultivating of GROWTH in our AGRICULTURE and INDUSTRY etc.  We even speak in terms of a GROWTH ECONOMY.

This IMAGERY of GROWTH obscures (in the psyche) the reality of TRANSFORMATION.  The GROWTH of CULTIVATED LAND is something we speak about ‘on its own’ without mentioning the conjugate LOSS of Wilderness, which is to say that the REALITY is TRANSFORMATION and NOT GROWTH.

Although GROWTH is NOT REAL (there is only TRANSFORMATION), GROWTH is something we talk about all the time as if it WERE REAL and we have given it a foundational role in our GROWTH ECONOMY.   In so doing, we are employing a SUBSTITUTE REALITY as in the case of the TOWN which we say is GROWING and we take EARLIER and LATER PICTURES as if to PROVE that ‘the TOWN “IS” GROWING’.  That is just a language-based SUBSTITUTE REALITY; the REAL REALITY is TRANSFORMATION.

We are CONFUSING OURSELVES by SUBSTITUTING our own intellectual abstracting and employing it IN PLACE OF our sensory experience reality.   ONE DAY, perhaps SOONER than LATER, the ‘stuff is going to hit the fan’.  The following article infers that REALITY is going to CATCH UP WITH US.

 

https://ensia.com/voices/end-economic-growth-economy/

SEE: Opinion: Sooner or later, we have to stop economic growth — and we’ll be better for it

The end of growth will come one day, perhaps very soon, whether we’re ready or not. If we plan for and manage it, we could well wind up with greater well-being.

January 8, 2019 — Both the U.S. economy and the global economy have expanded dramatically in the past century, as have life expectancies and material progress. Economists raised in this period of plenty assume that growth is good, necessary even, and should continue forever and ever without end, amen. Growth delivers jobs, returns on investment and higher tax revenues. What’s not to like? We’ve gotten so accustomed to growth that governments, corporations and banks now depend on it. It’s no exaggeration to say that we’re collectively addicted to growth.

The trouble is, a bigger economy uses more stuff than a smaller one, and we happen to live on a finite planet. So, an end to growth is inevitable. Ending growth is also desirable if we want to leave some stuff (minerals, forests, biodiversity and stable climate) for our kids and their kids. Further, if growth is meant to have anything to do with increasing quality of life, there is plenty of evidence to suggest it has passed the point of diminishing returns: Even though the U.S. economy is 5.5 times bigger now than it was in 1960 (in terms of real GDP), America is losing ground on its happiness index.

 So how do we stop growth without making life miserable — and maybe even making it better?

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There is no such thing as GROWTH so we do not have to “STOP GROWTH”.  We only have to restore our understanding of reality in terms of our sensory experience of inclusion in the transforming relational continuum.

This is not something we have to PHYSICALLY DO, it is something that has to happen IN OUR PSYCHE so that our understanding of REALITY AS TRANSFORMATION is restored to its NATURAL PRIMACY so that we remember that the REALITY we are intellectually CONSTRUCTING based on GROWTH is only a SUBSTITUTE REALITY that is useful because EFFABLE-because-LOCAL-and-EXPLICIT while the REAL REALITY of TRANSFORMATION remains INEFFABLE-because-NONLOCAL-and-IMPLICIT.

Language is therefore only good for constructing a Wittgenstein ladder or SUBSTITUTE REALITY for INFERRING the INEFFABLE-because-NONLOCAL-and-IMPLICIT REAL REALITY of our sensory experience of inclusion in the transforming relational continuum aka the Wave-field aka the Tao.

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SUMMARY:

To ‘recoup’ where ‘we have been’ in this note and to then supply some perspective;

As in the innocence of youth, which is to some extent retained through life, we have natural capacity for CHOICELESS AWARENESS .

As in the knowing of maturity, which grows with experience, we have the socially acquired capacity for DELIBERATE ASSERTION.

There is a clear suggestion of FEMALE-MALE gender relations here that invites exploration.

For example, INSPIRATION seems to associate with CHOICELESS AWARENESS while EGO seems to associate with DELIBERATE ASSERTION.

This article is ‘making the case’ that we WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS have oriented our discourse and thus our conceptualizing of reality, to DELIBERATE ASSERTION the sense of which is captured by “GROWTH”.

