The WEST: The Confederacy of Localisers

We WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS use our NAMING and GRAMMAR based language to cook up a ‘SUBSTITUTE REALITY’.   This SUBSTITUTE REALITY is no longer being used as a ‘mock-up’ to suggest a real-but-ineffable reality that lies beyond language-based articulation, but is being used, in WESTERN CULTURE, as our OPERATIVE REALITY.

So when we use language to put out the message that ‘THE TOWN IS GROWING’ which is in fact trying to allude to the INEFFABLE reality of the continually TRANSFORMING LANDSCAPE wherein EVERYTHING IS IN FLUX (Heraclitus and Modern physics), … we, as a social collective that has gotten to the point where the tool of language has been running away with the workman, LITERALLY ACCEPT that THE TOWN IS GROWING.

WHERE IS THE TRANSFORMING LANDSCAPE in this representation?

Once the mind gives itself up to concepts like THE TOWN IS GROWING, it goes into a mode of understanding based on “LOCAL SOURCING” which explains reality in EXPLICIT DETAIL, always starting from SOMETHING LOCAL like ‘the TOWN’ and building the story on top of that secure and absolute LOCAL base.

Neither the indigenous aboriginal people nor modern physics have qualms about understanding NONLOCALITY as the basis of reality, as accords with ‘everything is in flux’ which has been reaffirmed by the Wave-field understanding of modern physics.

I am calling us WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS: … A CONFEDERACY OF LOCALISERS… because our of language and grammar habit wherein we use NAMING and GRAMMAR to put together a DOUBLE ERROR impression of LOCAL SOURCING such as ‘the TOWN is GROWING’.

We can’t retain in our mind ‘the TRANSFORMING LANDSCAPE’, where we can see houses outcropping like mushrooms on the gentle hill and transforming the landscape … AT THE SAME TIME AS WE ARE OBSERVING THE GROWTH OF THE TOWN by way of the addition of more streets and avenues, a high rise church steeple, and a shop-filled TOWN-CENTRE.

As we focus our intellectualizing mind on the GROWING TOWN, we may recall the earlier days when the TOWN was smaller, before it had the ice-skating arena and the banquet hall and the screen cinema.

But a few miles away, across the uncultivated fields of prairie grass and wildflowers, the people of the indigenous aboriginal tribe may be recalling NOT the GROWTH of the town but the TRANSFORMING of the LANDSCAPE within which this TOWNING was like a BLISTERING in the LANDSCAPE

BEFORE WE COULD CALL IT A TOWN THAT WAS GROWING, WE WOULD HAVE TO ACKNOWLEDGE THAT IT WAS A RELATIONAL FEATURE IN A TRANSFORMING LANDSCAPE, because once we started describing THE TOWN’S GROWTH, we would not longer be capturing the CONJUGATE SHRINKAGE of THE WILDERNESS.

While language allows us to speak of either the GROWTH of the TOWN and/or the SHRINKAGE of the WILDERNESS, even the animals understand what is going on here is TRANSFORMATION and we can’t articulate TRANSFORMATION because it is NONLOCAL and IMPLICIT (purely relational).

The title; The WEST: The Confederacy of Localisers refers to the fact that we WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS are in the habit of REDUCING our language-based REPRESENTATIONS of reality to ‘the LOCAL’ .  Thus, where an indigenous aboriginal may ‘credit’ the NONLOCAL flow of NATURE for the salmon that he pulls from the stream, our WESTERN CULTURE Confederacy of Localizers credits the LOCAL agent with ‘producing the fish’.

This imputing of LOCAL PROVENANCE, as Nietzsche points out, is psychological artifice that derives from the DOUBLE ERROR of NAMING and GRAMMAR; e.g. ‘Our LOCAL TOWN is a major producer of fish products’.

The abstraction of LOCALISING by way of the DOUBLE ERROR of NAMING and GRAMMAR is the source of EGO.  Although WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS, in earlier times, may have given thanks to Nature or the Gods or to the little critters the salmon was able to feed and fatten up on on its long journey, … we today ‘credit’ a notional LOCAL SOURCE such as the ‘FISHERMAN’.

Our WESTERN CULTURE habit of using language to LOCALIZE the ORIGIN of actions and developments is made possible by the DOUBLE ERROR of NAMING and GRAMMAR; e.g. “The LOCAL fishermen sold their entire catch of salmon in short order”.

