The IMPOSTER of GROWTH that OBSCURES TRANSFORMATION
Why do we WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS speak of ‘reality’ in the abstract terms of GROWTH instead of in terms of relational TRANSFORMATION?
In the indigenous aboriginal cultures, Taoism, Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta, REALITY, the WORLD OF OUR SENSORY EXPERIENCE, IS … THE TRANSFORMING RELATIONAL CONTINUUM aka “TRANSFORMATION” aka ‘the Wave-field’ aka ‘the Tao’.
This TRANSFORMATION includes everything, hence ‘mitakuye oyasin’ (we are all related).
There is a sensible answer to this question; i.e. TRANSFORMATION is INEFFABLE, so in order to speak about it and share our experiences (or some reduced semblances thereof) through language and grammar, language and grammar must come up with EFFABLE REDUCTIONS of the INEFFABLE transforming relational continuum.
The DOUBLE ERROR lies at the heart of this reducing of the INEFFABLE TRANSFORMATION and its fluid forms via EFFABLE REDUCTION that is in terms of NAMING-instantiated LOCAL THINGS-IN-THEMSELVES, notionally with THEIR own powers of SOURCING actions and developments.
TRANSFORMATION is thus reduced to PRODUCTION and CONSUMPTION or BIRTH and DEATH which implies the in-between state of LOCAL BEING along with the BINARY ABSTRACTION of ‘IS’ and ‘IS NOT’ as in ‘NOW IT IS’ and ‘NOW IT IS NOT’ which in turn implies the abstract concept of ‘TIME’, something that gives us the sense of a continuing passage that goes from ‘earlier’ to ‘later’ that we can ‘plot’ beginnings and endings on as in ‘birth’ and ‘death’ instead of understanding the emergence of new forms in the context of relational TRANSFORMATION of the overall Tao or Wave-field.
Why would we put this BINARY ABSTRACTION of BIRTH and DEATH as a substitute for TRANSFORMATION? That is; why would put the EITHER/OR logic of the EXCLUDED medium (wherein FIGURE and GROUND are seen as TWO SEPARATE THINGS-IN-THEMSELVES, as a substitute for TRANSFORMATION wherein FIGURE and GROUND are understood as ONE?
The key word in that question is “SEEN”. It is NOT POSSIBLE to visualize the INCLUSION of our SELF as a FIGURE in the GROUND of the transforming relational continuum because in order to visualize something, one has to get outside of it and get a VOYEUR view of it. We can get a reduced VOYEUR view of our self in a mirror or in a photograph or a video recording, but that is getting a video recording of us clearing land or crop-growing where we say that our farm has GROWN from 2 acres to 160 acres and that we produced a lot of milled lumber from the trees we removed as our farm grew in size and productive capacity. WHAT HAPPENED TO TRANSFORMATION? DOES THE VIDEO RECORD OF THE GROWTH OF OUR FARMING OPERATIONS VALIDATE THAT WHAT WENT ON WAS, IN FACT, ‘GROWTH’ RATHER THAN ‘TRANSFORMATION’?
Where are all the animals that scattered out of sight as we brought in the chain saws and GREW the croplands at the expense of the forested land? Evidently, GROWTH is too simple and one-sided a concept to describe what is going on. That is, what is going on is TRANSFORMATION OF THE LIVING SPACE WE SHARE INCLUSION IN, WITH THE BIRDS AND ANIMALS OF THE FOREST ETC. THE CONCEPT OF ‘FARM’ AND ‘ITS GROWTH’ IS DOUBLE ERROR BASED ABSTRACTION. THERE IS ONLY TRANSFORMATION AND WE ARE INCLUDED IN IT. WE ARE NOT THE AUTHORS OF ANYTHING BECAUSE ‘AUTHORSHIP’ IS ABSTRACTION THAT COMES FROM THE DOUBLE ERROR OF LANGUAGE AND GRAMMAR.