When we speak of the “GROWTH” of the TOWN, this conjures up in the Mind’s Eye, a PICTURE of a smaller TOWN which is GROWING larger or ‘ballooning up’.  The LANDSCAPE it is included in is not needed for us to form this picture in our mind.  The TOWN has been LIBERATED from its inclusion in TRANSFORMATION and now appears to be ‘GROWING ON ITS OWN’.  This is the product of RATIO or RATIONAL THOUGHT otherwise known as REASON, which is RADICALLY UNLIKE the reality of the TOWNING that is INCLUDED in the TRANSFORMING LANDSCAPE (which our perspectival access to the TRANSFORMING RELATIONAL CONTINUUM.

In other words, GROWTH is an intellectually contrived SUBSTITUTE REALITY which conjures up the impression of LOCAL THING-IN-ITSELF EXISTENCES with their own innate powers of SOURCING actions and development.  These two abstractions constitute the DOUBLE ERROR of NAMING and GRAMMAR.  While the relation of our sensory experience affirms our inclusion in the TRANSFORMING continuum, our REASONING INTELLECT puts together this impression of a LOCAL THING-IN-ITSELF-that is GROWING; i.e. ‘the TOWN’ which is now SUBSTITUTE REALITY that wallpapers over the TRANSFORMING LANDSCAPE.

While our CHOICELESS AWARENESS lets us experience inclusion in TRANSFORMATION, our DELIBERATE ASSERTION constructs an EXPLICIT PICTURE as a SUBSTITUTE REALITY.

Since this SUBSTITUTE REALITY is EFFABLE-because-LOCAL-and-EXPLICIT, we are able to capture it in language and to share and discuss it.  That is to say, in going into discursive mode, we have to LEAVE THE TREAL BUT INEFFABLE REALITY and enter into the UNREAL but EFFABLE SUBSTITUTE REALITY of the TOWN-that-GROWS.

GUESS WHAT!

WE WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS FORGET THAT WE HAVE TO COME BACK OUT AND SHARE OUR ARTICULABLE FINDINGS PERTAINING TO THE SUBSTITUTE REALITY, IN THE INEFFABLE REAL REALITY, without losing track of the fact that the reality we are talking about is NOT the reality of our actual sensory experience but simply a SUBSTITUTE REALITY that ALLUDES TO the relation of our actual sensory experience.  Thus, for example, when we say ‘the DUNE is GROWING longer and taller and is shifting across the desert floor, … THAT JUST A SUBSTITUTE REALITY and the REAL REALITY, which is INEFFABLE because NONLOCAL and IMPLICIT, as is the nature of RESONANCE aka Wave-field TRANSFORMATION, lies beyond reach of our REASON based (RATIO-based) rhetoric.

We WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS have become STUCK in SUBSTITUTE REALITY space, and are erroneously using it as a OPERATIVE REPLACEMENT of REALITY.

This is where the PHANTOMS come in, as is implied by the example wherein the GROWTH of cultivated land comes with the conjugate LOSS of Wilderness.  BUT WE SPEAK OF THE GROWTH OF THE CULTIVATED LAND AS IF IT WERE ‘REAL’.  It is NOT REAL.  It is a SUBSTITUTE REALITY triggered in the mind by language based INTELLECTUAL ABSTRACTIONS such as produced by the DOUBLE ERROR of NAMING and GRAMMAR.

The REALITY is TRANSFORMATION which includes the LOSS of Wilderness.  But so long as we focus on GROWTH of cultivated land and regard this as ‘reality’ (IT IS NOT REALITY), what will be reduced to PHANTOM status that HAUNTS the pictures we paint with our positivist (DELIBERATE ASSERTIVE) rhetoric.

“Reason” in language!—oh what a deceptive old witch it has been! I fear we shall never be rid of God, so long as we still believe in grammar.  – Nietzsche

‘NAMING’ and “GRAMMAR” are the DOUBLE ERROR we use to construct our SUBSTITUTE REALITY that is EFFABLE-because-LOCAL-and-EXPLICIT, but it is not REALITY since REALITY is INEFABLE because NONLOCAL-and-IMPLICIT which is the nature of the Wave-field aka the Tao.

What we WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS are leaving out of the picture by relying on the LOCAL and EXPLICIT is CHOICELESS AWARENESS.