By now, you and I, being WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS, are pretty much mesmerized by all of this LOCALIZED TALK and have taken our place in The Confederacy of Localisers.

The NONLOCALIZERS can only stand there in silence with the mouths agape as we Localisers disgorge endless rhetoric made possible by reducing the INEFFABLE-because-NONLOCAL to the EFFABLE-because-LOCAL.

Our experience of inclusion in the transforming landscape (relational continuum) is INEFFABLE-because-NONLOCAL.  In other words, while NONLOCAL TRANSFORMATION IS REALITY, it is INEFFABLE.  That’s why David Bohm planned to develop Rheomode, a language that would be more able to convey the fluid reality of our actual sensory experience of inclusion in the transforming relational continuum.

IT IS FAR EASIER TO SPEAK IN TERMS OF THE “TOWN GROWING” THAN IN TERMS OF THE TRANSFORMING LANDSCAPE …. since TRANSFORMATION has no LOCAL beginning and no LOCAL ending, whereas a GROWING TOWN is something LOCAL has both an explicit BEGINNING marked by signage ‘You are now ENTERING Pleasantville, … and an EXPLICIT ENDING, ‘You are now LEAVING Pleasantville’.   Such signage seeks to establish the LOCAL THING-IN-ITSELF BEING of the TOWN.

NAMING serves as a DECLARATION OF LOCAL EXISTENCE, and what good would that sort of LOCALIZING be without some device to impute LOCAL SOURCING power to the NOW “LOCAL” activity given by NAMING?   There is activity here, ‘comings and goings’ which ‘put this place on the map’.  Although the activity belongs, FIRST OF ALL, to the NONLOCAL dynamics of the transforming countryside, now that we have a map with a NAME-tagged circle on it to create a LOCAL presence, … we need GRAMMAR to follow through with our LOCALZING of the inherently NONLOCAL dynamic.

We could use a relational language like the indigenous aboriginal peoples, but their mitakuye oyasin (everything is related) understanding means that there is no discrete and explicit OWNERSHIP and CONTROL over the LOCAL land so that once the tipis are packed up and moved, the  LOCAL returns to being included in the NONLOCAL, as if it was never anything other than NONLOCAL, and without residue of any claims of ‘ownership in perpetuity’.

THE ABSTRACT CONCEPT of ESTABLISHING A PERSISTING LOCAL PRESENCE was the device of COLONIZATION that supported the ABSOLUTE concept of OWNERSHIP-IN-PERPETUITY’.

WESTERN CULTURE AHDHERENCY is The Confederacy of Localisers whose system of NAMING and GRAMMAR serves to impute LOCAL BEING, notionally with GRAMMAR-given powers of LOCAL SOURCING of actions and developments, … hence, … THE TOWN IS GROWING …. (the TOWN being duly NAMED and thus IN-CORP-ORATED; i.e. be given by holy ritual, a baptismal endowing of LOCAL physical THING-in-ITSELF EXISTENCE).   If the indigenous aboriginal is galloping over the grassy landscape, he may be unaware of his entry into, and passage out of, a DESIGNATED REAL LOCAL THING-IN-ITSELF “PROPERTY” the surveyed in coordinates of which are in the LAND REGISTRY OFFICE which is backed up by the JUISTICE SYSTEM, its COURTS OF LAW, POLICE and PENAL INSTITUTIONS.

The point is that The Confederacy of Localisers has elevated the concept of “LOCAL” from the status of expedient abstraction, to an ‘operative reality’, furnishing a foundation for imputing the reality of GROWTH since GROWTH is a RATIO-NAL extension of that which is LOCAL.

We can see the END RUN that is being built here, … the END RUN around the INEFFABILITY of the transforming relational continuum wherein everything is in flux as in the TRANSFORMING LANDSCAPE where we now see the SUBSTITUTE REALITY featuring the LOCAL TOWN that we say is GROWING larger and more populous and productive.

Is your mind getting fooled by this END RUN that INJECTS the abstract RATIO-NAL and EFFABLE concept of LOCAL GROWTH to get us past the INEFFABILITY of TRANSFORMATION?    PROBABLY “YES” so, ‘Welcome to The Confederacy of Localisers!

