That title may seem to foretell an apocryphal unfolding, made even worse by the fact that END of GROWTH will bring with it the END of TIME, but my impression is that it is more like tearing a poster off a wall only to expose another poster that precedes it, or even the discovery that what was presumed to be the blank face of a wall is a window into another world that had been hidden by the SUBSTITUTE REALITY pasted over it.

That the END of TIME is coming has already been pronounced by Modern physics but the timeliness of a package deal which removes GROWTH as well feels imminent.  GROWTH and TIME are cohorts that come hand-in-hand like the slowly building pile of sand in the hourglass.  GROWTH happens over TIME within an empty and uninvolved containing space, and it is this empty containing space that ensures that GROWTH is LOCAL.

Of course, while we can make that happen with language, is it really possible to separate the GROWTH of the TOWN on its own, from the LANDSCAPE.  Yes, I know, GRAMMAR lets us engineer this separation but if we examine where the TOWN meets the GROUND, there is a blurriness there as to where the TOWN stops and the LANDSCAPE begins.

Nevertheless, LANGUAGE has no problem in splitting into two separate items, ‘the TOWN’ and “ITS” GROWTH from the ‘GROUND’.  LANGUAGE and GRAMMAR are like that; … they can do amazing things together; first you invoke the name “TOWN” to invoke the LOCAL BEING of a notional THING-IN-ITSELF, and then we use GRAMMAR to imbue the LOCAL THING-IN-ITSELF with the notional power of GROWTH.

We have to do this VERY CAREFULLY because if we change the surrounding GROUND in the process, what we will have on our hands is TRANSFORMATION which is where the whole of unbounded space is modified, … so it is VERY IMPORTANT for us to PRETEND that GROWTH is something LOCAL because NONLOCALITY wherein a local change changes the whole of the NONLOCAL would require an infinite number of words to describe it and thus an infinite length of TIME to articulated it.  We must insist that GROWTH is something that is phenomenon that is confined to a LOCAL THING-IN-ITSELF and that it transpires within a DISCRETE interval of TIME.  One might say that GROWTH is something that is FINITE in EXTENT in both SPACE and TIME.

That way, we have something manageable and controllable which can POINT TO because GROWTH is LOCAL and we can MEASURE by comparing the RATIO of its current EXTENT to its PRIOR EXTENT.  We must cover BOTH of these bases in order to invent a GROWTH concept that is purely LOCAL and without any NONLOCAL interdependence.  That is why, in order to support the concept of GROWTH as a LOCAL phenomenon, we need to develop FIXED REFERENCES for both SPATIAL EXTENT and TEMPORAL EXTENT.  That way, we can establish LOCAL GROWTH of a THING-IN-ITSELF with NO DEPENDENCIES on NONLOCALITIES which would blur the whole business and force upon us an endless sequence of descriptive words that would have to capture the whole territory to the ends of the world and to the end of time.

The REALITY of GROWTH is thus based on RATIO of EXTENT of something LOCAL that is changing IN TIME.

The title of this philosophical perusing is The END of GROWTH is COMING.  PREPARE! because of the hokeyness of the concept of GROWTH and the TROUBLE it is brewing up in our WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENT society.

Our sensory experience affirms that there is NO SUCH THING AS GROWTH because there is no such thing as LOCAL and there is no such thing as the TIME.  Modern physics investigators have spoken openly about ‘The END of TIME’.  e.g. The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Our Understanding of the Universe by Julian Barbour. however, it hasn’t really ‘struck a nerve’ with people as much as the science fiction stories of DOCTOR WHO navigating THROUGH TIME as in the TARDIS.  This sci-fi-series actually perpetuates and romanticizes the abstraction of TIME which is not what Julian Barbour’s aim i.e. Barbour was trying to show that TIME is not a physically real thing but an illusion.

But TIME is an illusion which is secured by the second illusion of GROWTH and these two ABSTRACTIONS really need to be addressed together or the one will slip away and regenerate the other, and as Kepler observes, we will be in error contrary to our own opinion;

As regards the academies, they are established in order to regulate the studies of the pupils and are concerned not to have the program of teaching change very often: in such places, because it is a question of the progress of the students, it frequently happens that the things which have to be chosen are not those which are most true but those which are most easy. And by that division in things which makes different people form different judgements, it so happens that certain people are in error contrary to their own opinion.” – Johannes Kepler, ‘Harmonies of the World’

GROWTH is one of things that is NOT most TRUE but which is most EASY and it is a great SIMPLIFIER of discourse because of its ability to DUMB DOWN TRANSFORMATION which is NONLOCAL and IMPLICIT, and inject a SUBSTITUTE REALITY that is LOCAL and EXPLICIT.  GROWTH needs a bit of MAGIC to localize the NONLOCAL and that MAGIC is known as RATIO and the RATIO-based way of constructing a more manageable (EFFABLE) SUBSTITUTE REALITY which is called RATIONAL INTELLECTION or just ‘rationality’.