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FOOTNOTE:

Having tried for the past while to ‘understand’ how ‘CHOICELESS AWARENESS’ fits into the “philosophical” understandings of others, including Nietzsche’s concept of the ‘DOUBLE ERROR’, I think I have arrived at that point, and have tried to capture what is going on, in this essay.

One way to ‘explain’ it is to start from something that has persistently ‘troubled’ me is the ‘mismatch’ between our thinking of the GROWTH of the land under cultivation and the conjugate ‘loss of Wilderness Land’.  While there is some sort of BINARY ‘polar opposition’ going on here, it seems apparent that what is REALLY going on is TRANSFORMATION wherein there is NOT REALLY two things in opposition but one thing undergoing TRANSFORMATION.  It therefore seems as if the ‘two things in opposition’ where one GROWS as the other REDUCES is an oversimplistic way of TRYING to describe TRANSFORMATION.

If we ponder this, we ‘bump into’ the problem that the conceptual basis supporting the BINARY logical combination of GROWTH and REDUCTION is ‘too simplistic’.  We know that BINARY LOGIC, the EITHER/OR LOGIC of the EXCLUDED medium was not adequate for Modern physics and we had to shift to ‘quantum logic’, the BOTH/AND logic of the INCLUDED medium.

Tied up in all of this are TWO ways of understanding reality; CHOICELESS AWARENESS and DELIBERATE ASSERTION. We might also call this duo INTUITION and REASON but “INTUITION” has been used in many ways while the term “CHOICELESS AWARENESS” is much clearer.

We know that language that is built on a BINARY LOGIC base is too simple to be able to give representations of the NONLOCAL-and-IMPLICIT as in a flow-based reality (i.e. the ‘Wave-field’ which is a transforming relational continuum).  This may be what ‘troubles the mind’ in trying to divide the our space on earth up into ‘CULTIVATED AREA’ and ‘WILDERNESS AREA’.  What do we ‘really mean’ when we speak of the GROWTH of cultivated (industrialized/developed etc.) LAND and the conjugate LOSS of Wilderness area?

‘TRANSFORMATION’ is so much better as a concept to employ since it avoids the BINARY LOGICAL DIVISION, but here we are and we ARE USING THE TERM “GROWTH” of agricultural development and industrial development and domestication etc.  “GROWTH” is useful because it is “LOCAL” and applies to LOCAL THINGS-IN-THEMSELVES such as TOWNS and FARMS and INDUSTRICAL COMPLEXES etc.  We measure this GROWTH and it relates to the GROWTH of PRODUCTION of agricultural and industrial products, and the GROWTH of housing developments that increase with population.

If that GROWTH of ‘cultivated land’ is REAL, then since we live in finite space on the surface of a sphere, the conjugate LOSS of ‘Wilderness land’ must also be real.  The curious thing is, that we talk about the GROWTH of Towns and Cities and Agriculture etc. as if it ‘were real’ even though we make no mention, in the same breath, of the SHRINKAGE of Wilderness.   But we FEEL the loss of Wilderness in our hearts even if we aren’t OVERTLY or EXPLICITLY measuring and announcing it.  It is kind of like the artist’s ‘NEGATIVE SPACE’.  But as we proudly announce the GROWTH of agriculture and industry, … the Wilderness plants and creatures are having their home ground removed and paved over.

GROWTH is an abstract RATIO-NAL concept where we compare a thing to itself.  When we say the Land under cultivation has TRIPLED over the past 50 years there is no reference made to the LOSS of Wilderness lands.  It is as if we lived on a flat plane of infinite extent such as Euclidian space but WE DON’T.  But supposing we have a “GROWTH ECONOMY” and we just keep pushing for ‘more GROWTH’.  Well, the problem is that what is going on is NOT GROWTH, it is TRANSFORMATION wherein there is a continuing LOSS of Wilderness.

This LOSS of Wilderness is something that is in the ‘back of our mind’, nagging us, even as we push for MORE GROWTH as if GROWTH were something ‘REAL’.  TRANSFORMATION is REAL but GROWTH is ABSTRACTION based on RATIO aka REASON.  This MISTAKEN belief in GROWTH is the source of ABERRANT social dynamics in our WESTERN CULTURE.

This is the point that ‘shows through’ in exploring the connections between the ideas of Bohm & Krishnamurti, and Nietzsche, as explored in this essay.

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