G.R.O.W.T.H.    is a LOCAL SUBSTITUTE for NONLOCAL   T.R.A.N.S.F.O.R.M.A.T.I.O.N.

GOODBYE TRANSFORMING LANDSCAPE with its gathering of settlers, HELLO GROWING TOWN! There’s not enough room in one REALITY for both of us.  So, let’s welcome this LOCALLY emergent TOWN into a SUBSTITUTE REALITY featuring LOCAL THINGS-IN-THEMSELVES with GROWTH capability.   Pass the Euclidian space template please so we can measure the GROWTH of the thing with respect to itself, RATIO-nally and thus in a LOCAL sense so that we don’t have to deal with TRANSFORMATION which just goes on and on and on as a NONLOCAL and thus INEFFABLE developing.

The WEST: The Confederacy of Localisers is entitled thus so as to highlight we WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS have been SEDUCED by this concept of LOCALISING the inherently NONLOCAL dynamic of TRANSFORMATION, … thereby delivering up a notional LOCAL version of dynamics that goes by the NAME “GROWTH”.

“GROWTH” is based on RATIO as in the following TWO-STEP RECIPE:

STEP !:  MAKE UP A “NAME” to imply some LOCAL THING-in-ITSELF.

STEP 2: COUPLE GRAMMAR WITH THE NAME to  that the THING-IN-ITSELF is then imputed to have the powers suggested by the GRAMMAR as with the verb TO GROW.

Putting these two steps together we get expressions such as ‘the TOWN IS GROWING’.

Nietzsche refers to these two steps as ‘the DOUBLE ERROR’ of NAMING and GRAMMAR which serves up the abstraction of RATIONAL THOUGHT or REASON that tells of LOCAL SOURCING of ACTIONS and DEVELOPMENTs.  Nietzsche complains about our WESTERN CULTURE bad habit of using RATIONAL THOUGHT as a SUBSTITUTE REALITY.   For example, we use GROWTH (based on RATIO) as a SUBSTITUTE REALITY in pace of TRANSFORMATION which is continuous and ongoing as in ‘the transforming relational continuum’ aka the Wave-field aka the Tao.

RATIONALITY takes our intellectualizing mind into a SUBSTITUTE REALITY wherein GROWTH which is LOCAL has been substitute for TRANSFORMATION which is NONLOCAL.

That’s going to get us into trouble, right, should we forget that we are constructing a SUBSTITUTE REALITY and start behaving as it were the REAL REALITY.  For example if we start treating GROWTH of construction of towns, highways, parking lots etc. is REAL, it is NOT.  The REALITY we construct on the basis of GROWTH is a SUBSTITUTE REALITY, whereas the REAL REALITY is continual relational TRANSFORMATION which doesn’t stop EVEN WHLE WE ARE ORIENTING OUR PHYSICAL RESOURCES TO THE GROWTH ORIENTED CONSTRUCTION; I.E. THE GROWTH OF TOWNS AND SHOPPING MALLS, THE GROWTH OF HIGHWAY SYSTEMS, THE GROWTH OF INDUSTRY.

BUT THERE IS NO SUCH THING IN REALITY AS “GROWTH”! “GROWTH” IS A “LOCAL” CONCEPT THAT COMES FROM LANGUAGE (‘THE DOUBLE ERROR’ OF NAMING AND GRAMMAR’). BY CONTRAST, IN OUR SENSE-EXPERIENCE REALITY THERE IS ONLY TRANSFORMATION AND IT IS “NONLOCAL”.  Hence this title;

The WEST: The Confederacy of Localisers

When are using REASON, we are RATIO-NALIZING which is to say that we are switching into a SUBSTITUTE REALITY wherein GROWTH substitutes for TRANFORMATION and GROWTH is a LOCAL, RATIO-based ABSTRACTION?

This abstract substitution of LOCAL pseudo-reality for the NONLOCAL reality of TRANSFORMATION is a MEANS of coming up with an EFFABLE-because-LOCAL SUBSTITUTE REALITY.  While TRANSFORMATION is NONLOCAL and everywhere at the same time, as is the nature of the Wave-field, GROWTH is LOCAL and thus EFFABLE-because-LOCAL.