THE FIRST ERROR IS NAMING (EG. ‘FIRE’) TO IMPUTE ‘LOCAL EXISTENCE OF A THING-IN-ITSELF’ AND THE SECOND ERROR IS GRAMMAR (FIRE BURNS) THAT IMPUTES THE POWER OF LOCALLY SOURCING ACTIONS AND DEVELOPMENT TO THE NAMING-INSTANTIATED LOCAL THING-IN-ITSELF.
The reality of our actual sensory experience is of INCLUSION IN TRANSFORMATION but that is INEFFABLE. So we use language and grammar to effect a DOUBLE ERORR based REDUCTION-TO-EFFABLE wherein we invent a LOCAL SOURCE of actions and developments. THUS; NO MORE ALL-INCLUSIVE RELATIONAL TRANSFORMATION, but instead, loads of DOUBLE ERROR based LOCAL things-in-themselves with GRAMMAR-GIVEN powers of SOURCING actions and developments. HER COMES ‘PRODUCTION’ and ‘CONSUMPTION’ as BINARY substitutes for RELATIONAL TRANSFORMATION, … at least in our language and grammar based REPRESENTATIONS of REALITY.
Thus, the abstract concept of the GROWTH OF THE FARM becomes a self-standing pseudo-erality which fails to mention the SHRINKAGE OF THE WILDERNESS, as if what is going on occurs on a FLAT PLANE OF INFINITE EXTENT, because if it were transforming on the surface of a sphere, there would be no such ting as GROWTH of farmed land since that fails to mention the reciprocal SHRINKAGE of Wilderness lands which, taken together (as is what is actually transpiring) amounts to TRANSFORMATION.
“GROWTH” of croplands is only possible as “GROWTH” on a FLAT PLANE OF INFINITE EXTENT and there is no such thing in the reality of our actual sensory experience of inclusion in the transforming relational continuum. In other words, our sensory experience is of inclusion in TRANSFORMATION, … but the problem here is that INCLUSION IN TRANSFORMATION is INEFFABLE while GROWTH is EFFABLE so while it makes sense to use the reduction to EFFABLE in order to share INFERENCE of TRANSFORMATION, … it does not make sense to FORGET that the EFFABLE is a EXPEDIENCY-MOTIVATED REDUCTION of the INEFFABLE.
The EAST does not forget and thus regards the EFFABLE as REDUCTION that INFERS the INEFFABLE, while the WEST DOES FORGET and in the process, is confusing the reduction to EFFABLE FOR REALITY. Thus in the EAST, ‘DUNE’ is a word that INFERS DUNING (relational resonance) while in the WEST, ‘DUNE’ is a word for a LOCAL THING-IN-ITSELF with its own powers of SHIFTING and GROWING HIGHER and LONGER.
What the EAST uses as a tool for INFERRING the ineffable (NONLOCAL TRANSFORMTION), the WEST is using AS IF IT REALLY WERE A LOCAL THING-IN-ITSELF WITH ITS OWN POWERS OF SOURCING ACTIONS AND DEVELOPMENTS. This is where EGO springs from in the WEST. That is the WEST splits apart the FIGURE and GROUND into TWO separate entities while the EAST understands FIGURE and GROUND as ONE. This WESTERN CULTURE DELUSION is problematic as “Chief Seattle” pointed out;
“You must teach the children that the ground beneath their feet is the ashes of your grandfathers. So that they will respect the land, tell your children that the earth is rich with the lives of our kin. Teach your children what we have taught our children, that the earth is our mother. Whatever befalls the earth, befalls the sons of the earth. If men spit upon the ground, they spit upon themselves. … This we know, the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. This we know. All things are connected like the blood which unites one family. All things are connected. Whatever befalls the earth, befalls the sons of the earth. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.”— “Chief Seattle”
F. David Peat, in Blackfoot Physics, points out how this WESTERN CULTURE distorting of reality is playing out (COVID 19 is a prime example); e.g. in the following excerpt which points to how our denial of FIGURE AND GROUND AS ONE can lead to FIGURE’s corrupting of the GROUND (cultivating of disease);
CHAPTER 5 The Coming of Disease
The Garden of Eden
The letters and diaries of the first settlers on the eastern seaboard of North America portray it as a Garden of Eden with its Native peoples living in a state of peace and harmony, welcoming their new visitors and showing them new foods and medicines. Similar accounts of this balance, connection to the environment , and deep sense of the sacredness of all things can be found in the writings of explorers who made early contact with the Indigenous peoples in several other areas of the world.