If we, as humans on the brink of developing a better language (beyond grunts and gestures) are looking at DUNING of sand in the desert, stand there in the desert pondering how we are going to design a language that captures NONLOCAL PROVENANCE such as DUNING, we will be compelled by the need for manageable FINITE EFFABILITY, to impute LOCAL FINITE AND EXPLICIT BEING to a part of the FORMING as associates with DUNING and thus ‘bite the bullet’ and simply impose the LOCAL and FINITE by way of the word “DUNE”.  This NAMING of a THING-IN-ITSELF comes with what the PreSocratic philosophers called ‘the BURDEN OF CONCRETENESS’ because we now have to manage with words and grammar, the entire dynamic of movement of growth of this NAMING-created THING-IN-ITSELF which we just abstractly SPLIT OUT of the transforming relational continuum with the intellectual DEVICE of NAMING, which, as is the point here, requires the invention of a GRAMMAR to address the bottom-up representation of what we dropped out by NAMING-imputing THING-IN-ITSELFNESS, which is MOVEMENT AND DEVELOPMENT.

Admittedly, the INEFFABILITY of the NONLOCAL AND IMPLICIT resonance phenomenon of DUNING was a bitch to even try to capture in a language, but our EASTERN brothers and sisters nevertheless DODGED the approach of imposing LOCAL THING-IN-ITSELF EXISTENCE which brings with it the ancillary necessity of invention supportive abtractions to deal with the representation of movement and development of the NAMING-created LOCAL THING-IN-ITSELF.

EENY-MEENY-MINY-MO, … is it with the EAST or WEST I go?

In retrospect, if we WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS had gone with ‘the EAST’, we never would have had to invent GROWTH  and its conjugate, TIME, and we could have stayed with TRANSFORMATION wherein EVERYTHING IS RELATED as the indigenous aboriginal peoples remind themselves with ‘mitakuye oyasin’.

BUT FOCUSING IN ON A LOCALIZED HUNK OF REALITY EVEN AS AN ABSTRACT DEVICE is very useful for communications purposes.

Ok, those smart-asses, the indigenous aboriginal cultures BYPASSED our technique of reduction to the LOCAL THING-IN-ITSELF and the abstract implication of GROWTH over TIME by the tactic of constructing a mess of TEMPORARY REALITIES featuring NAMED THINGS merely for the use of developing an IMPLICIT WEB OF RELATIONS, at which point, the NAMED THINGS could be forgotten about, a technique also sussed out by 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.

7.0 Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. (“Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen”),

–Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

This representation of reality is now purely relational as all the local thind-in-themselves have been ‘let go of’.

This reality, while the INEFFABLE because NONLOCAL and IMPLICIT is nevertheless ‘in our understanding’ and no WESTERN OBSERVER who has tape-recorded all the word content that went the construction is going to be able to get to the same understanding so long as they try to construct meaning in terms of the sum of the meanings of the parts.  Instead, the meaning is encoded in the web of relations as in the resonances or coherencies arising in the connective confluence of the word-based contributions.

The GROWTH of town A and the growth of town B and the growth of town C can all be explicitly and three book written in great detail about such GROWTH and handed over to an EXPERT in the subject of GROWTH to get his observations and critiques.  The old indigenous aboriginal will chuckle at that and in his own language observe that THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS GROWTH of a LOCAL THING-IN-ITSELF called a TOWN, there is only NONLOCAL TRANSFORMATION OF THE LANDSCAPE.

The indigenous aboriginal’s representation is obvious ‘ON TARGET’ in that there is no such thing as GROWTH.  As Nietzsche pointed out, GROWTH is abstraction that arises from a DOUBLE ERROR of NAMING and GRAMMAR such as ‘the TOWN is GROWING’.   This DOUBLE ERROR invoking GROWTH ‘makes it up as it goes along’, saying TOWN A is GROWING and TOWN B is GROWING and TOWN C is GROWING and all the while no mention of the SHRINKAGE of the conjugate WILDERNES.

We are free to speak of GROWTH in this manner but is it REALISTIC to do so without mentioning the conjugate shrinkage of WILDERNESS?

We WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS are, some say, on a bus-trip to HELL because of our forgetfulness of the REALITY of TRANSFORMATION which is the ANDROGYNOUS unity of GROWTH of cultivated land and SHRINKAGE of Wilderness land.

Note that GROWTH is a LOCAL MALE ASSERTIVE conjugate component of NONLOCAL TRANSFORMATION while LOCAL FEMALE SPATIAL ACCOMMODATING is the enabling CONJUGATE component.