WATCH OUT FOR PHANTOM EFFECTS THAT COME WHEN WE USE “GROWTH”

The TRANSFORMING ATMOSPHERE manifests in the emergence of the Hurricane which, thanks to the DOUBLE ERROR of NAMING and GRAMMAR we perceive as a LOCAL thing that we say is ‘sourcing the stirring up of the Atmosphere”.  But when we start thinking in the abstract terms of LOCAL SOURCING, as in the space on the surface of a sphere, the Hurricane could be sourcing turbulence in the Atmosphere, or the Atmospheric turbulence could be sourcing the Hurricane.  It is the Zen kaon of Wind and Flag (which stirs movement of the other) all over again.

We are misguided in our actions if we assume that actions are LOCAL as in the DOUBLE ERROR of NAMING an GRAMMAR where we say ‘The TOWN is GROWING’ and help to further the DEVELOPMENT of the TOWN on this basis of LOCAL GROWTH.  As we focus on local construction supporting the GROWTH of the local TOWN, we import lumber which comes from decimating forests ‘over there’, we order up concrete which comes limestone and gravel quarries way over there and there, we import furnishings and fittings and art works from there and there.

Meanwhile, we use language to construct the abstraction; ‘the TOWN is GROWING’ which is a DOUBLE ERROR of NAMING and GRAMMAR as pointed out by Nietzsche.

What is really going on is NONLOCAL in that the entire planet is undergoing TRANSFORMATION.

Of course, LANGUAGE and particularly the DOUBLE ERROR of NAMING and GRAMMAR lets us put together a lot of ABSTRACT CONSTRUCTIONS that we pass off for REALITY and that is what is going on EVERY TIME WE USE THE TERM “GROWTH”.

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS “GROWTH”, … that is RATIO-based ABSTRACTION which pivots form the ABSTRACTION of “LOCAL” which is popular here in The WEST: The Confederacy of Localisers.

THERE IS NO “LOCAL” in “TRANSFORMATION” .  “LOCAL” is INFERENCE coming from such abstract constructs as the DOUBLE ERROR of NAMING and GRAMMAR where we can say; ‘the TOWN is GROWING larger and more populous and productive’.  What we are doing here is constructing a SUBSTITUTE REALITY to LIVE IN’.   Where do you live?   In Pleasantville on 3rd Avenue?  Oh lucky you, you must be one of the pioneers.  I came recently and am living out on 114th Street in the North end of town.  Welcome!  When I moved into my place on 3rd Avenue there was no 114th Street but the TOWN has been GROWING so rapidly!

What we need here to BREAK THE ILLUSION OF LOCAL GROWTH is the interjection of the elder indigenous aboriginal who will speak of the game-rich Wilderness that is being progressive encroached on by pavement and house construction where the reality is in terms of SHRINKAGE of Wilderness in conjugate relational with GROWTH of the TOWN where NEITHER the SHRINKAGE NOR THE GROWTH IS THE “REALITY”, the “REALITY” being TRANSFORMATION.

At some level, everybody knows this but when we are putting so much energy into intellectualized discussions using DOUBLE ERROR infused NAMING and GRAMMAR based language, we enter into a SUBSTITUTE REALITY which our fellow WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS are accustomed to ‘TRIPPING’ in and out of.

When we “ARE IN” this SUBSTITUTE REALITY called RATIONALITY aka REASON, everything is LOGICAL which is great AS FAR AS IT GOES, but LOGIC is also CONSTRAINING in the manner described by Goedel’s Theorem of the INCOMPLETENESS of all finite systems of LOGIC.

It is impossible to EMPLOY LOGIC TO GET BEYOND THE LIMITS OF OUR FINITE SYSTEMS OF LOGIC.  One might say that it is impossible to use the precepts of LOCALITY to get to NONLOCALITY.

GROWTH is a LOCAL abstract concept while TRANSFORMATION is a NONLOCAL REALITY.

It may be convenient to use language to assert that ‘the TOWN is GROWING’ but it is not REALITY.  The reality is TRANSFORMATION which is INEFFABLE-because-NONLOCAL.

THINK ABOUT IT, WE WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS have been acting as if GROWTH were something real, so that the GROWTH of our TOWN could be understood as something REAL, when the REALITY, in FACT, is the TRANSFORMING LANDSCAPE in which case our pursuit of GROWTH as if it were REAL is doing something, we don’t know what’, in the REAL WORLD OF THE TRANSFORMING LANDSCAPE.