Philosophers of the time hailed such societies as the aboriginal state of humanity. They wrote of the “noble savage” and of people who may have escaped the fall of man. Systems of government such as the Iroquoian league of nations and other confederations pointed the way to those Europeans who sought to free themselves from the tyranny of kings. Indeed the political philosophy of the Iroquois people found its way into the Constitution of the United States of America, and there is evidence that Thomas More’s Utopia, an account of the ideal state of human society was written after that author had received descriptions of the Mayan civilization of Central America.
In Leviathan, seventeenth century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes suggested that without a common power or authority people would live in a state of war in which there would be be “no arts, no letters, no society and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” Hobbes, however, was wrong, for when it came to the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, and other parts of the world, his notion of “nasty, brutish and short” couldn’t be further from the truth.
Societies of hunter-gatherers, as well as those with mixed economies of farming and fishing, as well as hunting and gathering, lead lives that are far more relaxed and stress-free than our own. It takes us between thirty-five and sixty hours of work each week, to provide ourselves with food, shelter, and the other things that we feel are the necessities of life. Most traditional aboriginal people work for fewer hours than this, probably two or three days out of each week is all that is required — and during the time they are not “working”, they are visiting, hanging around, talking, and gossiping with one another, ensuring that the social cement that holds their society together is in good order.
The vision of a Garden of Eden has, to some extent, been confirmed by the work of scientists who have examined the skeletons of early peoples. Evidence points to the fact that, before contact with Europeans, The People were remarkably free from diseases. Indeed, epidemics only seem to have arrived when Western civilization began to encroach upon the Americas.
A Condition of Disease
Now this raises a very interesting question about Indigenous science and the condition of Indigenous people before contact with Europeans. why were they so free from disease? Could it perhaps have been something to do with their beliefs, science, society, and way of life? How was it that, at the time of European contact, approximately one-fifth of the world’s population was living in ideal conditions? Why is it that we, with all the power and knowledge of our modern civilization, are so subject to illness, cancers, heart disease, chronic autoimmune disorders, and allergies, in addition to a wide variety of mental illnesses and the slow heartbreaking disintegrations that come about with aging? Surely if we can split the atom, travel to the moon, and communicate electronically across the globe we can ensure that our bodies are and minds remain healthy. Could it be the development of the very civilization that brought about these technological advances has also been responsible for the introduction and spread of some of the world’s most terrible epidemics of disease?
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F. David Peat’s suggestion that WESTERN CULTURE based civilization comes as a package with disease bundled into it may ‘sound funny’ to us WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS since we are in the habit of thinking in terms that reduce relational forms, by way of the DOUBLE ERROR, to notional NAMING-instantiated LOCAL things-in-themselves with GRAMMAR instantiated powers of SOURCING actions and developments.
This makes us HUMANINGS (relational flow-features) out to be LOCAL INDEPENDENTLY-EXISTING THINGS-IN-THEMSELVES we NAME ‘HUMANS’ that we use GRAMMAR to animate by imputing the now-independent-thing-in-itself “HUMAN” the notional powers of SOURCING its own actions and developments. The ‘HUMANING’ within the TRANSFORMING RELATIONAL CONTINUUM, thanks to the DOUBLE ERROR of language and grammar, is conceptually (abstractly) reduced to the “HUMAN” whose actions and developments we can manipulate with language and grammar, RECASTING THE NONLOCAL “HUMANING” IN THE TRANSFORMING RELATIONAL CONTINUUM, IN THE REDUCED TERMS OF A LOCAL SELF-STANDING “HUMAN”, NOTIONALLY WITH OUR OWN POWERS OF SOURCING ACTIONS AND DEVELOPMENTS.