NONLOCAL TRANSFORMATION “DOES NOT NEED THESE TWO CONJUGATE COMPONENTS” … LANGUAGE BASED REPRESENTATION OF TRANSFORMATION MAY NEED THEM, HOWEVER, because TRANSFORMATION is INEFFABLE-because-NONLOCAL.

If GROWTH is abstraction that is just the LOCAL MALE ASSERTIVE CONJUGATE COMPONENT of NONLOCAL TRANSFORMATION, how is it that we WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS employ it as if it were REALITY?  Is that NOT going to get us into trouble in our physical promotion of GROWTH which is NOT REALLY GROWTH (since GROWTH does not exist) but which is instead NONLOCAL TRANSFORMATION?

Unfortunately, we WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENS are making strong progress in digging ourselves into a hole which it is not going to be easy to climb out of.  For example;

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

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.

by Richard Heinberg

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.

HOW ABOUT: “SOONER OR LATER,, THE END OF GROWTH WILL MANIFEST”

This may sound like a BIBLICAL PROPHECY but while the BIBLE deals in the BINARY LOGIC of  CREATION and DESTRUCTION wherein FIGURE-and-GROUND-are-TWO and we must decide on the “IS” or “IS NOT” of the existence of the LOCAL FIGURE, … we are NEVERTHELESS free to understand reality in the NON-BINARY BOTH/AND (quantum) logic of the INCLUDED medium wherein FIGURE-and-GROUND-are-ONE.

WHO SAYS that TOWN and COUNTRY are TWO?   Who says that the brown rot spot on the apple and the crisp green conjugate region of the apple are TWO?  How about FIGURE and GROUND are ONE as in the understanding of TRANSFORMATION?  The TRANSFORMATION is itself NONLOCAL and IMPLICIT which makes it INEFFABLE even though we can easily UNDERSTAND that there is TRANSFORMATION as our sensory experience informs us, … it’s just that language is one of those abstract representation schemes that wants to have a LOCAL PIVOT to break into the flow-continuum and get some LOCAL TRACTION for effable-izing the ineffable.

We are under no compulsion to let the LOCAL and EFFABLE ploy of ‘side-stepping’ of the INEFFABLE by way of constructing a LOCAL and EFFABLE SUBSTITUTE REALITY “HIJACK” the natural primacy of the INEFFABLE-because-NONLOCAL Wave-field reality of our sensory experience.  The EFFABLE SUBSTITUTE REALITY which features LOCAL GROWTH of LOCAL THINGS-IN-THEMSELVES such as TOWNS does not deserve primary billing for REALITY REPRESENTATION just because the natural PRIMARY SENSORY EXPERIENCE REALITY of INCLUSION IN THE TRANSFORMING RELATIONAL CONITNUUM (aka the Wavefield aka the Tao) is INEFFABLE-because NONLOCAL and IMPLICIT.

But if we DO let “RATIONAL” abstractions like RATIO and RATIO-based GROWTH RULE in our INTELLECTUAL NAMING and GRAMMAR (DOUBLE ERROR) based REPRESENTATION of REALITY, we unleash a PANDORA’S BOX in the REAL REALITY of TRANSFORMATION as we focus steadfastly on the SUBSTITUTE REALITY of the GROWTH of our TOWNS as if these ABSTRACTIONS were REAL.

HOW EASTY IT IS for us to speak of the GROWING TOWNS and/or the GROWING BROWN ROT-SPOTS on the apple as if their GROWTH is REAL.  It is the MALE ASSERTIVE SUBSTITUTE REALITY and it ‘comes across’ with strength and forcefulness, but such GROWTH is NOT REAL.  Let’s not TAKE OUR EYES OFF the SHRINKAGE of the GREEN that is CONJUGATE to the GROWTH of the BROWN because this FIGURE of the GROWTH of the BROWN and the conjugate SHRINKING of the GREEN GROUND are JUST ONE which means that THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS “GROWTH”, what we make out to be LOCAL GROWTH is instead NONLOCAL TRANSFORMATION.

Not to be an ‘alarmist’ but;   The END of GROWTH is COMING.  PREPARE!

As usual, the Bohm’s and the Nietzsches and the indigenous aboriginal culture adherents and the Taoists/Buddhists and Advaita Vedanta adherents can, having never left behind the understanding of reality in terms of TRANSFORMATION, can sit back and relax, … OR CAN THEY?

Being a ‘fellow traveller’ within the WESTERN CULTURE social collective pursuit of GROWTH, we are all in this emerging WAKE-UP-CALL together.

“I, you, he, she, we
In the garden of mystic lovers,
these are not true distinctions.” ― Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

Only when we break everything apart into separate entities; i.e. as with the DOUBE ERROR of NAMING and GRAMMAR do enable ABSTRACTIONS that imply LOCAL THING-IN-ITSELF BEING such as is implied by GROWTH.