As we well know, at some level our DEVELOPMENTS or IMPROVEMENTS to the land make for PRETTY PICTURES such as the GROWTH of the TOWN, but these pictures do not capture the reality of TRANSFORMATION of the LANDSCAPE which includes decline of the Wilderness etc.

THERE IS THUS A PHANTOM EFFECT THAT IS CONJUGATE TO OUR VISION BASED PICTURES OF THE GROWTH of the TOWN.

TAKING a TIME-BASED succession of PICTURES to capture the GROWTH of the TOWN flies in the face of the adage that ‘One can’t step into the same river twice” which implies that we live within a transforming relational continuum whereby slapping a NAME on form in the TRANSFORMING whether it is Hurricane KATRINA or the TOWN of Pleasantville and measuring “ITS” GROWTH as if the abstraction of “LOCAL” (GROWTH) prevailed over the reality of “NONLOCAL” (TRANSFORMATION), ‘makes sense’.

GETTING STUCK in the SUBSTITUTE REALITY where GROWTH prevails over TRANSFORMATION has us leaving TRANSFORMATION to flap about like a loose sheet on a mainsail in the gale.

While we are orienting all our actions to the LOCAL concept of GROWTH, what is really going on is TRANSFORMATION, … not just NATURAL TRANFORMATION ANY MORE, .. but TRANSFORMATION which is distorted in that ‘loose sheet in a gale’ manner by a delusional focus on what is perceived as GROWTH as in the GROWTH of cultivated land which is what we talk about, but which fails to address the SHRINKAGE of the Wilderness, the conjugate pair suggesting the overall reality of TRANSFORMATION.

The ugliness of an abused Wilderness is coming back to HAUNT us through such developments as COVID 19 and other dynamic features within the all-including transforming relational continuum.

The use of the word HAUNT is fitting here in the sense that the DOUBLE ERROR of NAMING and GRAMMAR imputes LOCAL SOURCING (the MALE CONJUGATE to the FEMALE ACCOMMODATING in a Wave-field reality) which becomes the centerpiece for a one-sided, male SUBSTITUTE REALITY which DISPLACES Wave-field TRANSFORMATION, leaving in the darkness of the sub-conscious aka the Wilderness, the FEMALE CONJUGATE.

Our having difficulty understanding the Wilderness in our masculine, RATIO-nal manner is no justification for our acting as if our only tool were a hammer such that every issue that confronts us is seen as a nail.

We speak in terms of GROWTH because it is LOCAL, EXPLICIT and EFFABLE while the reality of TRANSFORMATION is NONLOCAL, IMPLICIT and INEFFABLE.  Insofar as we feel compelled to express ourselves through language, we are forced to FALL BACK to the LOCAL and EXPLICIT such that GROWTH becomes the centerpiece of our SUBSTITUTE REALITY.

While this SUBSTITUTE REALITY featuring LOCAL GROWTH could be deployed as a Wittgenstein ladder or BOOTSTRAPPING TOOL to position us for an INTUITIVE LEAP to the INEFFABLE-because-NONLOCAL-and-IMPLICIT reality, we WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS have instead fallen into the habit of using the SUBSTITUTE REALITY based on RATIO/REASON,… DIRECTLY, … as our OPERATIVE REALITY.

“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

“REASON” comes from “RATIO” which gives us the abstract concept of GROWTH which we use to construct a SUBSTITUTE REALITY that is LOCAL and EXPLICIT in place of TRANSFORMATION which is NONLOCAL and IMPLICIT

The DOUBLE ERROR of NAMING and GRAMMAR conjures up EGO, the delusion of having LOCAL POWERS of SOURCING ACTIONS AND DEVELOPMENT.  Were we to understand ourselves as INCLUDED in a relational dynamic (the Wave-field aka the Tao) GREATER THAN OURSELVES, then we would not get ‘hung up’ on the ego-pride that comes with a mistaken sense of local sourcing.

A man’s wisdom is to know that all ends are momentary, that the best end must be superseded by a better. But there is a mischievous tendency in him to transfer his thought from the life to the ends, to quit his agency and rest in his acts: the tools run away with the workman, the human with the divine.  — Ralph Waldo Emerson

As intermediaries in the transforming relational continuum, we join in the understanding of modern physics, indigenous aboriginal cultures, Taoism/Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta wherein ‘mitakaye oyasin’ is understood (everything is related).

* * *