OK, this DOUBLE ERROR reduction succeeds in reducing the INEFFABLE-BECAUSE-NONLOCAL to the EFFABLE-BECAUSE-LOCAL and thus opens up alternative INTELLECTUAL REPRESENTATION POSSIBILITIES as follows;
(a) The DOUBLE ERROR as a tool of INFERENCE that IMPLIES an INEFFABLE NONLOCAL REALITY.
(b) The DOUBLE ERROR as DIRECT and EXPLICIT REPRESENTATION of A LOCAL REALITY.
If we say; FIRE BURNS or LIGHTNING FLASHES, or PATHOGENS KILL, … this DOUBLE ERROR contrivance MAKES US FORGET THAT EVERYTHING IS INCLUDED IN TRANSFORMATION and succeeds in constructing a mental representation that BREAKS INTO the TRANSFORMING RELATIONAL CONTINUUM which is INEFFABLE-BECAUSE-NONLOCAL, and extracts a reductive effigy/representation that is LOCAL-AND-THUS-EFFABLE. For example, TRANSFORMATION is reduced to PRODUCTION and CONSUMPTION.
ACHTUNG! This REDUCTIVE splitting of TRANSFORMATION into PRODUCTION and CONSUMPTION is abstraction that comes with a price that must be paid for such artificial simplification. That ‘price’ is the innate ambiguity that comes with the DOUBLE ERROR split into the MALE—FEMALE topology; i.e. “Does the man source the making of the times’, or ‘do the times source the making of the man?’ . This ambiguous REDUCTIVE SPLITTING of TRANSFORMATION into ‘PRODUCING’ and ‘CONSUMING’ gives rise to many variants such as the tales of INCUBUS and SUCCUBUS, and to the WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS political splitting into CONSERVATIVE and LIBERAL, the former visualizing ‘organization’ as being the product of a one-to-many directive influence, and the latter visualizing ‘organization’ as being the product of a many-to-one directive influence. Eg. the CONSERVATIVE understanding is that ONE BAD APPLE SOURCES SPOILING OF THE WHOLE BARREL, … while LIBERAL understanding is that IT TAKES A WHOLE COMMUNITY TO RAISE A CHILD.
BOTH OF THESE CONJECTURES PIVOT FROM THE ASSUMPTION THAT ‘LOCAL SOURCING’ IS WOMETHING ‘REAL’. Meanwhile, ‘LOCAL SOURCING’ IS NOT REAL, it is a DOUBLE ERROR of languge and grammar of the type ‘FIRE BURNS, LIGHTNING FLASHES, PATHOGENS KILL’, … all of which is DOUBLE ERROR CONTRIVANCE we invent to render the INEFFABLE-BECAUSE-NONLOAL, EFFABLE-BECAUSE-LOCAL.
This reductive rendering is taken by the EAST (modern physics, indigenous aboriginals, Taoists/Buddhists and Advaita Vedanta) to be no more than IMPLICIT INFERENCE of the INEFFABLE while we WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS are in the habit of employing the DOUBLE ERROR reduction as EXPLICIT surrogate reality so that hen we say COVID 19 sickens and kills, WE MEAN IT, like ‘READ MY LIPS’, like FIRE BURNS’.
We WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS speak of FOREST FIRES as LOCAL THINGS-IN-THEMSELVES with the power of SOURCING devastation, while reflection would remind us of the being smothered in (included in) suffocating-summer thermal irradiance that TRANSFORM forests into incendiary bombs waiting to go off, so that we drop out THIS INEFFABLE-BECAUSE-NONLOCAL TRANSFORMATION when we point to an EFFABLE-BECAUSE-LOCAL “FIRE” and say see, there is a FIRE over there and the FIRE is BURNING OUT OF CONTROL. By this time (i.e. by filling our mind with this kind of language) WE LOSE TOUCH WITH REALITY that WE along with our brothers and sisters the trees and bushes, are INCLUDED IN TRANSFORMATION.
Because we can’t point to what we are included in (i.e. TRANSFORMATION THAT IS NONLOCAL), we point to what we can point to which is stuff that WE SPEAK OF as LOCAL, … but is it LOCAL? IN FACT, IT ONLY SEEMS TO BE ‘LOCAL’ BECAUSE WE HAVE PASTED A NAME ON IT, AND THE PASTED NAME IS WHAT IS “LOCAL”. E.g. ‘this here is my farm, defined by its barbed-wire fencing’ perimeter with the gated opening with the sign BAR-X Ranch on it.. It has GROWN from 2 acres to its current 160 acres. NOTA BENE: … The term GROWTH which backhandedly infers LOCAL BEING pivots from nothing other than NAMING and GRAMMAR imposed upon relational features within the TRANSFORMING RELATIONAL CONTINUUM.
So, …. Why do we WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS speak of ‘reality’ in the abstract terms of GROWTH instead of in terms of relational TRANSFORMATION?
The simple answer Is; BECAUSE TRANSFORMATION IS NONLOCAL AND THUS INEFFABLE IN LOCAL EXPLICIT DESCRIPTIVE TERMS, but this is not the relevant question. The more important question is WHY DO WE WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS ACCEPT THE REDUCTION OF THE INEFFABLE TO EFFABLE AS OUR OPERATIVE REALITY? Evidently, this does not happen in modern physics, nor among EASTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS.
The answer is that GROWTH is the embodiment in language and thought of the DOUBLE ERROR and it is the DOUBLE ERROR that EGO springs from where the DOUBLE ERROR is understood LITERALLY or EXPLICITLY as it is in the WEST; e.g. FIRE BURNS, COVID 19 KILLS etc. etc. This belief in the REALITY of LOCAL SOURCING gives rise to EGO and EGO has been built into WESTERN CULTURE through the notional REALITY of the PRODUCTION-CONSUMPTION cycle (in place of TRANSFORMATION). Those who believe in the REALITY of their own powers of PRODUCTION and CONSUMPTION bling themselves to what is REALLY GOING ON which is TRANSFORMATION that they and all things share inclusion in.
While we WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS, spurred on by our own EGO continue to GROW the PRODUCER-PRODUCT ECONOMY, what is really going on all the while is TRANSFORMATION that we are included in AND DO NOT ‘CONTROL’. AS F. DAVID PEAT SUGGESTS, IN THE EARLIER CITED PASSAGE, WE ARE NOT SIMPLE PRODUCERS OF PRODUCT BUT ARE CONTRIBUTORS TO THE TRANSFORMATION WE SHARE INCLUSION IN, who are all the while congratulating ourselves for what we perceive is the PRODUCING OF PRODUCTS. We focus on the ‘products’ coming off the assembly line, which is where the money and growth of the ‘economy’ is without connecting it, in our intellectual reasoning, with the GREATER REALITY OF TRANSFORMATION IN WHICH WE ARE INCLUDED.
We are NOT the starting point for PRODUCER-PRODUCT ACTIONS AND DEVELOPMENTS (that is the ‘DOUBLE ERROR’), we, and everything else, are INCLUDED IN THE TRANSFORMING RELATIONAL CONTINUUM.
The EAST “GETS THIS” and employs the DOUBLE ERROR pseudo-realiy only as IMPLICATE INFERENCE of the INEFFABLE that lies innately beyond capture in language, while we WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS employ the DOUBLE ERROR pseudo-reality as EXPLICATE ACTUALITY. THIS IS A CRAZY-MAKER!
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