GROWTH is ‘back-handed INFERENCE’ that implies LOCAL BEING and RATIO which are the basis of RATIONAL THINKING which, as mentioned earlier, is something we teach our children and ourselves because of its simplicity;

As regards the academies, they are established in order to regulate the studies of the pupils and are concerned not to have the program of teaching change very often: in such places, because it is a question of the progress of the students, it frequently happens that the things which have to be chosen are not those which are most true but those which are most easy. And by that division in things which makes different people form different judgements, it so happens that certain people are in error contrary to their own opinion.” – Johannes Kepler, ‘Harmonies of the World’

GROWTH belongs to that kind of SIMPLIFYING which puts us IN ERROR contrary to our own OPINION since to declare that the TOWN is GROWING contradicts our asserted contention that the LANDSCAPE is TRANSFORMING.  The problem is that the concept of GROWTH serves up representation that is LOCAL and EXPLICIT and slips off the tongue with such simplicity and exactitude as to make us proud of articulative prowess.  But like the drunk who is looking for his watch under the street lamp that he lost on a dark stretch of road, “because the search conditions are better there”, similar encouragements support our employing of the SUBSTITUTE REALITY of GROWTH.

This confusing of GROWTH with reality to the point that we constructing a GROWTH based SUBSTITUTE REALITY is getting us progressively into the deeper doo-doo, as is the above message of Richard Heinberg, but the issue is far more general than where Heinberg has pointed the spotlight; e.g. the sense of PERSONALLY SOURCED LOCAL GROWTH of some or other POSITIVELY PERCEIVED action or development or enterprise which is often accompanied, in WESTERN CULTURE, by praise and reverence and rewards, … unleashes, thanks to the popularity of BINARY LOGIC the antithetical obligation to similarly rebuke and punish PERSONALLY SOURCED LOCAL GROWTH of some or other NEGATIVELY PERCEIVED action of development.

Because of the WESTERN CULTURE popularity of BINARY LOGIC, the more claims that are made for being the author of GROWTH of positive developments, the legitimation of such belief in abstraction must be secured by corresponding attribution, punishment and rebuke for GROWTH of negative developments.

The U.S. penal population of 2.2 million adults is by far the largest in the world. ”Just under one-quarter of the world’s prisoners are held in American prisons. The U.S. rate of incarceration, with nearly 1 out of every 100 adults in prison or jail, is 5 to 10 times higher than the rates in Western Europe and other democracies.  — The Growth of Incarceration in the United States 

In the EAST and indigenous aboriginal cultures where relational dissonance and relational harmony are the basic phenomena of reality rather than the DOUBLE ERROR based LOCAL SOURCING, there is no forced logical balancing act wherein attribution of LOCAL SOURCING of GOOD acts must be legitimized, logically, but attribution of LOCAL SOURCING of BAD acts.  This is the price of reducing the relational harmony and dissonance of the Tao to the DOUBLE ERROR terms of NAMING and GRAMMAR as grounded by concepts such as GROWTH.

GROWTH is a RATIO-NAL abstraction that secures the abstractions of LOCAL BEING and LOCAL SOURCING as in the DOUBLE ERROR (NAMING AND GRAMMAR) based ‘GROWTH of the TOWN’, which, although it comes together with the CONJUGATE shrinkage of Wilderness, makes no mention of its conjugate. The net result is to promote a SUBSTITUTE REALITY wherein the male assertive is all one needs to construct representations comprising this SUBSTITUTE REALITY.   As we have seen, this one-sidedness induces a BINARY LOGIC BASED ‘EQUAL RIGHTS’ rebellion to re-instantiate the FEMALE ACCOMODATIVE as in the Conservative-Liberal conjugate tension.  Meanwhile, the ANDROGYNOUS dynamic of TRANSFORMATION lies beyond reach of any simple mechanical balancing combination of the MALE and FEMALE and the attempts to GROW these to the SAME SIZE as with programs of EQUAL RIGHTS.

GROWTH is not just ABSTRACTION, it is an ABSTRACTION that lacks the complexity to serve as a viable stand-in for TRANSFORMATION.

The END of GROWTH is COMING.  PREPARE!  This title is to flag the fact that THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS “GROWTH” and that our use of “GROWTH” as if it were something REAL and DESIRABLE is screwing up our social dynamic and our psyche.  The signs of collapse in the belief in GROWTH are increasingly emerging, one example being Heinberg’s earlier cited note on the topic.  There is also the COVID 19 PANDEMIC which is where we see people having problems like pine trees stricken by the pine-beetle Dendroctonus ponderosae.   The forest seems to recover as if the forest vitality is the living ecosystem wherein the whole is greater than the parts.  Should we see the social collective in this same light wherein the TRANSFORMING LANDSCAPE is the primary reality while the individual participants or microbial assemblages are something LESSER?

Neither GROWTH nor PATHOGENS would then make sense and the reality would instead be understood as the transforming relational continuum.

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